Theoretical origin of life: increasing complexity theory (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 03, 2025, 20:58 (22 hours, 20 minutes ago) @ David Turell

A new approach:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-everything-in-the-universe-turns-more-complex-20250402/

"They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. “We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,” Hazen said. “But it seems like there’s a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it’s because of selection for function — a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That’s not part of the second law, although it’s not inconsistent with it either.”

"Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don’t seem related to life at all.

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"Hazen and Wong have shown(opens a new tab) that, even for minerals, functional information has increased over the course of Earth’s history. Minerals evolve toward greater complexity (though not in the Darwinian sense). Hazen and colleagues speculate that complex forms of carbon such as graphene might form in the hydrocarbon-rich environment of Saturn’s moon Titan — another example of an increase in functional information that doesn’t involve life.

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"Wong said their work implies three main conclusions.

First, biology is just one example of evolution. “There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.”

"Second, he said, there might be “an arrow in time that describes this increasing complexity,” similar to the way the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the increase in entropy, is thought to create a preferred direction of time.

"Finally, Wong said, “information itself might be a vital parameter of the cosmos, similar to mass, charge and energy.”

"In the work Hazen and Szostak conducted on evolution using artificial-life algorithms, the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps. That echoes what is seen in biological evolution. Biologists have long recognized transitions where the complexity of organisms increases abruptly. One such transition was the appearance of organisms with cellular nuclei (around 1.8 billion to 2.7 billion years ago). Then there was the transition to multicellular organisms (around 2 billion to 1.6 billion years ago), the abrupt diversification of body forms in the Cambrian explosion (540 million years ago), and the appearance of central nervous systems (around 600 million to 520 million years ago). The arrival of humans was arguably another major and rapid evolutionary transition. (my bold)

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"Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there’s a kind of physics of evolution — and it’s a kind of physics we know about already.

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"Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what’s available. (my bold)

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"Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged — this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.

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"If Hazen and colleagues are right that evolution involving any kind of selection inevitably increases functional information — in effect, complexity — does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? (my bold)"

Comment: this article makes the point that feathers appear before a use is found and many such events occur in evolution, A designer explains all of this. An extraordinary article I had to eviscerate. The whole piece is amazing.