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It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time.

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on their own. On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other intelligences the second that we could, began trying to make them the second we thought we could know how. It's very reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life and intelligence. I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer, foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things happen in the wake of that.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression. For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.
- alphazard 3y ago
  Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible. But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can. Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
jmcqk6 3y ago
Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of sand dissipates much, much more energy than the grain of sand, and so there is a very strong "preference" for bacteria in this regard.
- mrkstu 3y ago
  Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently. Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
    - knome 3y ago
      >life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle. It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low entropy because it's free energy. We create more entropy in capturing energy than we capture because it's impossible not to. There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life lives.
      - keithwhor 3y ago
        > It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. sighs in bitcoin
      - 3y ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".
- SnazzyJeff 3y ago
  [dead]
Balgair 3y ago
Nit-pick: > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we define complexity as the number of genes an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with jellyfish. Again, sorry!)
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Sounds like observer bias. In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface with bio-solar-panels) Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially changed in 3.5-4 billion years. They swap genes as needed, and drop them when they're too costly and unneeded. And they're dominant, and everywhere They were here since just a few hundred million years (or less) after the earth formed. And when conditions on the planet become more hostile again, in the long run it could be the case that eukaryotes are just a historical blip (and a fluke, to boot). And if there's something we recognize as life out there beyond earth... it's likely to look like prokaryotes. The galaxy might be swimming in that kind of thing. There is a strong philosophical/ideological bias in our culture to see the world in terms of "progress"; a teleological bias, seeing the universe as proceeding in stages towards some order. It just so happens we almost always seem to define this progress as "inevitably" leading to ... us, or "beyond" us into whatever fantasy for the future is laying dormant in the present. It feels remarkably pre-Copernican.
- bmitc 3y ago
  I don't understand what you're balking at. I didn't see anyone imply that the complexity of life going up leads to "us". The complexity of life does trend up. Nothing you mentioned refutes that.
vlovich123 3y ago
Another cool perspective is that simple organisms evolved to coordinate with each other to build complex organisms that could protect the simple organisms in hostile environments they might not / would take longer to explore. Think about all the gut bacteria that survives in humanity during reproduction and viruses and bacteria that invade and hitch rides. You can view humans as the life form or you can view the bacteria within us as the life form and humans are the organic machine they’ve constructed and control (eg look at how the gut/brain connection can effect your mood and decision making without you even being conscious to it)
- pocketarc 3y ago
  I think that is a far more fun way of looking at it! But the bacteria aren't the whole story - we also have our own cells, all doing their thing and all participating (even if bacteria in us are -also- participating). We're just groups of trillions of cells all working together to keep themselves alive and reproducing. And then we go work together with other blobs of trillions of cells, just to further that goal: survival of the cells. These groups of cells that started working together many, many billions of generations ago, are now looking at space exploration, colonising other planets, and wondering if there are other big groups of cells on other planets. There's no way they'd have gotten there if they'd kept living alone as single-celled organisms. That's fun to think about.
  - lurker616 3y ago
    So each of us is basically an AGI for the tiny cells
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
RyEgswuCsn 3y ago
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.
tivert 3y ago
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. I think that's a biased take. Complex life may be better at exploiting a more table environment, but too much disruption can kill it. "Less complex" life seems able to adapt more quickly to more extreme changes (e.g. the much greater diversity of bacterial metabolism). Extinction events are inevitable, and environmental disruption will inevitably become more and more challenging until everything dies (though it may take a billion years), and during that time I think the trend will be for complexity to decrease. So ultimately, I think you're overgeneralizing one phase.
empath-nirvana 3y ago
