Scientists Propose Sweeping New Law of Nature, Expanding On Evolution (reuters.com) 112
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When British naturalist Charles Darwin sketched out his theory of evolution in the 1859 book "On the Origin of Species" -- proposing that biological species change over time through the acquisition of traits that favor survival and reproduction -- it provoked a revolution in scientific thought. Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more. It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.
Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist -- such as cellular mutation -- that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions. [...] The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment. Some biological examples of this "novelty generation" include organisms developing the ability to swim, walk, fly and think. Our species emerged after the human evolutionary lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage and acquired an array of traits including upright walking and increased brain size. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist -- such as cellular mutation -- that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions. [...] The authors proposed three universal concepts of selection: the basic ability to endure; the enduring nature of active processes that may enable evolution; and the emergence of novel characteristics as an adaptation to an environment. Some biological examples of this "novelty generation" include organisms developing the ability to swim, walk, fly and think. Our species emerged after the human evolutionary lineage diverged from the chimpanzee lineage and acquired an array of traits including upright walking and increased brain size. The research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Um...obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
Darwin didn't invent the phrase, but he used "survival of the fittest" to describe his theory of evolution. For living systems, TFA is saying exactly the same thing, just in more words.
Where TFA is different, is claiming the above for non-living systems. A law of nature should be universally applicable. However, fIre, for example, does not change. Every fire you start is the same as the previous one. It endures only as long as it has fuel, and it decreases information and complexity.
Re: Um...obvious? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that it never survives long enough to pass on its characteristics.
I wouldn't say that it's a matter of "surviving long enough." You could hypothetically feed a fire enough fuel to burn for giga-years, and it still wouldn't necessarily pass on characteristics like color of the flame or burning temperature if you suddenly start feeding it a different fuel with different intrinsic properties.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile I would say that life itself is a fire that's been burning for billions of years. Respiration, whether aerobic or anaerobic is just a form of combustion so, from a certain perspective, all living things are basically a complicated hearth that keeps a fire going. Sure, there's a lot else going on there, but we're basically all a continuation of a billions of years old fire.
Re: (Score:2)
> But fire is a thing.
It is, and it is also is a collection of processes that manifest as a thing. Even the dirty dish you leave in a sink is a process of continuous bonding of the molecules that make the mustard with the porcelain of the plate. Fire only makes this more obvious because the "thing" changes appearance quickly.
But even a bottle of water sitting on the desk is a process; there are countless interactions between the water, the air and the plastic walls, the radiation from the heat, the cosmi
Re: (Score:2)
Ya, geometric patterns forming from chaotic systems are totally not a fitness test. If a biological process takes advantage of such then that's cool in itself but not any indication that the pattern itself is an evolutionary component.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not surprising that a fish with eyes might identify threats and hunt better than one without and thus be more likely to survive and procreate; what's surprising is that a fish without eyes can have offspring that differs in photosensitivity enough from itself to confer a survival advantage, and that such small random changes can incrementally invent something as complex as eyes (and the neurons to proces
Re: (Score:3)
Evolution is simply a word meaning "changing with time". Darwin's term was "evolution by natural selection," that is, he was stating a theory of how things evolve.
Re: (Score:1)
it should really be "survival of the survivors" because he never defined fitness
Re:Um...obvious? (Score:4, Funny)
it should really be "survival of the survivors" because he never defined fitness
Turns out that Darwin wrote a whole five-hundred page book defining what he meant.
Re: (Score:2)
And most aren't really the "fittest". They're just the "good enough to reproduce effectively in their current environment".
I have observed that herbivore lineages can be regarded as devolved carnivores, which have lost enough traits to be locked into what is now an evolutionary dead end.
Restates theory of evolution by natural selection (Score:5, Insightful)
The article seems to be merely rewording the theory of evolution by natural selection when it is applied to living organisms.
Applied to "atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more," it is mystic pseudoscience. No, these do not "evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity." Unless you work very hard to cherry pick examples.
Re: (Score:2)
It seems weird that they used things like stellar nuclear fusion as an example. It is a reduction in potential energy to lower energy states (towards iron nuclei in this example). It is thermodynamics.
