Kaufman argues that biological evolution always creates new possibilities for organisms, not just new types of organisms. Living things were not only nonexistent in the early stages of evolution, they were not likely to exist. Elephants were unable to suddenly appear in the soup of the single-celled organisms that made up life on Earth three billion years ago.
However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses that an object has. This means that we cannot predict the emergence of new features in evolution, but some new features may determine the very rules of how the system will evolve afterwards. “The biosphere creates its own potential,” Kaufman said. “Not only do you know what will happen, you don’t even know what will happen.” Photosynthesis was a very deep development. So were eukaryotes, the nervous system, and language. As microbiologist Carl Wars and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld said in 2011, “We need additional rules that explain the evolution of the original rules. But the higher levels of this rule themselves need to evolve. So we become an infinite hierarchy.”
Paul Davis, a physicist at Arizona State University, agrees that biological evolution “generates unique spaces of possibility that cannot be reliably predicted or captured through deterministic processes from previous states. Therefore, life evolves in part to the unknown.”
Mathematically, “topological space” is a way of describing all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it is relatively simple with an idealized pendulum or as complex as all atoms including the Earth. Davis and his colleagues have recently Proposed Evolution in an expanding, accessible topological space could be formally equivalent to “.Imperfectivity TheoremIt was conceived by mathematician Kurt Gödel. Godel showed that the system of mathematical axioms allows for the formulation of statements that are not shown to be true or false.
Davis and colleagues, like Godel’s theorem, are the key factors that prevent biological evolution from being open-ended and unable to express it in a self-contained, comprehensive stage space, is that it is self-reference: the appearance of new actors in the universe has already returned to those who create new possibilities there. This is not the case with physical systems. Even if you have millions of stars in your galaxy, it’s not a self-reference.
Marcus Heistler, a plant developmental biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the Incompleteness Paper, said: This connection between biological evolution and the issue of the competition “turns life to the heart of something so magical.”
Is biology special in the evolutionary process in having degrees of freedom generated by self-reference? Hazen believes that, in practice, the potential for macromicrofeedback and open-ended growth is greater when complex cognitions are added to the mix, as systems components can infer, select and execute experiments “in their heads.” “Technical applications go far beyond Darwinism,” he said. If the watchmaker is not blind, the watch will be faster.
I’m back to the bench
If Hazen and his colleagues are right that evolution, including all sorts of choices, inevitably increases functional information, then it is effective, and does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, are inevitable in the universe? That would go against what some biologists thought. Ernst Maire, a well-known evolutionary biologist, believed that the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the emergence of human-like intelligence was “completely unlikely.” After all, if intelligence at the level of culture and civilization was so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, why did it only arise once in the whole tree of life?
May’s evolutionary points can be revealed in a jump to human-like complexity and intelligence, and the entire arena changes completely. Humans achieved control of the planet so quickly (for better or worse) that the question of when it would occur again became controversy.
Illustration: Irene Pérez by Quanta Magazine
But what about the possibility of such a jump in the first place? If the new “law of increasing functional information” is correct, then life appears to be more complicated by leap and boundaries when it exists. You don’t need to resort to highly unlikely opportunity events.
Furthermore, this increased complexity appears to inherently mean the emergence of new causal methods, which are incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics that manage the smallest component parts, but are effectively carried over to determine what happens next. Perhaps this is already in biology. The experiment of dropping two masses from the (apoptych) Pisa’s (apocryphal) experiment is no longer predictive if the masses are living birds rather than shells.
