A common way of considering ‘design” in nature is that it is a myth: Natural selection can only address present needs; it cannot “see” into the future, so it cannot design anything. I understand these arguments. Blind processes carried out over the long haul of history, tracking changing environments all the while, may look like design, but, really, are not. And yet, it seems to me that if you make this argument, you must also say that humans do not design anything either—not really.  It is either that or you say that humans are outside of evolution. Here I muse on the alternative.

In my way of looking at things, the appearance of design is evolutionarily inevitable, because design itself is inevitable. That is, any sufficiently sentient being will develop an “Appearance of Design” because it will, as a function of becoming sentient, develop design. For the purposes of the present ruminations, I will leap right over the processes of natural selection to get to what I want to talk about. I do feel confident that this chasm can be bridged, but…another time….

Any gradient can be utilized by some sort of “life” to ply its trade, to make a home in the universe. We generally think of a physical life along physical gradients (after all, that is where we make our “home”). But more generally, gradients can be of any type: virtual, mathematical, constructional, dynamical, dimensional, or as well, and the same kinds of emergent processes obtain, including complexification, arms races, natural selection, parasitism…. Differentials (of some kind) can be the engine for emergence, yet there seems to be an optimal “slope” for sustainable emergent behavior. A particularly area one just south of the edge of chaos. Chaos itself seems to be the abstractional equivalent of a physical black hole, and the gradient leading (mathematically) to it—the slope that flirts with chaos’ “event horizon”—provides a rich environment for all sorts of emergent forms. (This way of looking at things, by the way, suggests that it’s ecosystems all the way down.)

All life “wants” to live. Life itself is a gradient, powering life (given, to be sure, a more fundamental source of energy and resources at the more fundamental levels or organization). And it has what the philosophers can an intentional stance. It is, so to speak, an “agent” that in some sense “seeks” something.

All life processes that continue life are subject to and driven by selection pressures of some sort. Life processes lie along a number of interactional gradients. These provide complicit dimensional engines for selection.

Competition in this dynamical milieu always, if the “ecosystem” is rich enough, leads to an arms race. Increasingly complex processes are thus, in such cases, inevitable.

“Complexity” can (and eventually must) happen along several different abstractional continua. One continuum is speed, or organizational “velocity”. Cutting to the chase: Genetics is stable but slow. But, because of the Arms Race principle, problems will develop that require the evolution of far speedier solutions—solutions that can be found and utilized within the lifetime of a single organism, or even the “lifetime” of any sub-organism. (As it turns out, Lamarck wasn’t completely wrong, even if he was sniffing up the wrong Tree of Life!)

Memetic and metaphor systems are possible solutions to the problem of speed in a cultural context. One aspect of natural selection is that non-zero sum systems (win-win, particularly, but not exclusively) have at least a slight evolutionary advantage which will, over time, be parlayed into something really top down. I.e., non-zero sum solutions generate top down-ness: Cf. Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the best solutions are “from above”. A huge proportion of the problems faced by living entities is best dealt with through top down solutions.

Now, non-zero sum-ness lies along a continuum—a gradient. Because there is a “ecosystem” of non-zero solutions, there will be ferocious natural selection pressure toward top down-ness. Increasing sentience, and its attendant (and complicit) consciousness, become a perfect vehicle for the development of top down solutions. (Consciousness, relying on (in my view) a metaphor-based memetic system, cuts across abstractional levels like a wormhole through space.)

So, my conjecture is that all sufficiently sentient beings will evolve consciousness (even robotic ones!), and all sufficiently conscious beings (even robotic ones!) will come to believe in Design. (This is self-evident, as “design” means top-down solutions.) And a large proportion of these will come to believe in a Designer. A Designer, in this sense, is “obvious”: The conscious entity contemplating a Designer is herself a Designer. Why can’t it be Designers all the way up? Whether the “Designer” is supernatural, off worldly, or transcendental is another question, often following the more mundane dynamics of politics and economics. The Russian Tsars nominally believed in the Judeo-Christian Great Designer, a belief which presumably conferred Great Authority on their august personages; Lenin nominally believes in the Design-ship of the State (and “L’etat c’est moi”…).

Design (top down) solutions have evolved because they provide solutions for a wide variety of problems. But not for all problems. Thus, successful evolution is really a complicity among different classes of solutions along a number of continua, including speed and degree of non-zero sum-ness. (Conscious) top down-ness works complicitly across levels of abstraction. The dinosaurs may not have had a high degree of consciousness, but they did have plenty of genetic stability going for them, as their environment was itself quite stable. This was fine for a long time, but they were dead meat when really speedy solutions were called for, such as evolving extremely fast (humans can almost do this now, with gene customization and the like; whether we know enough to do this advantageously is another matter), or keeping comets out of the back yard.

In this way of looking at it, the gods are emergent virtual life forms, living along the Top down gradient of consciousness. (So, yes, man does create God in his own image. He has to: What other model could there be…?)

So far as we know, grasses (for instance) are not religious. They have no pantheon, nor, presumably, any numinous sensitivities. Social insects have more, owing to, perhaps, the desired continuance of the hive. Wolves (whether a lupine caniform is wicked or not depends on your paradigm!) have a sort-of “god”, the alpha of the pack. (With domestic dogs, the human “master” assumes the alpha role.) But humans take the top down rules to an extreme level. It seems (to us, at least) that we’re the only species that can consider design in the way we do: as order imposed from the top, because we so often do it ourselves (admittedly, with mixed success). We have evolved to be the designing ape.

Top down-ism evolved because it is useful. Clearly, high level concepts can control low level events, but, importantly, top down-ism emerges from bottom-up processes—abstractional complicity. (Memeplex [Published as Heaven], by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, says, “It is the events, and their unfolding, that determine history. The meaning you attach to them is irrelevant.” But this is not so when interactive complicity is taken into account: As history is recursive, interpretation changes the unfolding history. Again, an advanced metaphor system cuts across levels of abstraction, so, with humans, top down and bottom up become complicit. We are the only species we know that (sometimes) claims an omnipresent, omniscient, and transcendental top down Designer deity. But a Spinozan bottom up deity is also big among many humans, including scientists, philosophers, and close-to-the-earth “contextualists”. Is “God” in the gaps, or in the continuum? Is there a Great Designer? Would we know, could we know if there were? What kind of deity could ponds have? Galaxies? Universes? What kind of deities could gods have?