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. A lot of lifeforms evolve to be more simple, not more complex -- I think what you have is sort of a distribution of complexity, and as life continues to evolve, the upper bound keeps getting pushed up as some organisms push the boundary of complexity, but I don't think it's at all true that in general life involves to be more complex.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  Single-celled organisms are almost infinitely more complex than, say a self-replicating RNA molecule. That again is vastly more complex than a protein or an amino acid. Similarly, a human is nearly infinitely more complex than a single-celled organism. Evolution causes organisms to fill an ecological niche. Simple niches for simple organisms will always exist, and simple life will always exist, even as the upper bounds of organic complexity trend unerringly upward. Life tends toward complexity, but that doesn't obviate the need for simple organisms.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Arguably, viruses exist by shedding as much complexity as possible. Trim their genome to the absolute minimum which can still propagate.
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    Which has some analogy to computer viruses (specially in simulated environments where they are generated through optimization algorithms, rather than being engineered by an human software developer)
  - 3rd3 3y ago
    As others have noted, it is more about the maximum complexity increasing than mean or median. Simple structures keep existing as long as they have their niche, and a human's niche is not (yet) that of viruses. This also reminds of Gall's law that complex systems evolve from simpler ones. You can also see it in neural nets, where larger ones have a higher spatiotemporal resolution and can do more complex things. More model capacity allows to model the environment and self more accurately which allows to outperform other structures in negentropy consumption often at the cost of the other structures (zero sum). This exerts selection pressure toward increasing complexity. That also largely explains group and country disparities. I am not sure that non-evolving things really fit into the same pattern. A burning fire does not necessarily displace inert matter, nor did it arise from competition. Physics and chemistry are more fractal-like possibly the result of enumeration of all computational structures (see Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis or Wolfram's ideas on the computational universe). Not fractal-like in terms of self-similarity (although there is some at different scales), but fractal-like in terms of chaotic complexity like a pseudorandom number generator but with more rule-like structures in between. Wolfram also classified such computational patterns.
hyperthesis 3y ago
The maximum complexity increases, but the average complexity? Bacteria outnumber us. It's more that it diffuses evenly rather than having a specific direction.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
> complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. Talk more about this, as I'm not sure how you are arriving at this conclusion... it feels a bit like when people talk about evolution being in some way directed as opposed to just being.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago
  Evolution is "directed" towards the exploitation of free energy, inevitably producing increasingly complex niche methods of obtaining and dissipating energy.
Nevermark 3y ago
Two reliable effects predict runaway complexity for any initially simple life form in a non-trivial environment. 1) BOOT STRAPPING COMPLEXITY: Non-trivial static environment: Something simple is rarely the global efficiency optimum in a non-trivial environment. There is nothing trivial about chemistry and the myriad of terrains created by physics in the non-living world. So simple living things, in competition, quickly get more complex. 2) ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY: Dynamic environment: In a competitive ecosystem of continually diversifying life forms, the ecosystem gets more complex, so competing in the ecosystem both enables and requires more complexity. The exponential increase in complexity produces qualitatively new modes of complexity leveraging beyond initial resources: such as specialization, food chains, parasitical strategies, mutual or cyclical symbioses, discarded products that become new resources, colonization of new environments and energy sources, flexible behaviors based on conditions, greater utilization of existing environments and resources, cooperation within multi-cell colonies, specialization and reproductive coordination within cell colonies (creatures), communication and coordination between similar and different life forms, tool use, tool creation, environment shaping, anticipation and planning, curiosity driven learning, aggregation and recombination of knowledge, resource trading systems, systems to promote positive sum interactions, and suppress negative sum interactions, engineering, invention, science, automation, etc. -- TLDR: Non-trivial environments provide initial opportunities for complexity to improve efficiency. Complexity feedback in ecosystems exponentially accelerates further complexity. Exponential growth of life's complexity on Earth shows no signs of relenting. Qualitatively new forms of complexity keep appearing. Conscious intelligence, culture, technology and automation are more continuations than breaks from this trend.
colordrops 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
alanbernstein 3y ago
