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very well supervised. Like most human organizations, Boeing is organized from the top down. The company was started by Bill Boeing himself; he hired the people he wanted and assigned them to desks and drawing boards, organizing his business in top-down fashion. To this day, Boeing has a top-down structure headed by a CEO, a president, a board of directors, and a chairman of the board. It’s an arrangement familiar to anyone who has worked for, or with, a large corporation. It’s also a big reason for a lot of popular misconceptions about the process of evolution.
    In top-down organizations, everything follows a chain of command. At work you might have an organization chart (an “org” chart) that shows this chain: the boss at the top, a layer of managers beneath her or him, a layer below those middle managers, including shop foremen, team leaders, and entry-level employees. The same pattern plays out in all other kinds of hierarchical groups. If you’re a student, you can pretty much count on there being a principal or president and a vice or assistant principal at the school. Universities are loaded with presidents, deans, department chairs, ombudsmen, professors, and teaching assistants.
    Nature follows an organizational scheme, too, but one that’s stunningly different from ours—and that’s where the confusion can creep in. Humans like to organize things from the top down; many of us reasonably assume everything is organized that way. But nature works the other way around. In the natural scheme of things, changes made in the past are the only things that determine whether or not any feature of the organization is retained in the future. There’s no planning. If there were a day-to-day manager of nature, he or she would have a cushy gig, because he or she wouldn’t have to do anything. Nature is self-organizing. That’s another way of defining evolution: Nature builds ecosystems, in all of their complex glory, from the bottom up.
    Looking at nature with a human’s top-down perspective can create a mistaken sense of intentional design. I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s say you’ve started a business, and your organization is successful enough that you are able to hire a few people. Your business grows, and as it does, it gets more complicated and requires more energy. More computers are needed. More phones are needed. You need more equipment and more energy to supply everything from copy machines to farm irrigators. All this equipment and all these people have to be organized. The more complicated it gets, the more organizing it needs. The energy enabling this organization and this growth comes from outside of the company. If you sell things or services, your business growth comes from your environment: in this case, from the money spent by your customers.
    In nature, living things depend on their environment, as well. We get energy stored in chemical bonds in our food; plants generally get their energy from sunlight; a few ecosystems run on geothermal or volcanic heat. When we view our systems and nature’s systems from the standpoint of energy, our organizations and nature have a lot in common. However, there is a big difference between the two. Any decisions you make to shape and direct your business are based on what resources are available, but they are your decisions. You directed your organization to make certain purchases, hire certain people, and fill out certain paperwork, or whatever documentation you might require. Your company or business gets more complex, because you chose to make it so.
    In nature, living things also have the ability to use the resources in their environments to become more complex, not by their conscious choices, but by outcompeting other living things. This is one of the fundamental mechanisms of Darwinian evolution: natural selection. The chemicals along a strand of DNA are arranged so that the molecule can make a copy of