7 ms·

A New Physics Theory of Life (2014)

46 points by mads 10y ago

jaequery 10y ago
How far back does evolution go? Is it the time the first cells were created? Or does it go even further back?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Evolution is a mathematical model - any time you have a replicating configuration of something and a selection pressure, you have evolution.
  - visarga 10y ago
    Reading this article I realized that entropy is actively eliminating systems that are not efficient enough at compensating (various non-living chemical structures), making it much more profitable to be one of the systems that can compensate against it (living cells). By overcoming this threshold of entropy, life has gained resiliency. Without the constant destructive effect of entropy, probably there could be no life. Life is both created and destroyed by entropy. On a parallel note, deep learning neural nets rely on randomness in connectivity and order of examples, and sometimes just consumes random numbers and turn them into coherent images or sounds. Entropy/randomness is essential in Reinforcement Learning in the exploration-exploitation dilemma - we need to discover the space of possibilities, and in order to do that we need randomness. Interesting how chaos is tangent with intelligence and life, it is practically creating a space for them.
- lawpoop 10y ago
  Evolution probably goes back before cells. The first living thing would have to be a self-replicating molecule that uses energy. Different forms of this self-replicating molecule would have different reproductive success. There is a not-unpopular theory that the original form of life on earth was an RNA molecule. RNA is a special molecule, because it can both act as a store of data, and as an enzyme for catalyzing reactions. According to this theory, specialized data storage in the form of DNA evolved later, along with specialized enzymes. Here's a brief overview of the theory that shows how evolution could happen with chains of RNA only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xnYFCZ9Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xnYFCZ9Yg Jack Szostak at Harvard has a great series of videos explaining this theory, and also a number of experiments that he and his students have performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzWrv6l9l0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzWrv6l9l0
  - jaequery 10y ago
    Going further back, are planets and stars forming also part of evolution?
    - castis 10y ago
      I suppose it would depend on the context of the discussion. Evolution can be defined as a gradual development of some thing. This thing does not necessarily have to be defined as life. Since celestial formations develop from a starting state then yeah, they can be considered evolution. In the context of the conversation as it pertains to life, I would imagine that a discussion of evolutionary life would start at the moment a given thing becomes capable of change as it replicates.
    - lawpoop 10y ago
      I would say no, because they are not self-replicating things. A part of the definition of living things is that they reproduce. That reproduction (with variation) is a necessary precursor to evolution. Stars and planets do not reproduce themselves, so they cannot be said to undergo selective evolution.
      - edblarney 10y ago
        "A part of the definition of living things is that they reproduce." Kind of :). We don't really have a definition for life. Imagine an alien ship landed, and out popped these things. They said 'hey what's up' in their language. Cool. And as it turned out - they don't 'die' by natural causes, or reproduce. The pop out of some chemical process. It's a little creative, but physically plausible. We could build 'mechanical wombs' fecundated with ovaries and sperm we farm. Is that reproduction? What if we are able to synthesize sperm and ovaries form scratch? 'Reproduction'? Depends on how you look at it I suppose :) As the Scientist stated in the article, there really isn't a hard boundary between the living and non-living, because when you reduce our definitions down the level of physics, there is no distinction, at least materialist terms. 'Life' is something we observe, and give a name to, but because of the underlying assumption of materialist science (that the Universe is matter/energy bouncing around randomly) - it really doesn't have any real objectivity. You (or we, collectively) just define it to be what you (we) want it to be and that's it.
- edblarney 10y ago
  "How far back does evolution go?" Evolution is not an entirely objective thing, really, it's the arbitrary theoretical line we draw around our observation of bags of random things bouncing around in a random environment. There is no 'process' per sey, other than somewhat arbitrary means we wish to use to describe it. So the answer is: 'evolution goes back as far as you want it to' - depending on how you chose to define it :)
  - xorxornop 10y ago
    Yup, it all depends on which level of abstraction you choose to operate in. I could describe throwing a ball to you into terms of how the quantum wavefunction evolves over time to produce the end state from the start state, and it would be a perfectly fine description, but for the sorts of things we do, usually a Newtonian physics level of description will do because we're generally concerned with coarse level details, not the momenta of each individual atom involved.
AJ007 10y ago
http://www.englandlab.com/research.html http://www.englandlab.com/research.html
mike_ivanov 10y ago
An interesting question to ask is how far does it go up the emergence ladder. E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival? Or perhaps even whether industries producing more infrared radiation are the most effective ones? Ultimately (if this is true) - would it be possible to increase efficiency of a complex system (social, financial, computational - doesn't matter) by consciously shifting the radiation it emits to the lower end of the spectrum?
- jbdistaken 10y ago
  >E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival? in general, no. E.g., a child with a high fever will dissipate more energy than a child without a fever over the same time period. who is more likely to survive? We can even consider a specific type of dissipation that an organism uses to store memories (longer lifetime of memory = less reversible = requires more dissipation), there's no guarantee that the memories stored will be useful for survival. storing a memory that lasts 100 years costs dissipation that could be better spent elsewhere for an organism that typically lives 1 week... but with appropriate restrictions on what is meant by dissipation, organism, ... the timescales involved, the driving ... then the reverse statement can be true "more likely evolutionary outcomes" <among all possible trajectories of configurations of 'organisms'> "are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there.”
  - mike_ivanov 10y ago
