Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

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.....as an Idealist -- thinking that consciousness is fundamental, and matter (as well as space and time) are just appearances (aka Maya or illusion) on the screen of perception -- I believe that consciousness is the source of what we think of as living entities.

Does consciousness, as the source of all, actively design what appears to us as living beings? Well, that's a possibility, but I have my doubts. Cosmic consciousness need not be conscious in the same way we seem to ourselves to be. It needn't be an immensely bigger and more intelligent version of us, with far better design capabilities: that could just be a projection of ourselves onto it (which I believe is also the essential reason for Abrahamic religious interpretations).
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From https://evolutionnews.org/2017/12/intell...f-science/:

"....physicist Walter Elsasser argued that the unfathomable complexity of the chemical and physically processes in life was “transcomputational” — beyond the realm of any theoretical means of computation. Moreover, the development of the embryo is not solely directed by DNA. Instead, it requires new “biotonic” principles. As a result, life cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics. An unbridgeable gap separates life from non-life.

Similarly, mathematician René Thom argued that the 3D patterns of tissues in an organism’s development from egg to birth and their continuous transformation cannot be understood in terms of isolating the individual proteins generated by DNA and other molecules produced in cells. The problem is that the individual “parts” composing tissues and organs only take on the right form and function in the environment of those tissues and organs. More recent work by Denis Noble further has elucidated how every level of the biological hierarchy affects every other level, from DNA to tissues to the entire organism. Based partly on these insights, Thom concluded in his book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis that the process of development should be thought of as being controlled by an “algebraic structure outside space-time itself” (p. 119). Likewise, Robert Rosen argued that life can only be understood as a mathematical abstraction consisting of functional relationships, irreducible to mechanistic processes. He observed that life is fundamentally different from simple physics and chemistry. It embodies the Aristotelian category of final causation, which is closely related to the idea of purpose. The conclusions of these scholars challenge materialistic philosophy at its core."

Purpose, and abstractions held in thought are inherently aspects of consciousness.