A New Physics Theory of Life (2014)
quantamagazine.orgEnjoyable read — would be nice to have 2014 in the title, it's easy to miss.
This[0] is a nice writeup from 2019 that does a better job of connecting England's work to contemporary complexity theorists like Stuart Kauffman.
[0]: https://qz.com/1539551/is-the-universe-pro-life-the-fermi-pa...
Related:
A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33203733 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)
A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453946 - March 2019 (1 comment)
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15770011 - Nov 2017 (18 comments)
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858250 - July 2017 (66 comments)
A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14831747 - July 2017 (35 comments)
A New Physics Theory of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13103215 - Dec 2016 (31 comments)
A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859691 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)
A New Physics Theory of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8750630 - Dec 2014 (94 comments)
A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8733759 - Dec 2014 (1 comment)
And a follow up from a few years later: https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...
So it's like how you inevitably tend to end up with tangled headphone cords even if you swear you never tangle them yourself and they're just "lying" there? The reason behind it is also a simple matter of probability. It's more probable that they'll tangle than untangle, so eventually they do. Even with only small oscillations or disturbances, like here.
Only this is on a microscopic level where eventually, particles, through probability, find _their_ configurations that disperse energy (settling where they "want" to be per thermodynamics) and in the process form more bonds among the particles. Maybe a tiny human diving in to that microcosmos might have found that annoying too!
Who would've known, annoying bunched up cords and wires might have carried a hint to bunched up complex molecules and genesis itself!
This is one of my favorite threads of theoretical physics. An entropy modeling of life.
The article says it "underlies rather than replaces" Darwinian evolution but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. Sure general relativity "underlies rather than replaces" Newtonian gravity, but honestly, the understanding of GR gravity does "replace" a pure Newtonian understanding.
Darwinian evolution focuses on survival pressures to force natural selection. An entropic basis for evolution can explain things other than survival pressures; evolution can occur on a basis that rather than "improving survivability" it simply is a more functional expression of entropic drive.
How would this change how how we view evolution? It would be massive and perhaps explain a lot of the oddities in the evolution of very complex features where full functionality and marked increase in survivability is very delayed...
Would love to see further research along these lines
Darwinian evolution explains how self-replicating entities can evolve into the sort of life we see around us today, but it does not explain how those self-replicating entities got that way in the first place.
It is not clear to me from the article, however, that this theory goes so far as to explain the latter, either. It seems to be saying that if you take something like what we believe the primordial earth was like, then one might expect life to emerge, but it does not seem to have suggested specific processes leading to that outcome.
Nor does the article give any example of how it has led to a satisfactory non-Darwinian explanation of an allegedly problematic case of evolution. If that has changed since the article's publication in 2014, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
Indeed these are normative claims, not descriptive. The emergence of life is is an extremly complex stochastic process, and likely impossible to describe. However, it does seem plausible that if a) high dissipative systems are more likely to perdure in time given the 2nd law, b) self-replication enhances the global entropic dissipation of a category of systems (because there are more) and c) the process of developing such a system is easier done by replication than by the same evolutionary pathway that led to the appearance of said system in the first place, then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. I would like to see a formalisation of c) though, my formulation is quite tenuous.
I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. As has been said by in the parent comment, survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems. It's remarkable that this is a claim that can be falsified, whereas Darwinian evolution, well..
> then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear.
The cause "given enough time" seems to leave the questions of how probable it is, and how widespread a phenomenon it would be, wide open.
> I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution.
To be clear, I don't think it does, and I don't read galenmarchetti as going that far, either.
> It's remarkable that this [survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems] is a claim that can be falsified.
Can it be falsified? It seems a rather broad claim, and it is unclear to me that the falsification of England's theory would rule out some other theory succeeding.
Agree. I cannot comment on how probable or how widespread, but only that it is possible, and in fact it is arguably a certainty based on the premises above. Now if entropy was the only driver then self-replicating systems would be the norm. But alas, the Fermi paradox. I think we are asking too much.
Could it be falsified? I think if you could show that natural selection led to the survival of less dissipative life forms then you could claim falsification.
I take your point about falsification, though it seems to depend on accepting that the Darwinian theory of evolution via natural selection is itself sufficiently falsifiable to present the 'threat' of falsification to the premise in question.