    Let me reframe my question this way: given the child you mentioned, would he/she be better off in life if you construct and provide such a framework where that child could consume and dissipate more energy than other children? That is, can we control (not just predict) the outcome by manipulating dissipation patterns?
- visarga 10y ago
  > increase efficiency of a complex system (social, financial, computational - doesn't matter) by consciously shifting the radiation it emits to the lower end of the spectrum You take energy too literally here. You could say a spoiled child has evolved to be an efficient money dissipation system.
yaksha13 10y ago
The Paper is here http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n11/abs/nnano.2015.250.html http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n11/abs/nnano.2015.2... It's actually pretty easy to read and interesting! I first saw this here: http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-... Nautilus, Quanta Cosmos... all of them great publications for futurists
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I've seen a similar theory published before: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047....
tbabb 10y ago
This theory strikes me as teleological rather than explanatory-- it explains phenomena in terms of their effects rather than their causes. Effects come afterwards, so they can't be the explanation for something that's already happened. Really I do not see what this idea is supposed to add. Darwinian evolution is a perfectly complete, tight, and verified explanation for the existence and complexity of life.
- trhway 10y ago
  > Effects come afterwards, so they can't be the explanation for something that's already happened. actually theory of emergence of dissipative structures in the energy flows is kind of showing that the energy flow, i.e. 2nd law is the cause, not the effect >Really I do not see what this idea is supposed to add. even without showing it as a cause, there is still important role of these works is to show compatibility at all stages and scales of the life process with the basic physics laws like the 2nd law. We kind of intuitively know that this is true, yet to be shown scientifically true is still a pretty big work. >Darwinian evolution is a perfectly complete, tight, and verified explanation for the existence and complexity of life. Does it explain clearly and in all the details why we have RNA and those 20 amino acids instead of some other structure and those amino acids that has recently been and will be more in future synthesized in the lab? "Better fit" is obviously a right answer, yet it doesn't provide any details on what specifically was better "fit" with "what". It is like Archimedes law - we still have huge field of naval engineering resulting in multitude of hulls, etc.. despite the law itself being "complete, tight, and verified explanation".
fuzzieozzie 10y ago
Good reporting of a simple idea that me and my under-graduate colleagues discussed 30+ years ago! This is not a "new" theory -- rather it is simply new reporting of an old idea.
ClayFerguson 10y ago
I have my own theory about how life and entropy interrelate. I think total entropy in the universe starts at zero and will end at zero. This is because 'order' must be considered 'negative entropy'. As the universe evolves over time patterns in molecules and behaviors of molecules begin to occur. Starting with particles, atoms, molecules, compounds, planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc. Physics doesn't drive just randomness, but it also drives order. So you ask what is the ultimate MOST NEGATIVE entropy that exists? Life. Specifically brains. Life forms are the most ordered things in the universe (non-random/order). Brains are massively large negative entropy locations in the universe. If you total up all positive entropy and negative entropy the balance out to zero. The reason is because the laws of physics don't change and DO create patterns. You can even study this "Zero Entropy" law in Conway's Game of Life. As the randomness increases over time to does the 'order', and i argue that the roughly cancel out. It's a kind of 'information conservation' at work here. If no new information is added into a system, it cannot gain or lose entropy, because all the random events are creating 'patterns' and by definition a pattern is an non-randomness and therefore negative entropy.
- azag0 10y ago
  What you describe is not your theory, it's pretty much conventional understanding of what life is in terms of thermodynamics -- a local capsule of low entropy. It's just that in formal treatment of thermodynamics, there is no negative entropy, there is just high entropy and low entropy. Also, the total entropy of the universe is largely irrelevant. This view is nothing new. What is new (or claimed to be new) about the work reported here is what drives the emergence of these capsules of low entropy.
  - ClayFerguson 10y ago
    Thermodynamics states that in any closed system the entropy ALWAYS increases over time. I think this law works, but they need to stipulate that it's for situations where there is a begin-time and end-time (finite time range), but if you integrate entropy over all time (even in a closed system), you end up with a situation where the total area under the entropy curve is zero. In other words if you sort of 'remove' time from the equation, and only consider a closed system, then all particles are guaranteed to have had time to interact with each other and fall into a well ordered pattern where there is equal order and disorder. This is my belief and it is NOT the 'conventional' understanding, but people are beginning to adopt this idea into their thinking.
edblarney 10y ago
“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” Uhh - that is the basis for materialism. 'We are just particles' - essentially, ergo, we cannot be 'alive'. It's funny that Scientists have to figure this out, when it's the fundamental underlying presumption in their branch of metaphysics ... and frankly why we may very well be able to further refine/understand evolution in material terms, we cannot - by definition - explain 'life' in terms of materialist thinking ... because by definition it is excluded from existence. In materialism, we can really only have 'the appearance of life' or intelligence etc.. Materially, we are just a 'bunch of random noise'. Which is obviously an unfulfilling idea, but one which nevertheless rests at the root of science as we understand it today.
- xorxornop 10y ago
  This strikes me as an entirely superfluous distinction. "just" random noise? What other kind of life is there..? Why can't life be that? Why the "just"? Needless romanticism
  - edblarney 10y ago
    No, it's not romanticism, it's metaphysics. I'm reminding the commenter in the realm of materialism there really is no such thing as life, the universe is just a bunch of random noise including you and it. If you think life exists you need something other than materialism, like spirituality etc.. It's an important paradox sitting right at the base of our rational world view that few realize exists.

