Intelligent Design Vs The Scientific Method - PhD Physics…

By Shaun Higgins, PhD.

I believe that the most profound technological failures of our time are not due to a lack of intelligence, but to a persistent refusal to look carefully at what already functions flawlessly.

Nature, or what some call “Intelligent Design”, is an operating manual written over billions of years, tested under conditions far harsher and more varied than any laboratory we have ever constructed.

Every system that endures does so because it obeys constraints we are only beginning to articulate.

This essay is not an argument for retreating into nature, nor for idolising it.

It is an argument for literacy… for learning how complex systems actually work, across scales, before insisting that we know better.

From subatomic processes to biological organisation, onwards to even cosmic structure, the same 3 lessons repeat themselves…

• Stability emerges from information flow under constraint.

• Efficiency arises from cooperation between scales.

• Novelty, or invention, appears not from force, but from access to previously unused degrees of freedom.

If humanity’s future is to be viable, technologically and socially, it will depend on whether we learn to extrapolate from these principles rather than overriding them.

Nature as an Engineer…

Biology is often described as messy, inefficient, or improvisational.

This is a misunderstanding born from looking only at components rather than architectures.

Living systems are not optimised for maximal output, but for persistence under uncertainty.

A dragonfly does not fly by brute force… it exploits unsteady aerodynamics, vortex shedding, and rapid phase adjustments in wing motion.

It operates in regimes that classical engineering once dismissed as unstable, yet achieves manoeuvrability that still challenges our best winged machines…

Photosynthetic systems do not convert light into energy through simple absorption.

They use quantum effects… coherence, tunnelling, and selective decoherence, to guide excitations along optimal pathways.

These are measured methods of “intelligent design” that far outperform humanities clumsy, and often blundering, attempts.

The implication is uncomfortable, is it not?

That systems long assumed to be too warm, wet, and noisy for subtle physics are quietly making use of it anyway.

The same pattern appears at larger scales.

Termite mounds regulate temperature without central control.

Forests distribute resources through mycorrhizal networks that respond dynamically to stress.

None of this relies on rigid command structures.

These systems work because information is distributed, feedback is local, and correction is continuous.

The lesson is not that nature is perfect, but that it rarely wastes effort fighting constraints.

It incorporates them…

Information, Matter, and the Missing Middle

Modern physics has taught us that matter is not fundamental in the way it once appeared.

Fields precede particles.

Probabilities precede positions.

At the most basic level we can currently describe, what persists are patterns… stable configurations of excitation within underlying structures.

This becomes particularly interesting when we consider what we call dark matter.

Whatever it is, it interacts gravitationally while remaining largely invisible to electromagnetic probes.

Let us “treat” it as informational structure for a moment, one that does not readily couple to our usual measurement channels.

Essentially, a “productive framing”…

Information is not abstract in the physical sense.

It has thermodynamic cost.

It requires energy to store, transmit, and erase.

DNA makes this unavoidably clear.

A biological organism is not defined by the mass of its atoms but by the organisation of information across them.

The genome is not a blueprint in isolation… but rather a dynamic interface between chemistry, environment, and history.

If information can stabilise matter into living systems at one scale, is unreasonable to ask whether similar principles operate elsewhere?

Principles that have remained “hidden”, but only because we “lack” the appropriate coupling mechanisms to observe them directly…

Consciousness as a Functional Interface

Consciousness, in this context, does not need to be elevated to something supernatural.

It is sufficient, and far more useful, to treat it as a process.

Specifically, it is a process by which information is selected, compressed, and rendered actionable within a physical system.

The brain is not a generator of reality…

No, it is an editor.

It filters vast informational input into a coherent, usable model that allows an organism to act.

That coherence is not free.

It comes with energetic cost and irreversible loss of detail.

What we experience as awareness is the consequence of that compression operating continuously across time.

From this perspective, consciousness is neither separate from physics nor reducible to a single mechanism.

It is a boundary condition.

It alters how information flows, which states become accessible, and which remain suppressed.

In doing so, it changes system behaviour in ways that are observable, measurable, and consequential.

This framing allows us to speak about non-local informational structure without claiming non-local agency.

The interface is local.

The information need not be…

Degrees of Freedom and the Appearance of Novelty

One of the persistent puzzles in both physics and biology is the emergence of genuinely new structures.

Not merely recombinations of existing parts, but configurations that seem to explore previously unoccupied regions of possibility space.

This does not require invoking creation from nothing.

It simply requires access.

Higher-dimensional descriptions, whether in quantum state space, phase space, or abstract informational dimensions, are not speculative or fantasy…

They are already embedded in our mathematics.

What we perceive as novelty may simply be the projection of configurations that were always available but rarely stabilised.

Human creativity fits naturally into this view.

It is not an exception to physical law, but a particular mode of navigation through an informational landscape.

The body, nervous system, and environment together form a device capable of sampling low-probability states and, occasionally, making them persistent.

That capacity is limited, energetically expensive, and fragile.

It is nonetheless real…

Technology as an Extension, Not a Replacement

When technology ignores these principles, it tends to scale poorly.

Systems become brittle.

Externalities accumulate faster than control mechanisms.

When technology aligns with them, it often appears deceptively simple.

The future of energy will not be found solely in higher combustion temperatures or more aggressive extraction.

It will emerge from understanding how natural systems move energy with minimal loss… exploiting gradients, cycling rather than consuming, and coupling processes across scales.

The same is true of computation, materials, and medicine.

This does not imply stagnation.

On the contrary, it suggests that truly original technologies will arise not by copying nature, but by extending its logic into domains it has not explored.

Nature did not build satellites or particle accelerators, but it did establish the principles that make them possible.

Always the Learner

There is a temptation, once a coherent framework begins to form, to defend it as final.

That impulse has stalled progress more often than ignorance ever has.

Every advance I trust has come from recognising how much remains unknown, and how often confident assumptions quietly collapse under better measurement.

If consciousness plays a role in the evolution of the Universe’s observable structure, it will not be because it was destined to do so, but because it is a mechanism that works under certain constraints.

If information underlies more of reality than we “currently” detect, it will “eventually” reveal itself through inconsistency, anomaly, or unexpected coherence.

The responsibility, then, is not to proclaim answers, but to remain capable of recognising them when they appear.

Nature has already solved the problems for questions we have not yet learned to even ask…

The future will depend not on whether we can dominate them, but whether we are finally prepared to listen closely enough to learn how to create without destroying the conditions that allow creation at all.