Our (meaning, we humans) operating point seems to be at a phase transition, the fractal zone between strategies of problem solving.

It is true that there is a common misunderstanding of how the “design process”, in the engineering sense, actually works, But that misunderstanding is not that far out of line.

By way of comparison, evolution is essentially an “R strategist”, so far as design is concerned. That is, evolution evolved to throw out a lot—millions, billions, whatever it takes—of candidates, and pass on whatever works to the next drawing of the lottery. The Grim (and blind) Sower at work.

But the Great GS has a lot of time, and the energy of the universe, to spend. K strategists (in the biological sense) do not have that luxury. Out of the need to maximize the chances of individuals to survive, K strategists seem to have been selected for their abilities to “think things through”. This leads, in the case of humans, at least, to a quasi-“God’s eye view”—in essence, to weed out unlikely design possibilities before energy is expended in giving them an actual on-site audition. (When musicians audition for an opening, there in usually a pre-screening process, where applicants without credentials are required to submit recordings, thus saving everyone the trouble and expense of slotting in obviously unqualified candidates.) Consciousness is expensive, from metabolic and development points of view, but with the types of problems faced by, say, K strategist mammals, it is a small price to pay for “getting it right” (or at least pretty good) in a limited number of attempts.

To limn the metaphor, this is also true in an industrial sense: Product design is expensive, and, generally, the more technological the product, the more expensive it is. So, a design team will limit itself to considering, at each stage, a few likely candidates to compete against each other for further R&D funding. When the product reaches the market, probably a few competing design teams have likewise proffered their best designs; may the best product win—or, at least, may the most successful product become the most successful (within the constraints of the Panda Principle, et. al.). But note that, while in the transformation from concept to implementation, high-level designs employ K strategy, a memetic process is involved to come up with the candidate designs in the first place. And memes can be R strategists: They are “cheap”; if one out a million survives, that is pretty good. (On the other hand, once memes become “implemented”, as in becoming a person’s “raison d’etre”—perhaps she spent much of her life developing some idea, writing her dissertation, getting a prestigious university position, becoming an editor of a major journal, and staking her professional reputation on a particular viewpoint—memes can become extremely expensive offspring, warranting huge parental investments. The collapse of fungibility flips R strategy to K strategy! )

Stuart Kauffman, among many others (myself not disincluded!) would love to discover “general laws” of how biology works (see Investigations and At Home in the Universe), and, indeed, how the universe as a whole works. He often invokes the Invisible Hand, after Adam Smith, referring to the eerie and wonderful congruence between (mathematical) models and the “real” universe.

But I find it interesting to ask what, exactly, is meant by “laws” in this context. What, after all, is a law, except something given, by executive fiat, from on high? Does the universe unfold as it does because of its own dynamics, discovered in the course of its (the universe’s) unfolding? Or does the universe unfold as it does because it is following an assigned trajectory—a rules based trajectory—through unfolding-universe space? Are laws a presciption or a history? How one answers, or even phrases these questions makes a big conceptual difference.

[And they probably themselves betray historical biases. That is, until fairly recently in human history, they were questions asked by philosophers of all stripes, whether deistic, theistic, or “natural”. Science and religion seem to be in that fractal region of in-process symmetry breaking, and have been since at least the Enlightenment.]

It seems that we just can’t get away from the appearance of design. It comes as part of the make-a-human kit, as it evolved, and is part and parcel of our worldviews, our languages, and our conceptualizations. Kauffman obviously senses this, and tries to put it in linguistic perspective, as he also regular invokes the image of the blind watchmaker—the ultimate R strategist. But, in a deep sense, this is another broken symmetry, the other side of the same coin, so to speak. The watchmaker may be blind, but, as a watchmaker, he knows what the product needs to be. And the watchmaker’s protégés must evolve vision, internal dynamics and the pressures of selection and homeostasis being what they are.

So, I return to the point I raised in an earlier rumination: The appearance of design is evolutionarily inevitable because design itself is evolutionarily inevitable. As E.O. Wilson points out (in Consilience), we humans may have evolved to believe in gods. In some sense, we must believe in gods if we believe in ourselves, because, in that same sense, that—deification—is precisely what we want for ourselves, what process have evolved to participate in! Indeed, the very fact that we muse on how the universe unfolds—and that we actively try to influence its unfolding—seems to show this quite plainly.

Does this mean we can influence the unfolding of the universe? Are our attempts themselves part of the natural dynamic of the unfolding universe? These questions seem to round back on themselves. That is, they are emergent phenomena: Unfolding begets a new unfolding trajectory. Watchmakers take on protégés. Gods beget gods. Of the father we are begotten, and the child begets the father. And round and round she goes; where she stops nobody—not even a far-seeing watchmaker—can possibly know.