46 points by mads 10y ago

jaequery 10y ago

How far back does evolution go? Is it the time the first cells were created? Or does it go even further back?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
Evolution is a mathematical model - any time you have a replicating configuration of something and a selection pressure, you have evolution.
- visarga 10y ago
  Reading this article I realized that entropy is actively eliminating systems that are not efficient enough at compensating (various non-living chemical structures), making it much more profitable to be one of the systems that can compensate against it (living cells). By overcoming this threshold of entropy, life has gained resiliency. Without the constant destructive effect of entropy, probably there could be no life. Life is both created and destroyed by entropy. On a parallel note, deep learning neural nets rely on randomness in connectivity and order of examples, and sometimes just consumes random numbers and turn them into coherent images or sounds. Entropy/randomness is essential in Reinforcement Learning in the exploration-exploitation dilemma - we need to discover the space of possibilities, and in order to do that we need randomness. Interesting how chaos is tangent with intelligence and life, it is practically creating a space for them.
lawpoop 10y ago
Evolution probably goes back before cells. The first living thing would have to be a self-replicating molecule that uses energy. Different forms of this self-replicating molecule would have different reproductive success. There is a not-unpopular theory that the original form of life on earth was an RNA molecule. RNA is a special molecule, because it can both act as a store of data, and as an enzyme for catalyzing reactions. According to this theory, specialized data storage in the form of DNA evolved later, along with specialized enzymes. Here's a brief overview of the theory that shows how evolution could happen with chains of RNA only: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xnYFCZ9Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1xnYFCZ9Yg Jack Szostak at Harvard has a great series of videos explaining this theory, and also a number of experiments that he and his students have performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzWrv6l9l0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPzWrv6l9l0
- jaequery 10y ago
  Going further back, are planets and stars forming also part of evolution?
  - castis 10y ago
    I suppose it would depend on the context of the discussion. Evolution can be defined as a gradual development of some thing. This thing does not necessarily have to be defined as life. Since celestial formations develop from a starting state then yeah, they can be considered evolution. In the context of the conversation as it pertains to life, I would imagine that a discussion of evolutionary life would start at the moment a given thing becomes capable of change as it replicates.
  - lawpoop 10y ago
    I would say no, because they are not self-replicating things. A part of the definition of living things is that they reproduce. That reproduction (with variation) is a necessary precursor to evolution. Stars and planets do not reproduce themselves, so they cannot be said to undergo selective evolution.
    - edblarney 10y ago
      "A part of the definition of living things is that they reproduce." Kind of :). We don't really have a definition for life. Imagine an alien ship landed, and out popped these things. They said 'hey what's up' in their language. Cool. And as it turned out - they don't 'die' by natural causes, or reproduce. The pop out of some chemical process. It's a little creative, but physically plausible. We could build 'mechanical wombs' fecundated with ovaries and sperm we farm. Is that reproduction? What if we are able to synthesize sperm and ovaries form scratch? 'Reproduction'? Depends on how you look at it I suppose :) As the Scientist stated in the article, there really isn't a hard boundary between the living and non-living, because when you reduce our definitions down the level of physics, there is no distinction, at least materialist terms. 'Life' is something we observe, and give a name to, but because of the underlying assumption of materialist science (that the Universe is matter/energy bouncing around randomly) - it really doesn't have any real objectivity. You (or we, collectively) just define it to be what you (we) want it to be and that's it.
edblarney 10y ago
"How far back does evolution go?" Evolution is not an entirely objective thing, really, it's the arbitrary theoretical line we draw around our observation of bags of random things bouncing around in a random environment. There is no 'process' per sey, other than somewhat arbitrary means we wish to use to describe it. So the answer is: 'evolution goes back as far as you want it to' - depending on how you chose to define it :)
- xorxornop 10y ago
  Yup, it all depends on which level of abstraction you choose to operate in. I could describe throwing a ball to you into terms of how the quantum wavefunction evolves over time to produce the end state from the start state, and it would be a perfectly fine description, but for the sorts of things we do, usually a Newtonian physics level of description will do because we're generally concerned with coarse level details, not the momenta of each individual atom involved.

