WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Consider an artificial intelligence (or even a biological organism) that creates a set of self-replicating intelligent robotic probes to fly off and explore (and colonize) the universe. Each probe will land on a different planet and begin to create new probes like itself, much like Dneprov's Crabs on the Island. Will each daughter probe be identical to the parent? Probably not. The parent probe may choose to make them slightly different from one another, with intelligent foresight: One may be optimized for swimming underwater, and one for flying in the air, for example. But will there be any errors, any mutations in the process? It would seem that, like any respectable engineer, the parent probe would make every effort to ensure that each replicated probe is exactly the way it was meant to be. The advantage of evolutionary mutation exists only because evolution has no foresight! If you do have foresight, it makes sense to dispense with the randomness.

But even if you can be 100 percent accurate, and are capable of completely stopping bugs from creeping into your software (our hypothetical parent is super intelligent, after all), we have seen that variation is, nonetheless, necessary. Even if you don't want mutations, you need a swimming daughter probe and a flying daughter probe. The offspring of each of those daughters will also change: one granddaughter probe for swimming in deep water and one for shallow water, for instance. As time goes on and the environment on the planet changes, a wide diversity of artificial creatures will arise. Not through the mechanisms we are familiar with on Earth, but diverse nonetheless. Each one will be perfectly engineered to its niche, without the awkward wisdom teeth and appendixes that we carry with us, and that betray our origins as creatures not designed by anyone.

Even if natural selection isn't operating on this well-oiled and super-intelligent community, some of the rules of evolution will still apply, no matter how flexible and self-designed they might be. Even super-intelligent artificial life forms are subject to the ruthlessly inevitable restrictions imposed on them by game theory--they would, after all, be competing against other super-intelligent organisms like themselves. If exploitation pays, exploitation will happen. Selfishness is a threat that will be present even in a community of super-intelligent artificial aliens. And some things like mutation, and even death, can't be eliminated just by being incredibly smart. Even for a radical, technological, non-Darwinian life form, so many of the principles that we use to understand the evolution of life on Earth, like trade-offs, still apply, and so it is unlikely that they would design themselves to live forever.

If astrobiologists wonder why we haven't found any indication of alien life so far, we should be doubly confused as to why we haven't found any indication of alien super-life. Once created, surely AI will take over the universe? Well, it hasn't happened yet, so perhaps the risk is less than we thought. And what about artificial life forms that are more modest in their abilities? Could a planet evolve an entire ecosystem all by itself, based on artificial life forms that accelerate evolution by having at least a basic Lamarckian ability, passing their lifetime experiences on to their offspring? It's possible that, because environments can rapidly change, such organisms may not have such an advantage over natural selection after all, at least not until they can evolve the ability to communicate, cooperate, and plan their evolutionary strategies intentionally. If you are an alien species seeding a planet with some prototypical artificial organism, maybe it's better to seed it with Darwinian creatures, rather than Lamarckians.

It's possible that we, ourselves, are artificial creatures, seeded onto planet Earth by intelligent aliens billions of years ago. But there is no sign of this, no fingerprint of alien interference. We might as well have evolved naturally--we show all the signs of natural selection pure and simple, with no trace of Lamarckian acceleration.

Unless ...

We actually do have the ability to adapt our evolution, to spread the ideas and experiences of our lifetime both to our own offspring and to others. We have Lamarckian abilities through our culture and through our technology, and what is more, we have the intelligence to know how and when to use them--although it remains to be seen whether we will be intelligent enough to be able to find our way out of the environmental dead end into which our expanding consumption has led us. Using modern techniques of genetic engineering, we can even alter the contents of our genes, eliminate the susceptibility to disease, and perhaps even stop aging. Eventually we may be able to change the shape of our very development, growing an extra arm, or wheels, or whatever takes our fancy.

Perhaps our alien seeders knew that consciousness would evolve. Perhaps this was the grand plan the whole time: Lamarckian artificial organisms could not survive their early evolutionary stages, but would one day mature. Our creators knew this and were patient enough to wait for the day when that would happen. This is possibly an unlikely scenario, but it does leave open the possibility that alien planets will be inhabited by "artificial" life forms that are nonetheless indistinguishable from what we would expect from natural selection.

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