Liz Swan & Richard Gordon 
Origin(s) of Design in Nature [PDF ebook] 
A Fresh, Interdisciplinary Look at How Design Emerges in Complex Systems, Especially Life

Introduction.- Foreword .- Preface.-  PART I: Origin of Design .- The Initial Low Gravitational Entropy of the Universe as the Origin of Design in Nature .- On the Biological Origin of Design in Nature.- Creativity in Nature.- PART II: Philosophical aspects of design .- Plato’s Pythagorean Cosmos: Order and Chaos in the Intelligence of Natural Design.- War or Peace? Huxley and Kropotkin’s Battle Over the Design of Virtue.- Free Will in God’s Dice Game.- Does Biology Need a New Theory of Explanation? A biological perspective on Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgment.- Pragmatism, Inquiry, and Design: A Dynamic Approach.- The Natural Design of Intelligence in Dewey’s Philosophy.- PART III: Theological aspects of design .- The Best Mislaid Plans: A Religious Approach to the Question of the Planning of Reality.- Judaism and Evolution in Four Dimensions: Biological, Spiritual, Cultural, and Intellectual.- Random Natural Laws Versus Direct Trends: A Cabbalistic Interpretation Based on the Teachings of Rabbi Kook.- The Identity of Designer and Design.- In the Beginning There Was Lightning: Fulguro-Genesis and Eduard Loewenthal’s Religion of Religions.- Structure and Creativeness: A Reinterpretation of the Neo-Confucian Binary Category Li and Qi.- Evolution: The Biblical Accounts of Life’s Development.- PART IV: Darwinism as the backbone of the life sciences .- Design and disorder: Gould, adaptationism and evolutionary psychiatry.- Architecture and Design Among Plants and Animals: Convergent and Divergent Developmental Mechanisms.- The Lingual Taste Palillae: A Delicate and Complicated Nature’s Design for Taste Modalities Perception.- Divine Genesis, Evolution and Astrobiology.- Consistent Patterns of Statistical Distributions in Natural Ecological Communities: Lake Phytoplankton.- Coupling of growth, differentiation and morphogenesis: an integrated approach to design in embryogenesis.- Interior Cell Design: VICKZ Proteins Mediate RNA Localization And Cell Function.- Organic Codes and the Origin of Language.- Mechano-Sensing in Embryonic Biochemical and Morphologic Design: Evolutionary Perspectives in Primary Organisms Emergence.- PART V: Critical discussion of design in what lies beyond Darwinism .- A Response to Darwin’s Dilemma: A-PR cycles and the origin of design in nature.- The Synthetic Approach in Biology: Epistemic Notes for Synthetic Biology.- Necessity and Freedom in Designs of Nature.- Not All Designs are Created Equal.- Design of Living Systems in the Information Age: Brain, Creativity, and the Environment.- From Nature to Naturoids and Back.- Trouble for Natural Design.- Imagining a Theory of Everything for Adaptive Systems.- PART VI: Design in the physical sciences .- Hidden Order and the Origin of Complex Structures.- What the Fine-Tuning Argument Shows (and Doesn’t Show).- The Continuous Increase in the Complexity of the Designed Structures of the Universe is Described as Movement Against Infinite Entropy.- Law, Order and Probability.- Design and Self-Organization.- Development of Organisms as Self-Organization of Mechanically Stressed Macroscopic Designs.- Playing God: The Historical Motivations of Artificial Life.- PART VII: Design in the social sciences .- The Socially Constructed Natural Origins of Self-Organization.- Complex Epidemics, Simplistic Tools: The Failure of AIDS Policy in Africa.- PART VIII: Summary and conclusions .- Last remarks on ORIGIN(S) OF DESIGN IN NATURE [ODIN].