When a conscious being designs something he/she has a final design in mind which he/she sets forth to construct. As the design is constructed piece by piece it starts off simple becoming more and more complex as each piece is added until it reaches its final and completed state.

However with life there is no final pre-planned design thus the designing of life is continuous and never complete. As long as life goes on so does the designing process and each stage will build upon another so what started off simple will also build in complexity.

A conscious being constructs its design by first selecting then obtaining the parts and supplies he/she desires and had in mind when planning the construction of his/her pre-planned design.

However life was constructed by a process of selecting each new part every step of the way, not just in the beginning. Every time life reproduces slight variations are made to the blueprints it passes on. These variations are what the non-conscious designer of life has to select from during each stage of design. These available variations are made randomly but the selection of which variations are inputed in future stages is not random. The non-conscious designer of life selects what designs and structures are sufficient enough to pass on their blueprints to continue the designing process of the structure and which ones are not.

A conscious being typically builds and works on a single structure that will end up being the final pre-planned design he/she had in mind.

Life's diversity however is the result multiple structures being made continuously and simultaneously with various selections being incorporated during the each stage of each structure's designing process. When a structure replicates and produces multiple child structures each sibling structure inherits a unique but subtle variation to its parent's design causing the child designs to branch off into two different directions. On each branch for each structure is a different and unique set of variables to be incorporated and these different variations begin to build up sending the design of each structure in different directions. Eventually the same selection process of design that allowed a structure's design to continue will halt it's designing process (causing the design to go extinct) while only continuing the design process of other structures.

The study of life has taught us that conscious beings are not the only agents with the ability to design complexity, the other possible agent is nature through a "selection design" process known as Natural Selection. The design of life continues to grow as it continues to produce variations for nature to select from when unconsciously deciding which structural designs will go extinct and which ones will continue to evolve.