When you have a vast near infinite canvas, it's just a numbers game.
Quoting England:
> I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.
I think this is exactly alligned with your Newtonian-GR analogy.
Anyone interested in this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper:
Summary. A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability.
I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it.
[1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018...
This lecture by Jeremy England and the related Quanta magazine article, really added the missing piece to my world view! (1) Why does evolution happen in one direction only? (2) Why (and therefore how) does evolution happen AT ALL? (3) Life is about inevitably absorbing and dissipating a very small fraction of sun's photonic energy by turning it into information ( = complexity). THAT is also the reason why both are measured in Joules! (1 bit = 2.9 x 10^-21 Joules: LANDAUER Principle). I now look at the world (and bio-diversity) very differently.
Some weeks ago I wrote down some ideas that "feel" like this after watching Feynman https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5, but before I read this (or maybe I did read this, and it's all just latent thought, who knows). What the hell, I'll share them here-
* Life "obviously" evolves where heat/energy is isolated into packets at some (many) levels * What is the F's 3 gear problem with respect to life? * The origin of life as a heat-management problem, with time-reversibility, sensu the video. * Life evolves in some time-reversible (mostly isolated) system that allows energy back and forth, a "DNA molecule" separating, and joing back, and separating, and joining back (until there is a little moment of chaos, and it doesn't separate, or come back, because the process is interrupted), at this point systems that can manage heat, i.e. shunt energy packets away, can prevent "mutations", at just the right time, so that they continue to go back and forth, separate the DNA, bring it back (time reversable). * "Shunting energy away" -> moving chaos to another place * Life is irreversible, therefor it must be a "machine" that shunts energy away * In as much as the collective Earth/Gaia "learns" to shunt energy away, then it will become collectively "alive" * We are at the point where we need to shunt Energy away, therefor the Earth is "Alive" * The earth / heat - at some point the finned shaft sensu F has to break through to space, to let the heat "out" * Why are trees? Yes this is a complete sentence. I.e. if there is some "fractalness"/"modularity" to earth, then this heat managing problem should repeat at many different levels. What are the "cold" counterparts to trees? If the gear is a tree, then what is the "fin"? How does the tree gear energy move back to the fin?
At least from the way it's presented in the article, I don't see how this makes any sense at all. Maybe someone else here can explain it better?
Because the idea the article presents is that if you have matter that is being bombarded with energy (e.g. electromagnetic radiation) and is in an environment where it can dissipate heat (like the ocean), that this leads to self-organization of that matter to more efficiently convert the energy to dissipated heat, and that this could explain the early evolution of life.
Key quote:
> "Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment. This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.
But there's zero explanation of why. It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy or becoming resonant in order to do so. It seems far more likely that the matter just absorbs or reflects or transmits the energy, and that it heats up to the extent that it absorbs it (and maybe melts a bit or something, e.g. becomes even less structured). But I don't understand what principle would lead the matter to become "resonant" or structure itself to "more efficiently" absorb and dissipate the energy. Clumps of atoms don't care, do they?
It's like the article is relying on some new physical principle of "desire to dissipate energy efficiently" in non-living matter but without naming or justifying it. Can someone else point out what that principle might be, or if there is one at all? I've gone through all the links in previous submissions and can't find any mention of it. Or am I misunderstanding or missing something here?
How I understand it:
Entropy (according to Boltzmann) is proportional to the number of microstates that can give rise to a particular macrostate of a system. The macrostate with the highest number of possible microstates is the uniform one, where all the accessible microstates are equally likely. So if by the 2nd law entropy must increase, the system will tend towards the uniform configuration.
In other words, if a force is pushing water, the configuration with the highest number of states is that where all the particles of water are also moving i.e. indistinguishable microstates, doesn't matter how you rearrange the moleculles, it will look the same as they are all moving uniformly. It would be extremely unlikely that there were a pocket of water that is mysteriously still in the middle of the stream no? Clearly there are not a lot of rearrangements of the mollecules that will keep the macrostate the same, so low entropy, which tends not to be the case.
(Edit) How this connects to the "desire to dissipate energy efficiently":
Essentially, when we talk about "energy" we really mean "free energy". This is the amount of work that we can extract from a system. This is nothing but a measure of how far a current system is to it's maximum entropy state. So dissipating energy = increasing entropy.