Re: (Score:2)
The authors are considering a theory. The Big Bang theory posits there was first energy, then particles, then atoms, then molecules....then galaxies.Somewhere planets were created. The Earth started out as a formless blob. Then we eventually got oceans, then life, then...errr...you. Thems a lot of examples. So you arrived via mystic pseudoscience.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but the Big Bang goes from low state of entropy to increasingly higher levels of entropy. The writers here are proposing that life and planets somehow are reduction of entropy because they appear organized. A singularity is organized, anything else isn't, it's just gravity pulling garbage together into a heap of something that eventually begets life.
It's very similar to the teleological argument. Large boulders may appear designed, broken rocks do not, but many smaller broken rocks are much better for
Re: (Score:3)
Applied to "atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more," it is mystic pseudoscience.
To my untrained ear, it sounds a lot like the awestruck pontificating and hand-waving that Stephen Wolfram poured into his doorstopper book on cellular automata, which he had the nerve to title A New Kind of Science.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that this is all "mystic pseudoscience."
Re: (Score:3)
Applied to "atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more," it is mystic pseudoscience. No, these do not "evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity." Unless you work very hard to cherry pick examples.
Galaxies and star systems? That is something from nothing. Order from chaos. You 'could' say they evolved from a 'lumpy' mass of dust. No?
Re: (Score:3)
But "survival of the fittest" itself is essentially a tautology where every trait from depression to junk DNA is thought to be specifically selected for instead of not adverse enough to be selected against (these are not the same things), nevermind the selection is primarily sexual selection. It would be better expressed "survival of the most fecund".
The current "law" brings up the idea with schizophrenia "more complex systems develop more complex problems", which seems to be a hard check on how complex sys
Re: (Score:2)
If you look at the insane number of cellular signaling systems and interactions it is a wonder anything develops from a fertilized egg at all.
Re: Um...obvious? (Score:2)
Yep. This ist actually way too complex to reasonably expect it to work at all. At the very least exceptionally bad design that requires a massive amount of fault-tolerance.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, yes, but it is only part of the picture. The second part is the hardware it runs on, which is not described in the DNA.
Re: (Score:2)
But "survival of the fittest" itself is essentially a tautology where every trait from depression to junk DNA is thought to be specifically selected for instead of not adverse enough to be selected against (these are not the same things),
If a trait is not adverse enough to impact survival on a species scale then it would not be unreasonable to expect it not to disappear, but remain one of many genetic variations. It's also possible a trait that did help a species survive is no longer needed or even the counter to survival but exist because at one time they may have been key in survival and thus an integral part of one's DNA. In the end, the fittest survive, even if they have traits that lessen the chance of survival, since they are fitter
Re: (Score:2)
nevermind the selection is primarily sexual selection.
No, you have to be able to survive the environment first, then you can make an attempt at reproduction. And sexual reproduction hasn't even been a thing for most of the history of life on Earth. Your view point is limitingly multicellular-centric.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Fire (any kind of oxidizing reaction) does increase entropy in an information system but it does not reduce/destroy information. Information cannot be destroyed.
Re: (Score:2)
Clearly you've never had a corrupted hard drive.
Re: (Score:2)
FWIW, this isn't new. The phrase "dynamic stability" encompasses it, and has been used in the past. And neither is a "law of nature" as they are implicit in the nature of time and thermodynamics. At best they would be a new corollary.
When originally introduced, evolution was an independent theory, as the intermediate pieces weren't in place, but currently it is no longer independent, but rather is derivable from physics and chemistry. This doesn't make it less important, of course. And yes, we proper
Re: (Score:2)
Where TFA is different, is claiming the above for non-living systems. A law of nature should be universally applicable.
In David Deutsch's books, in particular "The Beginning of Infinity", he makes another variation of this argument, one that is perhaps not quite as broad as TFA, but much broader than biological evolution. I think it's an excellent argument.
Deutsch's contention is that variation and selection is the only mechanism in the universe (as far as we know) for creating "knowledge", defined broadly and abstractly. We understand how variation and selection works to enable the construction of complex "knowledge" emb
Chaos (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That is correct, if you define the system as the Universe or, at least, the environments from which living systems draw their resources.
