Origin(s) of Design in Nature

Abstract

The basic difference between the biblical and the scientific accounts of life’s origins and development is that we are viewing one reality but from two vastly different perspectives. The pattern of the flow of life from the simple to the complex is the same in both accounts. The driving force behind the flow differs. How the universe and eventually life began, why there was even a beginning (why is there something rather than nothing), and what if anything caused these beginnings are questions to which science can contribute. The final call will perhaps always require some leap of faith, as the answers seem to lie beyond the certainty of the physical sciences... The article points out that the central binary concept of the neo-Confucian tradition (i.e., the concept of structure and creativenessity) (li and qi) has generally been interpreted as a dualism of idea and matter by Euro-American sinologists... The Identity of Designer and Design -- The origin of design in nature has been one of the questions that preoccupied humans at all times and in all cultures. The answers given range widely: from naïve creationism to pure chance, from “intelligent design” to forces immanent in nature. This chapter attempts to offer a critique of all these positions as well as an alternative with a long history of its own: the oneness of mind and being... In 1790, Immanuel Kant completed and published the final installment of his three Critiques. With these, he addressed and changed our world perspective on some of the most fundamental problems with which human knowledge had been wrestling. The nature of these Critiques is, amazingly, from a twenty-first-century biologist perspective, still important and relevant in our rapidly evolving discipline to this day, a consequence of the depth and clarity of thought that appeared on the pages Kant presented to the reader. It also provides us with a wealth of bases to reassess problems that we had perhaps in our hubris thought solved in the relentless wave of scientific discovery, or at least had withered away from old age to inconsequential dust. But, as we so often find, dust may merely cover something from view, but in no way affect the structure of the object itself. And with this understanding, it is perhaps time to dust off Kant’s third Critique and use it to investigate the “sleeping giant” problem of teleology and design-like nature of organisms and assess how this work may inform our understandings of organisms and the process of life in the current day environment... This chapter attempts to sort out the various difficulties that have haunted the concepts of order, entropy, design, and information in their relation to cosmological theories. In this effort, I utilize Plato’s tripartite organization of the forms of order to more precisely delineate the constraints and dispositions of a possible unified model. I also rely on the mathematical interpretation of Plato’s model by Leibniz to reconstruct Plato’s Pythagorean vision for modernity.