Via Laura Hollis at the Twitter machine, here’s an interesting paper by chemist Addy Pross. The author tries to extend the idea of Darwinian natural selection to the realm of inanimate objects.
Toward a general theory of evolution: Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate matter
Addy ProssThough Darwinian theory dramatically revolutionized biological understanding, its strictly biological focus has resulted in a widening conceptual gulf between the biological and physical sciences. In this paper we strive to extend and reformulate Darwinian theory in physicochemical terms so it can accommodate both animate and inanimate systems, thereby helping to bridge this scientific divide. The extended formulation is based on the recently proposed concept of dynamic kinetic stability and data from the newly emerging area of systems chemistry. The analysis leads us to conclude that abiogenesis and evolution, rather than manifesting two discrete stages in the emergence of complex life, actually constitute one single physicochemical process. Based on that proposed unification, the extended theory offers some additional insights into life’s unique characteristics, as well as added means for addressing the three central questions of biology: what is life, how did it emerge, and how would one make it?
It’s a paper by a chemist, published in the Journal of Systems Chemistry, but doesn’t seem to require much in the way of specialized knowledge in order to read it, have a look. The central idea seems to be something called “dynamic kinetic stability.” A stable system is one that doesn’t change over time; a dynamic-kinetically stable system is one that doesn’t change in some particular features, but only by taking advantage of some other kind of change. The water in a river flows, but what we think of as “the river” remains fairly stable over time; an organism metabolizes, but maintains its structure for an extended period; individuals within a population come and go, while the population itself can be stable.
I’m very sympathetic to these kinds of ideas — they are reminiscent of Chapter Nine of From Eternity to Here. But my first impression is that the synthesis is going in the wrong direction. Biological organisms are made of the same kind of atoms as everything else, subject to the same kind of rules, so it’s not surprising to think that their evolution should be described by a theory that also applies to inanimate objects. But (maybe this is my physicist’s bias showing) I would tend to reserve “Darwinism” for actual biology, and instead try to develop a general theory of the evolution of complex structures and information that reduced to biological Darwinism in the appropriate circumstances. I’m willing to be talked out of it, though.
Thoughts? Especially from anyone familiar with the relevant chemistry or biology?
@6. Jim Cross
I’m pretty sure that Sean is using the word “evolution” in the physicists’ sense in that quote – all that means is the system changes with time, used for inanimate objects all the time. Although probably it’s intentionally a bit of a pun, with the biological kind of evolution applying to the living objects.
@19. Jim Cross
“The first person to think that everything obeys physical laws probably lived in a cave, and his/ her name wasn’t ‘Darwin’.”
We usually credit Thales. No doubt there were earlier people with this idea that aren’t remembered, but… it was a very unusual and crazy-sounding idea in primitive cultures with no science and long traditions of magic/religion.
Charon
Thanks for clearing up the obscure (to me at least) “Cave Man” reference.
If all Sean is saying is that things change with time and are subject to physical laws, that would be a rather tired and uninteresting argument.
The article is talking about biological evolution which involves species changing with time and is controlled by natural selection. Of course, underlying biological evolution, when it is decomposed, are fundamental physical laws.; but the problem is how to get from the underlying physics to life and biological evolution. In other words, how do you “boot up” life (or mind for that matter, since life and mind are probably closely related) out of inanimate matter?
The article is trying to suggest an approach but I am not sure how well it succeeds.
Ultimately it seems to me that they are only two ways of “booting up” life. You either have to assume that the capacity for life, defined as self-sustaining forms persisting by information, is somehow embedded in inanimate matter or new laws come into play when life begins that are not derivable from the underlying physics.
Probably neither of these options would make Sean or the average physicist happy. The first really implies that the universe is life friendly and leads to the rather absurd, unprovable multiverse concept to explain how we got so lucky. The second means there is something more than physics.
Jim, the problem of how to “boot up life”, is nothing more than the problem of how to go from a (relatively) thermodynamic stable configuration of matter to one of “dynamic kinetic stability” (as defined in the article) . One idea that was mentioned in an NGC documentary some years ago, was that life or at least the large organic molecules essential for life may have formed inside comets.
Inside a comet at low temperatures, chemical reactions can be limited between molecules that are very close to each other, forming compounds that at room temperatures would be very unstable. Such reactions can be induced by cosmic rays. Then if the comet is kicked out of its orbit in the Oort cloud, it will periodically come a bit closer to the Sun and move away again. The temperature increase could set free some of the strange molecules that have been formed, most of them will decay but some can react, forming a more stable larger molecule. When the comet moves farther away from the Sun, these molecules become less mobile and can then undergo reactions with other nearby molecules.
This cycle repeats itself after each orbit, but gradually the comet’s orbit changes and it comes closer and closer to the Sun, which leads to some lof the molecules being formed becoming more and more stable at higher and higher temperatures.
Some experiments are being formed to test this idea. Dirty snow balls are being put in a deep freeze, irradiated, patially thawed, refrozen, irradiated again etc. etc.
Count Iblis
I am not sure you appreciate the difficulty of reducing life to physical laws.
The problem isn’t just one of explaining how to go from inanimate to animate matter. Of course, there are a lot of origin theories and and one or more of them will likely to be proven to be the more probable.
The problem is in reducing the emergent properties of life to simpler physical laws.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Using the logic of Sean’s argument, Life takes on a very different definition than that which we perceive. Try defining life in completely abstract terms, as quantum physics does for physical systems. This creates possible interactions within a physical system that are very different from what we would consider to be “life like”. For example, if we look at life as a complex interactive system within the locality of our universe, it is not an entity at all, but merely a reflection of a local cosmic “weather pattern”. It will blow through this part of the universe, and leave no permanent trace of its ever having been here. Like any weather pattern, it may reappear in another location, but it is not a permanent feature there either. That is not to say that life does not involve evolutionary behavior, but rather that evolution is merely a pattern within a pattern, and the real evolution is truly that of the physical system of our cosmos that does not need natural “selection” to define it. It just is.
all this does not change the observation that evolving life has SU(3) symmetry and this is why we have 8 stable particles (so we won’t be radioactive)- all very favoral to the existance of life. This has been true for 14 billion years at least.
Pingback: Darwiniana » Darwin fanatics give it a try: Darwinism of the Inanimate
Pure bullshit.