You're looking for specialisation versus general, though. Is there some animal better than humans at locomotion? Probably, I can't be bothered looking this one up. Same for all the rest of it as a single point of examination. But put the entire package together, and we're probably very much optimised (there can always be improvements, some genetic engineer will figure out how to give humans three sets of legs or something).
Personally, I'd advise to forget all the stuff about "the brain is like a computer". No, it's not, but humans have been making these analogies with machinery since gears and cogs. We try to understand how the lump of matter in our skull works to do what it does, and we try to make deductions from the way the machines we construct work - oh, a clock works with these gears and springs and drives, a brain must work like that too.
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Notes -
You're looking for specialisation versus general, though. Is there some animal better than humans at locomotion? Probably, I can't be bothered looking this one up. Same for all the rest of it as a single point of examination. But put the entire package together, and we're probably very much optimised (there can always be improvements, some genetic engineer will figure out how to give humans three sets of legs or something).
Personally, I'd advise to forget all the stuff about "the brain is like a computer". No, it's not, but humans have been making these analogies with machinery since gears and cogs. We try to understand how the lump of matter in our skull works to do what it does, and we try to make deductions from the way the machines we construct work - oh, a clock works with these gears and springs and drives, a brain must work like that too.
The brain is a computer and I'm not sure how you can meaningfully argue that it isn't
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