What is remarkable, however, is that living systems can reduce chaos strictly within their system. For example, a human can unshuffle a deck of played cards and put them back into their canonical order. That is virtually impossible to happen in randomly organized non-living systems. But the human who did the unshuffling had to genera
Re:Chaos (Score:5, Insightful)
| Every system moves towards chaos.
That is correct, if you define the system as the Universe or, at least, the environments from which living systems draw their resources.
What is remarkable, however, is that living systems can reduce chaos strictly within their system.
Not remarkable at all. A snowflake does the same thing, turn a disorganized amount of water vapor into a highly regular crystal.
And it does it the same way, radiating waste heat to the external environment, and thus increasing the entropy of the universe as a whole.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, it's commonplace. But still remarkable, I think. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Humans shuffling/ordering cards only appear to reduce entropy because we assign value to the face of the card. In reality, every time you shuffle, you breakdown the card structurally. To an alien or even under a microscope the card appears informationally random.
I think this is where these researchers are going down the path of the teleological argument - things appear designed, therefore they are designed. No, as entropy increases, you simply get more and more dice rolls for something (what we as human thi
Re: (Score:2)
That's not how you measure entropy. Anything that increases order (in a subsystem) reduces entropy (within that subsystem). The value you assign to that order is irrelevant. Producing a table of purely random numbers is an increase in order, and is more expensive than producing a table that looks like random numbers to the casual observer.
Scientists need to put down the pipe (Score:1)
and start doing science again.
Re: (Score:1)
Fortunately you're here to tell us what to think.
Ars Technica link? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's quite rude to quote from and not link the Ars Technica article.
Survival of the fittest? (Score:2)
Is that even true? Sometimes dumb luck could also play a role. If you happen to be directly under the meteor when it hits, that has nothing to do with you being fitter than the next guy. Another thing, you can be the second fittest and still survive. The full phrase ought to be "The survival of the fit enough and lucky."
Re: (Score:2)
It's about being fittest for the environment. There are lots of local environments and some of them change often, so who or what is fittest in any given situation varies a lot. Some of them just aren't survivable by anything, so no evolution will occur there. But don't worry, it will still occur somewhere else.
Yes, luck plays a part, but across whole populations it averages out, unless the whole population is in one of those unsurvivable environments. But that speaks to being the fittest too, because one of
Re: (Score:2)
"Dumb luck" AKA statistics is the essence of evolution - mutations are random, events are random, what survives is a combination of those best able to deal with the specific event with a specific mutation at a time that it matters.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes but why would you call the creature who just got lucky "fitter"? When survival of the luckier is a better term for certain situations. "Fittest" implies at least two organisms were compared and one had traits that are better suited to their environment. Just being lucky isn't a trait, and its not fitness.
Authors suggesting agency, where none exist? (Score:1)
Are the authors suggesting that planets, stars, rocks, etc. have agency in some form? Unless they can come up with some testable mechanism they speak of religion, not science.
Darwin's survival of the fittest has been so misconstrued over the years to mean survival of the individual. It doesn't. It means survival of the species. Fittest doesn't always mean largest, most powerful, etc. It's a more generic term. The modern phrase: "species survival of the optimal" might be a better descriptor.
As for fire.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's "almost right". Natural evolution is more natural than intentional. There is also, however, directed evolution. I'm not sure if dogs qualify there, but certainly there are collections of RNA molecules that do, and I believe a few viruses also could certainly qualify, though I'd need to reread the reviews of the research to be sure.
Also I'm sure that there are arguments for saying that various designs have evolved intentionally over time.
The key here is that evolution depends not only on selection,
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Even if that isn't currently true of existing viruses (and just imagine trying to prove that), look up "transposons", That KIND of thing has definitely happened.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It generally helps the survival of their genes. At least it did so in the past. You were part of a group of people that you were genetically related to, and even if your genes themselves didn't survive, at least the genes of someone in your group who share some traits with you, did.
That this system then gets abused by a society where you're no longer related to everyone but still expected to "take one for the team" is unfortunate, and sadly, it may actually mean that any gene related to altruism may eventua
Re: (Score:2)
Earth the only known place to have fire... dude, please look up... on a good day, you may find particular place that is not particularly oxygen rich, illuminating the sky a few hours a day :p
Feedback (Score:5, Interesting)
Eigenfunctions of something are inputs to something (say a transformation) which retain their nature. That is, their nature survives the transformation. Other things do not. This is survival of the fittest.