AJ007 10y ago

http://www.englandlab.com/research.html http://www.englandlab.com/research.html

mike_ivanov 10y ago

An interesting question to ask is how far does it go up the emergence ladder. E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival? Or perhaps even whether industries producing more infrared radiation are the most effective ones? Ultimately (if this is true) - would it be possible to increase efficiency of a complex system (social, financial, computational - doesn't matter) by consciously shifting the radiation it emits to the lower end of the spectrum?

jbdistaken 10y ago
>E.g. do the organisms dissipating more energy have better chances of survival? in general, no. E.g., a child with a high fever will dissipate more energy than a child without a fever over the same time period. who is more likely to survive? We can even consider a specific type of dissipation that an organism uses to store memories (longer lifetime of memory = less reversible = requires more dissipation), there's no guarantee that the memories stored will be useful for survival. storing a memory that lasts 100 years costs dissipation that could be better spent elsewhere for an organism that typically lives 1 week... but with appropriate restrictions on what is meant by dissipation, organism, ... the timescales involved, the driving ... then the reverse statement can be true "more likely evolutionary outcomes" <among all possible trajectories of configurations of 'organisms'> "are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there.”
- mike_ivanov 10y ago
  Let me reframe my question this way: given the child you mentioned, would he/she be better off in life if you construct and provide such a framework where that child could consume and dissipate more energy than other children? That is, can we control (not just predict) the outcome by manipulating dissipation patterns?
visarga 10y ago
> increase efficiency of a complex system (social, financial, computational - doesn't matter) by consciously shifting the radiation it emits to the lower end of the spectrum You take energy too literally here. You could say a spoiled child has evolved to be an efficient money dissipation system.

yaksha13 10y ago

The Paper is here http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n11/abs/nnano.2015.250.html http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v10/n11/abs/nnano.2015.2... It's actually pretty easy to read and interesting! I first saw this here: http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-... Nautilus, Quanta Cosmos... all of them great publications for futurists

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I've seen a similar theory published before: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/20130475 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/86/2013047....

tbabb 10y ago

This theory strikes me as teleological rather than explanatory-- it explains phenomena in terms of their effects rather than their causes. Effects come afterwards, so they can't be the explanation for something that's already happened. Really I do not see what this idea is supposed to add. Darwinian evolution is a perfectly complete, tight, and verified explanation for the existence and complexity of life.