I think you're describing the maximum complexity of life over time, which is an interesting thing to think about: the life forms that stand out among the rest for "how far" they evolve. In terms of other measures (total biomass, long-term survival, short-term adaptability), the life forms that stand out, historically, are very different. Ants, roaches, sharks, bacteria.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
As entropy goes up in the universe complexity first increases and then decreases. And life is probably a consequence of this. Sean Carroll explains it quite well in his book The Big Picture and also in this video series from minute physics https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz7bxK_p1Dd2 https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz...
johngossman 3y ago
Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of these, but worth reading.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
  Effectively, we've been out-competed in all the low complexity niche; life adds complexity to take advantage of novel niche where there is less competition.
svieira 3y ago
In Count to the Eschaton the "grand project" is "the sophistication of all matter" and it's been going on since the beginning.
- lioeters 3y ago
  > The Count to the Eschaton Sequence is a six-novel series written by John C. Wright.
SnazzyJeff 3y ago
[dead]
_yb2s 3y ago
> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. This isn't true- many things evolved to be simpler over time. For example, some viruses are beleived to have evolved from parasitic bacteria, which themselves evolved from free living bacteria. Many other parasites have simplified and lost the ability to survive without a host. You also have examples like many cave and underground animals losing eye sight and pigmentation. Also consider things like marine mammals losing limbs land mammals had, and many sedentary/fixed marine invertebrates evolving from free swimming ones. There are costs to complexity, and so organisms evolve it when needed, and lose it quickly when it isn't giving an advantage... there is not an "arrow of complexity" that only moves one direction.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  A great example is tunicates. They're a subgroup of chordates, and so are closely related to us, but they've been brutally simplified over time.
sfink 3y ago
My first reaction was: wat? Isn't that only from the perspective of a relatively complex organism? Life constantly explores in all the directions it can, so it's no wonder that one frontier of that exploration is towards increasing complexity. And there are natural limits to decreasing complexity. (Though those limits are beyond what we would call "life". You don't need to be capable of reproduction if you can borrow a host's capability. We're all just host mechanisms for the parasitic reproduction of Pollan's corn, Adams's digital watches, and bad analogies.) Maybe that's what the abstract referred to as "the Theory of the Adjacent Possible"? I've only read the abstract. But your argument of ecosystem complexity is totally valid. Though I guess if an ecosystem decreases in complexity, then it has to end up in a different type of simplicity than it was the last time it was there, because otherwise you already know that it evolves out of that spot (assuming some amount of determinism). Temporarily, though, this can and does happen. Invasive species often obliterate a lot of complexity, presumably until either their weaknesses are discovered through the very changing conditions that allowed the natives to flourish in the first place, or until they evolve complexity of their own. There's another way to derive increasing complexity from a small number of laws, though. There are multiple resources and multiple ways to access them. Optimizing for any one of those results in overspecializing and becoming less fit for accessing most of the others. There's no one best answer that works for everything. You always have a delicate balance between overgeneralizing and overspecializing, and the area between those provides a lot of different ecological niches, and even more if you look at the battle stretched out over time. (The configurations are unstable; you could have a thousand species optimized for particular resources that get clobbered by a generalist that poisons the specialists, then the energy required by the poisoners makes them lose out to generalist nonpoisoners, which enables specialization again, not to mention evolved immunity... the wheel goes round and round, picking up crud as it rolls.)
tsunamifury 3y ago
There are some excellent if controversial theoretical explanations for this in Assembly Theory
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
I would say we have a complex organism bias though, really the most successful life is simple, more than 90% of earth's biomass is plants, ants, fungi, bacteria (obviously some of those are more complex than others, but none of them are posting on HN quite).
- SkyMarshal 3y ago
  Sounds like the complexity of life follows a power law distribution, where most of it is simple to moderately complex, but a few species are orders of magnitude more complex than the vast majority. Eg, the vast majority of complexity among living organisms derives from just a few species.
EGreg 3y ago
Hey this dude comes to mind. Anyone remember him? Whatever came of his theories? I found them to be implausible due to the implications they’d have on the Drake equation https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://xkcd.com/384/ https://xkcd.com/384/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gfarah 3y ago
I've long believed that as the overall entropy of the universe increases, life forms evolve greater information processing capabilities to adapt and thrive in increasingly disordered environments.

