Why-everything-in-the-universe-turns-more-complex

Summary

“I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,” Wong said. “I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory. So how do we abstract far enough away from life on Earth that we’d be able to notice life elsewhere even if it had different chemical specifics, but not so far that we’d be including all kinds of self-organizing structures like hurricanes?” The pair soon realized that they needed expertise from a whole other set of disciplines. “We needed people who came at this problem from very different points of view, so that we all had checks and balances on each other’s prejudices,” Hazen said. “This is not a mineralogical problem; it’s not a physics problem, or a philosophical problem. It’s all of those things.” They suspected that functional information was the key to understanding how complex systems like living organisms arise through evolutionary processes happening over time. “We all assumed the second law of thermodynamics supplies the arrow of time,” Hazen said. “But it seems like there’s a much more idiosyncratic pathway that the universe takes. We think it’s because of selection for function — a very orderly process that leads to ordered states. That’s not part of the second law, although it’s not inconsistent with it either.” Looked at this way, the concept of functional information allowed the team to think about the development of complex systems that don’t seem related to life at all. At first glance, it doesn’t seem a promising idea. In biology, function makes sense. But what does “function” mean for a rock? All it really implies, Hazen said, is that some selective process favors one entity over lots of other potential combinations. A huge number of different minerals can form from silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium and so on. But only a few are found in any given environment. The most stable minerals turn out ...