If you take an audio feedback loop (e.g. holding a microphone near a PA speaker), the signal evolves towards frequencies which interfere constructively, and everything dies out. This is evolution again: certain frequencies suited to the evolutionary niche survive and grow, and the other frequencies, ill-adapted to the feedback loop, die out.
When it comes to our brains, our immediate future brain state depends largely on its current state and its neurological input. Thought patterns which survive this grow, and those that don't die out. Thus the patterns in our brains evolve, going from thought to thought as animals go from generation to generation.
I've said to friends for years that evolution should be viewed as a very general phenomenon. As we get more specific, like biological evolution, then our notion of evolution takes on more particulars, and conversely, at its most general, all we know is that the state of a system depends on its present state, input from outside, and the laws which determine the immediate future state from theese.
The term I used at the time was Pattern Resonance. Just like resonance in many mechanical systems is a matter of frequency content, in the sense of sine functions and the Fourier transform, when it comes to mind and nature, things cease to be a simple function like this, rather what matters is some broad, general, complex notion of the stuff that is analogous to the sine functions in e.g. signal processing. I simply use the word Pattern.
Nature evolves, mind evolves, the state of the universe evolves, the outputs of recursively applied functions evolve. Wherever there is feedback there is evolution.
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
The term I used at the time was Pattern Resonance.
now why does this smell of quackery?
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps because you don't understand it?
Re: (Score:3)
Have we found Life on Mars? (Score:2)
I couldn't watch it all. Didn't grab my attention. Maybe will finish later.
But it talks about Carol Cleland's Research. Some may find it useful.
Have We Already Found Life On Mars? [youtube.com]
This was proposed in 2014 by Jermey England (Score:2)
Turtles all the way down!!!! (Score:2)
randomness and feedback (Score:2)
Re: randomness and feedback (Score:2)
Yes, but what is randomness? Physics does not provide it, except in quantum effects, and there it is just a placeholder for "we do not know" that makes the math look nice.
Hmm... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems. Care to point to any living system that is actually closed?
Re: Hmm... (Score:2)
Pretty much, yes. Ohne indicator thst life May actually user effects not covered by currently understood Physics.
Yes, I am aware that on a "whole universe" Level it may still work. It not.
Re: Hmm... (Score:2)
... damn broken auto-correct. My apologies.
Summary (Score:2)
Things that can happen, will. Those that persist become a potential starting point for other things to happen.
Wild that evolution emerges from that simple and obvious truth.
This isn't anything new though... (Score:2)
Darwin didn't propose evolution (Score:1)
The fact that species changed over time and evolved was well accepted in Erasmus Darwin's (Charles' grandfather) generation.
On the Origin of Species proposed the mechanism for evolution.
Reverse entropy (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
"Could spontaneous emergence of life and its tendency to self-organize into complex systems could be evidence of such reverse entropy principle at work?"
I don't think so. It is certainly possible to have a decrease in entropy locally while the overall entropy increases. The example above with the snowflake is precisely this. The article is not positing that that second law fails to hold, it is positing that local decreases in entropy are rife within the universe.
Re: (Score:2)
What if life spontaneously emerging is a frequent (on a cosmic scale) occurrence? Would that be enough to consider existence of anti-entropy driving such process as one possible explanation?
Re: (Score:2)
The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of a system either increase or remains constant in any spontaneous process. When generalized, this means the ultimate fate of the universe is big freeze [wikipedia.org]
Nah, the remote sysadmin will just reboot the computer and restart the simulation at the last save state.
Re: Reverse entropy (Score:3)
Yes. But so not expect the physicalists to even think about it. Life ist pretty much the elephant in the room telling us that some rather critical things are unknown at this time.
No, that ist not a "God", that idea is just not plausible at all.
Re: (Score:3)
Could spontaneous emergence of life and its tendency to self-organize into complex systems could be evidence of such reverse entropy principle at work?
No, I don't think this work invalidates the second law of Thermodynamics.