The mindblowing part for me is the connection that the process of extracting free energy is the same process that moves a system to its most likely state, uniformity, high entropy. So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state!! So if we imagine the arrow of time to progress at the average rate of entropic decay, we are essentially reversing it for some systems by accelerating it for others!!!
Man...
Thanks for writing all that. The key part seems to be:
> So somehow, the ability to _accelerate_ an already inevitable process lets us reconfigure other systems _away_ from their most likely state
But this is exactly the part that doesn't make sense to me. Why would it accelerate? There's no principle I'm aware of that would prefer or cause this accelerated version. There's no such "ability".
Rather, the entropy process just happens in this "already inevitable" way you describe, without any self-organizing "resonant" structures or anything or the sort. I don't understand what would cause anything different.
It's kind of like saying boulders eventually roll downhill, so therefore hills spontaneously turn their rocky surfaces into smooth slides so the boulders can roll down faster. But that's not how it works.
Ah I see, sorry to not address that - got carried away on entropic musings. It seems that is not an assumption he’s making, but it’s what he’s proven:
> when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (…) and surrounded by a heat bath (…), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy.
To be honest I cannot go any deeper without reading the paper.
> It's not like the matter has some goal of dissipating the energy
Doesn't it, though? Everything is thought to be tending towards higher entropy, and the dissipation of heat helps accomplish that.
No, because that higher entropy is developing regardless. The energy will eventually hit and heat up something, and who cares where it does?
There's no reason I can see why atoms would spontaneously rearrange to try to help that along in their local spot. It's not something that needs any help. Entropy increases, but there's no law that says it always increases as quickly as possible, as soon as possible. It just happens as physics describes it.
Thanks for the clarification, as I see what you're arguing now. It increases but nothing says that it increases as effectively or efficiently as possible.
Is that part of what these new theories are arguing though, where they are claiming that the universe does behave that way? Or is it this game where under certain conditions, molecules begin to self-assemble and thus decrease the local entropy but then must do so in a way to account for that and increase the local entropy (implying efficient heat dissipation), hence life?
Prigogine’s original work on dissipative structures seems to have already “proved” this as much as this scientist. They both are hindered by the speculative nature of any abiogenetic theory, we cannot go back to the birth of life and prove anything
I have also not understood why this theory gets solely ascribed to England instead of Prigogine and others. Is England even working on this stuff anymore? He left MIT and is a machine learning scientist at a massive pharmaceutical company now.
The follow-up article traves the history from Prigogine. https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-t...
It says that England made more meaningful contributions to the biological aspect.
I'm hoping that England did some new math, and didn't just rediscover lost work.
That's in the paper, not the article. The rest of the article is physicists making ill-informed statements about biology they don't understand. The conceptual model isn't novel, it's rather standard to students of evolution and entropy. But the specific concrete mathematical-physical model of how light becomes life is incredibly important, but up to the experts to validate and product in experiment.
This is not a new idea, but it is a cool idea. See Kay and Schneider on exergy (2002) https://archive.is/jlrpl
Do you have a title for the specific resource you're linking to? That link isn't working for me.
The meaning of life by Jr Minkel
NewScientist 5 October 2002
A mysterious man once said,"The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon"
For those who are unaware, this is the same worldview that underlies e/acc thought:
https://effectiveaccelerationism.substack.com/p/repost-notes...
TLDR: the universe's telos is entropy increase, and thus its emergent structures like life, intelligence, and capitalism favor entropic acceleration
I thought e/acc was some kind of in-joke or hoax? Does anyone really believe that stuff? This anonymous Substack isn't particularly convincing.
That's not what's being said in this theory, though. It only says entropy production happens at an appropriate rate. Obviously too much entropy production too quickly will create excess heat which is by definition useless energy from an information theoretical standpoint.
I find too many foundational problems and contradictions within e/acc to take it seriously. They are speculating with ideas that IMO have potential but the priciples are more a poorly though out sci-fi ideological statement than a philosophically comprehensive theory. Just the first few points of the manifesto make no sense to me:
> The overarching goal for humanity is to preserve the light of consciousness.
If all physical processes are subservient to a thermodynamical "telos", how could any manifestation of free will emerge? Not even going to get into how problematic it is to cite conciousess as a fundamental goal of when we cannot even assess its existence in other beings.