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression. For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.

alphazard 3y ago
Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible. But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can. Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

jmcqk6 3y ago

Check out the work of Ilya Prigogine - he won a Nobel prize in the 70's for his work on self-organizing complexity. There is a selection force in the universe for increasing complexity, being driven by the dissipation of energy. When you have systems in non-equilibrium, there is a strong pressure to explore the possibility space to find ever more efficient ways to dissipate energy. A bacteria the size of a grain of sand dissipates much, much more energy than the grain of sand, and so there is a very strong "preference" for bacteria in this regard.

mrkstu 3y ago
Is there already a theory for life->greater complexity similar to that of entropy in physics? It seems just as inexorable.
- bmitc 3y ago
  The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently. Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
  - knome 3y ago
    >life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat This seems silly on the level of the anthropic principle. It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. We're eddies in the flow of energy from high to low entropy because it's free energy. We create more entropy in capturing energy than we capture because it's impossible not to. There's no purpose for life there. It's just where life lives.
    - keithwhor 3y ago
      > It's like claiming a calculator exists to use up electricity. sighs in bitcoin
    - 3y ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".

SnazzyJeff 3y ago
[dead]

Balgair 3y ago

Nit-pick: > It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up Depending (heavily) on how we define complexity, this is not always true. If we define complexity as the number of genes an organism has (a big if there), then we see that evolutionary pressure will often get rid of genes to improve fitness. This is somewhat common in bacteria and other 'small' organisms that are in 'stable' environments, but can happen even in 'higher' lifeforms (Sorry, I can't seem to remember the paper on this, but I vaguely recall it had something to do with jellyfish. Again, sorry!)

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Sounds like observer bias. In terms of number of individuals, the vast vast majority of life on this planet is single cell prokaryotes, and always has been. And in terms of total bio-mass only plants exceed them but that's just because of how plants work (cover the surface with bio-solar-panels) Both bacteria and archaea haven't substantially changed in 3.5-4 billion years. They swap genes as needed, and drop them when they're too costly and unneeded. And they're dominant, and everywhere They were here since just a few hundred million years (or less) after the earth formed. And when conditions on the planet become more hostile again, in the long run it could be the case that eukaryotes are just a historical blip (and a fluke, to boot). And if there's something we recognize as life out there beyond earth... it's likely to look like prokaryotes. The galaxy might be swimming in that kind of thing. There is a strong philosophical/ideological bias in our culture to see the world in terms of "progress"; a teleological bias, seeing the universe as proceeding in stages towards some order. It just so happens we almost always seem to define this progress as "inevitably" leading to ... us, or "beyond" us into whatever fantasy for the future is laying dormant in the present. It feels remarkably pre-Copernican.

bmitc 3y ago
I don't understand what you're balking at. I didn't see anyone imply that the complexity of life going up leads to "us". The complexity of life does trend up. Nothing you mentioned refutes that.

vlovich123 3y ago

Another cool perspective is that simple organisms evolved to coordinate with each other to build complex organisms that could protect the simple organisms in hostile environments they might not / would take longer to explore. Think about all the gut bacteria that survives in humanity during reproduction and viruses and bacteria that invade and hitch rides. You can view humans as the life form or you can view the bacteria within us as the life form and humans are the organic machine they’ve constructed and control (eg look at how the gut/brain connection can effect your mood and decision making without you even being conscious to it)

pocketarc 3y ago
I think that is a far more fun way of looking at it! But the bacteria aren't the whole story - we also have our own cells, all doing their thing and all participating (even if bacteria in us are -also- participating). We're just groups of trillions of cells all working together to keep themselves alive and reproducing. And then we go work together with other blobs of trillions of cells, just to further that goal: survival of the cells. These groups of cells that started working together many, many billions of generations ago, are now looking at space exploration, colonising other planets, and wondering if there are other big groups of cells on other planets. There's no way they'd have gotten there if they'd kept living alone as single-celled organisms. That's fun to think about.
- lurker616 3y ago
  So each of us is basically an AGI for the tiny cells
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

RyEgswuCsn 3y ago

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. I feel this is only the case because the ecosystem keeps receiving useful/low-entropy energy inputs from the Sun.

tivert 3y ago

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. I think that's a biased take. Complex life may be better at exploiting a more table environment, but too much disruption can kill it. "Less complex" life seems able to adapt more quickly to more extreme changes (e.g. the much greater diversity of bacterial metabolism). Extinction events are inevitable, and environmental disruption will inevitably become more and more challenging until everything dies (though it may take a billion years), and during that time I think the trend will be for complexity to decrease. So ultimately, I think you're overgeneralizing one phase.

empath-nirvana 3y ago

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. A lot of lifeforms evolve to be more simple, not more complex -- I think what you have is sort of a distribution of complexity, and as life continues to evolve, the upper bound keeps getting pushed up as some organisms push the boundary of complexity, but I don't think it's at all true that in general life involves to be more complex.

