"You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a sculpture works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms."
Reminds me of this great quote by Terrence Deacon on a podcast (I believe it was one of his Mind & Matter episodes). From memory:
Engineering is in some sense the opposite of life: Engineering involves assembling components. Life involves differentiating wholes.
I highly recommend Deacon's 'Incomplete Nature', and I'm very psyched about his upcoming book “Falling Up: Inverse Darwinism and Life’s Complexity Ratchet”