[betty boop]

This is one of those profound differences between things that are "designed" and things arising through evolution. Living things have an enormous economy in their blueprints.

I read this statement and come up with the reverse sense than you do, probably because you used the word "blueprint." A blueprint is a model of economy; and blueprints are always designs. Living things arising in nature through evolution may do so according to a blueprint in precisely this sense. I don't think this possibility has been (perhaps cannot be) ruled out.

[js1138]

Blueprint is the wrong word if you are going to draw inferences from a metaphor. I happen to like Wolfram's ideas, but his automata express their programs on a plane of their own making. In the world, you have automata running their programs on a plane inhabited by others. So you have two sources of uncertainty: first that assertion (by wolfram) that there is no way to predict the outcome of a program except by running it (something that makes premeditated design rather difficult). Second, you have the interference of competing systems.

If you think of genes as a program, you cannot predict their outcome except by running the program. I like to think of this as acause/effect system in which causation flows backwards in time. Selection causes some programs to have a reproductive advantage.

Perhaps God, existing outside time, is the ultimate selector. ;^)

But within the constraints of a system that perceives time as change rather than a physical dimension, the design of living systems is impossible, because you cannot foresee the consequenses of changes to your program.