calamari4065 3y ago
Single-celled organisms are almost infinitely more complex than, say a self-replicating RNA molecule. That again is vastly more complex than a protein or an amino acid. Similarly, a human is nearly infinitely more complex than a single-celled organism. Evolution causes organisms to fill an ecological niche. Simple niches for simple organisms will always exist, and simple life will always exist, even as the upper bounds of organic complexity trend unerringly upward. Life tends toward complexity, but that doesn't obviate the need for simple organisms.
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Arguably, viruses exist by shedding as much complexity as possible. Trim their genome to the absolute minimum which can still propagate.
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  Which has some analogy to computer viruses (specially in simulated environments where they are generated through optimization algorithms, rather than being engineered by an human software developer)
- 3rd3 3y ago
  As others have noted, it is more about the maximum complexity increasing than mean or median. Simple structures keep existing as long as they have their niche, and a human's niche is not (yet) that of viruses. This also reminds of Gall's law that complex systems evolve from simpler ones. You can also see it in neural nets, where larger ones have a higher spatiotemporal resolution and can do more complex things. More model capacity allows to model the environment and self more accurately which allows to outperform other structures in negentropy consumption often at the cost of the other structures (zero sum). This exerts selection pressure toward increasing complexity. That also largely explains group and country disparities. I am not sure that non-evolving things really fit into the same pattern. A burning fire does not necessarily displace inert matter, nor did it arise from competition. Physics and chemistry are more fractal-like possibly the result of enumeration of all computational structures (see Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis or Wolfram's ideas on the computational universe). Not fractal-like in terms of self-similarity (although there is some at different scales), but fractal-like in terms of chaotic complexity like a pseudorandom number generator but with more rule-like structures in between. Wolfram also classified such computational patterns.

hyperthesis 3y ago

The maximum complexity increases, but the average complexity? Bacteria outnumber us. It's more that it diffuses evenly rather than having a specific direction.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

> complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. Talk more about this, as I'm not sure how you are arriving at this conclusion... it feels a bit like when people talk about evolution being in some way directed as opposed to just being.

MacsHeadroom 3y ago
Evolution is "directed" towards the exploitation of free energy, inevitably producing increasingly complex niche methods of obtaining and dissipating energy.

Nevermark 3y ago

Two reliable effects predict runaway complexity for any initially simple life form in a non-trivial environment. 1) BOOT STRAPPING COMPLEXITY: Non-trivial static environment: Something simple is rarely the global efficiency optimum in a non-trivial environment. There is nothing trivial about chemistry and the myriad of terrains created by physics in the non-living world. So simple living things, in competition, quickly get more complex. 2) ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY: Dynamic environment: In a competitive ecosystem of continually diversifying life forms, the ecosystem gets more complex, so competing in the ecosystem both enables and requires more complexity. The exponential increase in complexity produces qualitatively new modes of complexity leveraging beyond initial resources: such as specialization, food chains, parasitical strategies, mutual or cyclical symbioses, discarded products that become new resources, colonization of new environments and energy sources, flexible behaviors based on conditions, greater utilization of existing environments and resources, cooperation within multi-cell colonies, specialization and reproductive coordination within cell colonies (creatures), communication and coordination between similar and different life forms, tool use, tool creation, environment shaping, anticipation and planning, curiosity driven learning, aggregation and recombination of knowledge, resource trading systems, systems to promote positive sum interactions, and suppress negative sum interactions, engineering, invention, science, automation, etc. -- TLDR: Non-trivial environments provide initial opportunities for complexity to improve efficiency. Complexity feedback in ecosystems exponentially accelerates further complexity. Exponential growth of life's complexity on Earth shows no signs of relenting. Qualitatively new forms of complexity keep appearing. Conscious intelligence, culture, technology and automation are more continuations than breaks from this trend.

colordrops 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

alanbernstein 3y ago

I think you're describing the maximum complexity of life over time, which is an interesting thing to think about: the life forms that stand out among the rest for "how far" they evolve. In terms of other measures (total biomass, long-term survival, short-term adaptability), the life forms that stand out, historically, are very different. Ants, roaches, sharks, bacteria.

flanked-evergl 3y ago

As entropy goes up in the universe complexity first increases and then decreases. And life is probably a consequence of this. Sean Carroll explains it quite well in his book The Big Picture and also in this video series from minute physics https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz7bxK_p1Dd2 https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoaVOjvkzQtyZF-2VpJrxPz...

johngossman 3y ago

Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of these, but worth reading.

