"We'd have to define "create", but it seems to me that it implies a conscious act."

It's certainly taken that way by proponents of the blind watchmaker argument, and this linguistic problem makes self- organising systems very difficult to explain to those with a purposive cast of mind. In particular, it's very difficult to talk about how evolution happens- evolutionary strategies, ecological opportunities etc.- without using language that suggests some kind of conscious planning. I'm sure this deficit is part of the cause of confusion among those who haven't grasped how it can happen by itself.

It's a bit like those calculations of the minute odds of human life existing at all- you know the one, how many stars like the Sun, how many planets, how many habitable, etc. etc. all ending up with some fabulously small probability of humans existing at all. Ignoring the fact that it didn't have to be us, here. The calculatio of something, somewhere gives rather shorter odds.

Toss a coin 120 times, and record the results. The probability of getting that sequence is exactly one in two to the power of 120. Impossible, but you just did it.