The 2nd law applies to complete systems, though, and it doesn't forbid local decreases in entropy as long as they're balanced by (greater) increases elsewhere. But neither does it explain why entropy might decrease locally. This theory is attempting to provide a consistent, universal explanation of why regions of space do experience decreases in entropy, not by appealing to descriptions of the specific processes and mechanisms, but b
Re: (Score:3)
You can't do it that way, but if the universe is infinite, then somewhere in the universe entropy won't have maximized.
(FWIW, I think the universe is finite, but this is unproven.)
OTOH, another way to get "eternal change" invokes dark energy. It's not clear what would happen after dark energy ripped space-time apart. That's only one possible scenario, but it IS consistent with "known physics". Perhaps some pieces of the old universe could survive into the next one. (I don't think it's a good bet, but AF
Implications (Score:2)
It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.
If this is indeed true, then an all-powerful God must certainly exist. Even if he had to evolve from simpler elements.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
No, but it would mean that something 13 billion years more complex than ourselves must exist. I think that's the implication he's pointing out.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
but that mug of crystals is never going to take over my kitchen and become a deity no matter how long it sits there.
Kind of like how pools of primordial amino acids will never evolve into living cells no matter how long they sit there?
The fundamental problem evolution presents is that if it is true, then there must exist (statistically speaking) beings with 13 billion years more of evolution than we currently possess. The difference between them and us, even if only a purely technological one, would
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It is distinctly different from a god of the gaps argument which argues that because there is some gap in knowledge that god must have done it. I instead argue that a process which produces ever increasing complexity will inevitably produce God, given enough time.
While your dog might think of you as a god, the analogy fails to become meaningful because we humans can only reason about those things which we can define. Internet debates about the existence of God often end up floundering because opposing
Re: (Score:2)
It only has to happen once.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Be careful what you wish for, materialists, is that what you're saying? An excellent point.
Re: (Score:2)
I think your deduction is missing a few necessary steps.
It's all just (Score:2)
"subject to selection for useful functions" (Score:2)
Nah.
For example, attached vs unattached earlobes serve no useful function.
I'm sure there are a lot more not-harmful, but not useful evolutionary choices out there.
Stopped Reading At Philosophers (Score:3)
I Know Where I Came From (Score:2)
A masturbating monkey magically gave birth out of it's dickhole to spawn humans. Was I right? Do I get a Nobel prize?
Paper is interesting but disappointing. (Score:4, Interesting)
There's way more math on this subject than what they gave in the paper, which is sorely lacking computer modelling examples which I feel would have led to more rigor.
This could be applied to AI too. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's likely what's really behind the quackery - Pushing the idea that AI is somehow alive and therefore afforded legal rights.
Entropy (Score:2)
Have they forgotten about entropy?
"Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist -- such as cellular mutation -- that generate many different configurations. "
Without constant new energy injected into the system "functional information" will decrease. Biological systems have added energy. Non-biological systems not so much.
Re: (Score:2)
That is kind of the big deal here.
Entropy has a countervailing force, in a way.
The universe's bleak descent into entropic dissolution is no longer assured.
NOT Ars Technica (Score:2)
The quote is from a Reuters article. Ars Technica does have an article [arstechnica.com] about it, but it's a very different article. It starts out
Usually, when someone starts talking about the interface between evolution and physics, it's a prelude to a terrible argument that attempts to claim that evolution can't possibly happen. So, biologists tend to be slightly leery of even serious attempts at theorizing about bringing the two fields closer.
It goes on to describe one of the papers as, "the worst written paper I've ever seen in a major journal," and explains why most of the hype being reported about this is wrong.
Not what "law of nature" means (Score:2)
These guys have a theory. It's nowhere close to being established as a "law of nature."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
A scientific generalization about nature based upon empirical observation.
How about some of that empirical observation? A few examples that seem to fit the pattern, don't add up to a "law" of nature.
Sweeping New Law of Nature (Score:2)
Misses the ball (Score:2)
Another example of the clickbait obsessed lamestream media jumping all over a topic they don't understand. Evolution as taught in schools is 50 years behind current research. Theories such as genetic memory passing from parent to child, self-directed evolution where an organism develops new phenotypes in response to environmental inputs, and punctuated equilibrium, are completely ignored by writers whose entire knowledge is limited to Origin of Species.
Re: There maybe something to it ... (Score:2)
Not quite. Scientific theories are also useful when not testable (yet). They can become testable later or they can become part of something testable later.