RosanaAnaDana 3y ago
Effectively, we've been out-competed in all the low complexity niche; life adds complexity to take advantage of novel niche where there is less competition.

svieira 3y ago

In Count to the Eschaton the "grand project" is "the sophistication of all matter" and it's been going on since the beginning.

lioeters 3y ago
> The Count to the Eschaton Sequence is a six-novel series written by John C. Wright.

SnazzyJeff 3y ago

[dead]

_yb2s 3y ago

> It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. This isn't true- many things evolved to be simpler over time. For example, some viruses are beleived to have evolved from parasitic bacteria, which themselves evolved from free living bacteria. Many other parasites have simplified and lost the ability to survive without a host. You also have examples like many cave and underground animals losing eye sight and pigmentation. Also consider things like marine mammals losing limbs land mammals had, and many sedentary/fixed marine invertebrates evolving from free swimming ones. There are costs to complexity, and so organisms evolve it when needed, and lose it quickly when it isn't giving an advantage... there is not an "arrow of complexity" that only moves one direction.

pfdietz 3y ago
A great example is tunicates. They're a subgroup of chordates, and so are closely related to us, but they've been brutally simplified over time.

sfink 3y ago

My first reaction was: wat? Isn't that only from the perspective of a relatively complex organism? Life constantly explores in all the directions it can, so it's no wonder that one frontier of that exploration is towards increasing complexity. And there are natural limits to decreasing complexity. (Though those limits are beyond what we would call "life". You don't need to be capable of reproduction if you can borrow a host's capability. We're all just host mechanisms for the parasitic reproduction of Pollan's corn, Adams's digital watches, and bad analogies.) Maybe that's what the abstract referred to as "the Theory of the Adjacent Possible"? I've only read the abstract. But your argument of ecosystem complexity is totally valid. Though I guess if an ecosystem decreases in complexity, then it has to end up in a different type of simplicity than it was the last time it was there, because otherwise you already know that it evolves out of that spot (assuming some amount of determinism). Temporarily, though, this can and does happen. Invasive species often obliterate a lot of complexity, presumably until either their weaknesses are discovered through the very changing conditions that allowed the natives to flourish in the first place, or until they evolve complexity of their own. There's another way to derive increasing complexity from a small number of laws, though. There are multiple resources and multiple ways to access them. Optimizing for any one of those results in overspecializing and becoming less fit for accessing most of the others. There's no one best answer that works for everything. You always have a delicate balance between overgeneralizing and overspecializing, and the area between those provides a lot of different ecological niches, and even more if you look at the battle stretched out over time. (The configurations are unstable; you could have a thousand species optimized for particular resources that get clobbered by a generalist that poisons the specialists, then the energy required by the poisoners makes them lose out to generalist nonpoisoners, which enables specialization again, not to mention evolved immunity... the wheel goes round and round, picking up crud as it rolls.)

tsunamifury 3y ago

There are some excellent if controversial theoretical explanations for this in Assembly Theory

blacksmith_tb 3y ago

I would say we have a complex organism bias though, really the most successful life is simple, more than 90% of earth's biomass is plants, ants, fungi, bacteria (obviously some of those are more complex than others, but none of them are posting on HN quite).

SkyMarshal 3y ago
Sounds like the complexity of life follows a power law distribution, where most of it is simple to moderately complex, but a few species are orders of magnitude more complex than the vast majority. Eg, the vast majority of complexity among living organisms derives from just a few species.

EGreg 3y ago

Hey this dude comes to mind. Anyone remember him? Whatever came of his theories? I found them to be implausible due to the implications they’d have on the Drake equation https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... https://xkcd.com/384/ https://xkcd.com/384/

deleted 3y ago

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gfarah 3y ago

I've long believed that as the overall entropy of the universe increases, life forms evolve greater information processing capabilities to adapt and thrive in increasingly disordered environments.