And if you were "pro-choice"?

It's as if you have one cellular automata, like Life without Death, to build, and then another, like Wireworld, to compute, though this is clearly an oversimplification

The structure is emergent from the local (and global, think hormones that alter what rules are followed) rules encoded ... but then the structure operates via emergent rules quite different from those that built it

It's especially interesting how this is done in the brain. The DNA instructions for this must actually be quite limited. Yet, the cells are able to arrange themselves into structures that learn to do different things, with different areas/structures specialized in learning different things

This is very similar to segregation (what you're calling sorting) models using cellular automata. One of the demonstrations that global structure (segregation) can emerge from very small local/individual rules/preferences.

minhhua.com/ca_schelling/