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> 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

> 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.

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.