Kauffman claims that biological evolution constantly creates not only modern types of organisms, but modern possibilities of organisms that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution, but probably could not exist. From the soup of single-cell organisms, which were life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could suddenly emerge-it lived all the previous, random, but specific innovations.
However, there is no theoretical limit of the number of useful object. This means that the appearance of modern functions in evolution cannot be expected, “and yet some new functions may dictate the principles of system evolution themselves.” We do not know what will happen, we do not know what can happen. ” Deep development;
Physicist Paul Davies from Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution “generates its own space of possibilities, which cannot be reliably predicted or captured with any deterministic process from previous states. So life is partly evolving into the unknown.
Mathematically, “phase space” is a way to describe all possible configurations of the physical system, regardless of whether it is relatively basic as an idealized pendulum, or as complicated as all atoms covering the Earth. Davies and his colleagues lately suggested This evolution in the developing available phase space can be formally equivalent to “”Theorems about incompleteness“Mathematics developed by Mathematics Kurt Gãdel. Gã¶del showed that every axiom system in mathematics allows you to formulate statements that cannot be found that it is true or false. We can only decide about such statements, adding new axioms.
Davies and colleagues say that, like the claim of Gãdela, a key factor that makes biological evolution open and prevents us from expressing it in an independent and versatile phase space. This does not apply to physical systems, which, even if they have, say, millions of stars in the galaxy are not self -ferterative.
“The raise in complexity ensures future potential to find modern strategies inaccessible to simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, a biologist of plant development at the University of Sydney and co-author of the paper paper. Davies said that the relationship between biological evolution and the issue of non -compliance with the competence “passes the right to the heart of what makes life so magical.”
Is biology special among evolutionary processes in the field of openness generated by self -harm? Hazen believes that in reality to add a complex cognition to the mix-when the elements of the system can reason, choose and conduct experiments “in their heads”, the potential of feedback macro-micro and open growth is even greater. “Technical applications go beyond Darwinism,” he said. The watch is faster if the watchmaker is not blind.
Return to the bench
If Hazen and colleagues are right, evolution covering any type of selection inevitably increases functional information – as a result, complexity – does life, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, are inevitable in the universe? It would be contrary to what some biologists thought. The outstanding evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed to destruction, because the appearance of human intelligence is “incredible.” Finally, he said, if the intelligence at the level leading to cultures and civilization was so adaptationly useful in the Darwinian evolution, how did it happen that only all over the whole tree of life?
The Evolutionary Point of Mayra probably disappears in the jump to human complexity and intelligence, after which the whole pitch is completely transformed. People achieved planetary dominance so quickly (for better or worse) that the question when it repeats becomes debatable.
Illustration: Irene Peights for Quanta Magazine
But what about the chances of such a jump that will happen above all? If the new “lav of increasing functional information” is right, it seems that life, when it exists, will certainly be more complex by jumping and borders. It does not have to rely on any accidental edition.
What’s more, such an raise in complexity seems to be suggested by the appearance of modern causal provisions in nature, which, although they are not incompatible with the basic laws of physics regulating the smallest components, effectively assumes them in determining what will happen next. We probably see it in biology: Galileo (apocrypha) experiment consisting of dropping two masses from the inclined Pisa tower has no predictive power when the masses are not cannon balls, but live birds.