trhway 10y ago
> Effects come afterwards, so they can't be the explanation for something that's already happened. actually theory of emergence of dissipative structures in the energy flows is kind of showing that the energy flow, i.e. 2nd law is the cause, not the effect >Really I do not see what this idea is supposed to add. even without showing it as a cause, there is still important role of these works is to show compatibility at all stages and scales of the life process with the basic physics laws like the 2nd law. We kind of intuitively know that this is true, yet to be shown scientifically true is still a pretty big work. >Darwinian evolution is a perfectly complete, tight, and verified explanation for the existence and complexity of life. Does it explain clearly and in all the details why we have RNA and those 20 amino acids instead of some other structure and those amino acids that has recently been and will be more in future synthesized in the lab? "Better fit" is obviously a right answer, yet it doesn't provide any details on what specifically was better "fit" with "what". It is like Archimedes law - we still have huge field of naval engineering resulting in multitude of hulls, etc.. despite the law itself being "complete, tight, and verified explanation".

fuzzieozzie 10y ago

Good reporting of a simple idea that me and my under-graduate colleagues discussed 30+ years ago! This is not a "new" theory -- rather it is simply new reporting of an old idea.

ClayFerguson 10y ago

I have my own theory about how life and entropy interrelate. I think total entropy in the universe starts at zero and will end at zero. This is because 'order' must be considered 'negative entropy'. As the universe evolves over time patterns in molecules and behaviors of molecules begin to occur. Starting with particles, atoms, molecules, compounds, planets, solar systems, galaxies, etc. Physics doesn't drive just randomness, but it also drives order. So you ask what is the ultimate MOST NEGATIVE entropy that exists? Life. Specifically brains. Life forms are the most ordered things in the universe (non-random/order). Brains are massively large negative entropy locations in the universe. If you total up all positive entropy and negative entropy the balance out to zero. The reason is because the laws of physics don't change and DO create patterns. You can even study this "Zero Entropy" law in Conway's Game of Life. As the randomness increases over time to does the 'order', and i argue that the roughly cancel out. It's a kind of 'information conservation' at work here. If no new information is added into a system, it cannot gain or lose entropy, because all the random events are creating 'patterns' and by definition a pattern is an non-randomness and therefore negative entropy.

azag0 10y ago
What you describe is not your theory, it's pretty much conventional understanding of what life is in terms of thermodynamics -- a local capsule of low entropy. It's just that in formal treatment of thermodynamics, there is no negative entropy, there is just high entropy and low entropy. Also, the total entropy of the universe is largely irrelevant. This view is nothing new. What is new (or claimed to be new) about the work reported here is what drives the emergence of these capsules of low entropy.
- ClayFerguson 10y ago
  Thermodynamics states that in any closed system the entropy ALWAYS increases over time. I think this law works, but they need to stipulate that it's for situations where there is a begin-time and end-time (finite time range), but if you integrate entropy over all time (even in a closed system), you end up with a situation where the total area under the entropy curve is zero. In other words if you sort of 'remove' time from the equation, and only consider a closed system, then all particles are guaranteed to have had time to interact with each other and fall into a well ordered pattern where there is equal order and disorder. This is my belief and it is NOT the 'conventional' understanding, but people are beginning to adopt this idea into their thinking.

edblarney 10y ago

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” Uhh - that is the basis for materialism. 'We are just particles' - essentially, ergo, we cannot be 'alive'. It's funny that Scientists have to figure this out, when it's the fundamental underlying presumption in their branch of metaphysics ... and frankly why we may very well be able to further refine/understand evolution in material terms, we cannot - by definition - explain 'life' in terms of materialist thinking ... because by definition it is excluded from existence. In materialism, we can really only have 'the appearance of life' or intelligence etc.. Materially, we are just a 'bunch of random noise'. Which is obviously an unfulfilling idea, but one which nevertheless rests at the root of science as we understand it today.

xorxornop 10y ago
This strikes me as an entirely superfluous distinction. "just" random noise? What other kind of life is there..? Why can't life be that? Why the "just"? Needless romanticism
- edblarney 10y ago
  No, it's not romanticism, it's metaphysics. I'm reminding the commenter in the realm of materialism there really is no such thing as life, the universe is just a bunch of random noise including you and it. If you think life exists you need something other than materialism, like spirituality etc.. It's an important paradox sitting right at the base of our rational world view that few realize exists.