Is there a natural order in which complex objects appear?

‘In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever.’ So begins the famous passage in William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology, in which he argues that the exquisite forms and structures we find in nature can only be the product of divine intelligence. If, Paley said, he came instead across a watch, it is utterly implausible that such a contrivance could have arisen by chance. ‘There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer’, he wrote.

As Richard Dawkins explains in The Blind Watchmaker, Paley’s argument lost all force once Charles Darwin showed that natural selection can produce such apparently purposive artifice, given just random mutation, natural selection and time. But could natural selection make an actual watch? No; the material nature, the precision and indeed the function of its parts really does seem to demand a watchmaker – which, however, itself arrives courtesy of Darwinian evolution.

There seems, then, to be an inevitable time-ordering of these objects. The rock is first, by a long stretch; but only after the appearance of the human (and of human culture generally) is the stage set for the watch. Might there even be some law of nature which dictates that a watch must predate a quantum computer, and which currently precludes the existence of the as-yet undreamt marvels that, fate and climate willing, our descendants will one day produce?