> Technology and market forces (technocapital) are accelerating in their power and abilities. This force cannot be stopped.
What? Cannot be stoped? How could humanity possibly play any role in an unstoppable process? Surely no one can deny capitalism to be the result of specific choices in human history? Hence why we can concieve alternatives to capitalism and can very well choose them over capitalism.
> Technocapital can usher in the next evolution of consciousness, creating unthinkable next-generation lifeforms and silicon-based awareness.
Can? How could it not if the claim is that it's unstoppable? Concisouness again?
> HUMANS HAVE AGENCY RIGHT NOW. WE CAN AFFECT THE ADVENT OF THE INFLECTION IN THIS PROCESS
Scratches head...
I would love to have a rigorous debate about some of these ideas but come on... I was recently in an X space with some of the writers of this manifesto and was very disappointed.
> If all physical processes are subservient to a thermodynamical "telos", how could any manifestation of free will emerge? Not even going to get into how problematic it is to cite conciousess as a fundamental goal of when we cannot even assess its existence in other beings.
Agreed, this is a point which I don't think is empirically backed as rigorously as the rest of e/acc. Consciousness preservation is a side effect of the currently most successful form of life (humans) also evidently having consciousness.
> What? Cannot be stoped? How could humanity possibly play any role in an unstoppable process?
I take issue with the claim of "cannot be stopped". Certainly the extinction of humanity would result in capitalistic acceleration ceasing. But we'd simply be knocked a few levels down the emergence ladder. Darwinistic acceleration would continue to proceed on a biological level, eventually begetting a species with the ability to accelerate on shorter time-scales (intelligence) and across larger spatial scales (culture). I'd say that humanity doesn't play a role, but is rather an instrument of this acceleration process.
> Surely no one can deny capitalism to be the result of specific choices in human history? Hence why we can concieve alternatives to capitalism and can very well choose them over capitalism.
I don't think capitalism is necessarily the global maximum of economic systems for thermodynamic acceleration, but it is certainly the most effective system in existence at the moment. We can conceive of alternatives, but if a subset of humans were to choose them, historical precedent suggests that they would be out-accelerated by capitalism.
> Can? How could it not if the claim is that it's unstoppable? Concisouness again?
Given long enough time, it will. But it might need multiple reboots and bumps down the emergence ladder if we fuck up.
You do bring up some great points about agency vs instrumentality that I'd like to think longer about though.
e/acc isn't a serious idealogy but is kind of just a bit with some philosophical backing. Its definitely a lot of fun.
Its a bit unrelated, but I don't think your statement about capitalism being a result of human choices is correct. Capitalism is the emergent property of a multi agent resource collection game where one's resources compound in proportion to their quantity. Its the outcome when agents don't co-operate.
The best quality of life features of modern society, such as human rights and safety standards, only emerged due to coordination working against the forces of capitalism.
> Its the outcome when agents don't co-operate
Cooperation is a choice, as you very well say immediately below the above statement.
It's interesting to see how new religions are born after old religions are found wanting. Whereas earlier we had a God overseeing Earth, we now have Teleological Universe that ordains capitalism. But just like old religion, the new religion too works purely out of wishful thinking and not on evidence.
In a Universe that favors capitalism, you would think there would be plenty of evidence of a few entities exploiting the rest to drive entropy maximization. Instead what we see is that life is scarce, so scarce that we can't even be sure that there is other life in the Universe. Where are the Universe's capitalistic overlords who can make us pee in bottles lest we waste precious time maximizing entropy generation?
There is sense in which the core essence of capitalism is derivable from the entropic laws of nature.
Consider an active entity with a finite lifetime (e.g. child, factory). A production function can be defined as the net balance of flows in/out of the entity. This could be resources, energy, money.
As time progresses after t=0 (pregnancy, project plan), the production curve starts off negative (even a self-employed craftsman has to buy tools), perhaps it dips more negative (debt, nurture/education).
Eventually the curve slopes upward and crosses the breakeven point. Growth slows, the curve reaches a maximum positive value, then falls asymptotically toward zero, maybe going a little negative, before being truncated (death, scrap - even funerals and demolition cost money).
The net contribution is the area under the curve.
Resources have to be invested before there can be any benefit. The fact of any final net positive contribution is uncertain at the outset.