Mario,

I don't like Alex's answer simply because it pretends to have answers that we frankly don't know. There is an emerging discipline (no pun intended) dealing with self-organized systems that is trying to model many of these sophisticated structures of nature. What is interesting is recent work on the possibility that biological determinism is not dead with regard to the randomness of natural selection (see for example http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cond-mat/0105258 ). Other work that is ongoing suggests that natural selection itself may be inherently *better* at producing complex systems than other algorithmic approaches (see for example http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/physics/0005074 ).

I don't expect that we will have many answers to the 'big' questions, but it seems to me that a new discipline is brewing. And, as always, there will be philosophical interpretations (e.g., theism versus atheism, etc) of the results of those findings that will be totally at odds with each other.

Warm regards, Harv