The laws of nature, whether the law of thermodynamics, the law of electromagnetism, or even the framework of the evolution of life through natural selection by the English naturalist Charles Darwin and others, Describe everyone The ins and outs of how nature’s natural systems work in the universe.
That’s it?
Now, a nine-member team, made up of scientists from the Carnegie Institution for Science, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Cornell University, and philosophers from the University of Colorado, has determined Possible “missing law”. Nature fills in the gaps not covered by existing macroscopic physical laws. They baptized her “Employment Information Augmentation Act” It explains the natural tendency of our systems to evolve. This law says that evolution in all its forms It inevitably leads to more patterns, diversity and complexity in complex natural systems.
“Given the prevalence of sophisticated systems in the natural world, it seems strange that one or more laws describing their behavior did not emerge more quickly,” the authors wrote.
Features of the new law
The law recognizes evolution as a common property of complex systems in the natural world, which are characterized by:
It is made up of many different components, such as atoms, molecules or cells, which can be repeatedly organized and rearranged.
They are subject to natural processes that cause a myriad of different arrangements to form.
Only a small fraction of all these formations survive in a process called “selection for function.”
This approach, which predicts that all evolutionary phenomena are subject to natural processes, prioritizes key functions, It can help explain why a series of cosmological processes evolve over timeFrom stars that are chemically richer than their predecessors, to life forms on Earth that are more biologically complex than their predecessors.
Robert M. said: “Charles Darwin eloquently demonstrated the way in which plants and animals evolve by natural selection, with individuals having many variations and traits and many different configurations,” said Dr. Hazen of Carnegie School of Science and leader of the research. “We maintain that Darwinian theory is simply a very special and very important case within a much broader natural phenomenon. The idea that selection for a function drives evolution applies equally to stars, atoms, metals, and many other conceptually equivalent situations in which many configurations are subject to selective pressure.
Depending on the team’s perspective, there are three types of this “job selection”:
Fixed stability:
The first, and most basic, type is stability: stable arrangements of atoms or molecules that have been chosen to persist.
Dynamic stability:
The second type consists of dynamic systems that are selected for their continuous supply of energy.
Grandma’s generation:
The third type is “novelty”: the tendency of evolving systems to explore new configurations that may lead to new behaviors or surprising features.
“The universe generates new combinations of atoms, molecules, cells, etc. These stable combinations, which can generate further novelties, will continue to evolve. “This is what makes life the most amazing example of evolution, but evolution is everywhere.”the authors concluded in their study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The researchers explain that the new law of functional information applies to a wide range of physical, biological and symbolic systems, and as sophisticated systems become more complex and more ordered, their functional information will also increase.
References:
- Michael L. Wong, Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend, Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, Robert M. Hazen. On the roles of function and selection in advanced systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2023; 120 (43) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2310223120
- Ross, M. (2003). Is evolution a secular religion? Science, 299, 1523 – 1524. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.1082968.
- Barbaros, A., and Samadi, S. (2010). Species from Darwin onwards.. Integrative Zoology, 5 3, 187-97 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-4877.2010.00204.x.
- Polly, J. (2010). The entangled bank: an introduction to evolution. Evolutionary Applications, 3, 91 – 92. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1752-4571.2009.00109.X.
- Penny, D. (2011). Darwin’s theory of descent with modification versus the biblical tree of life. PLoS Biology, 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001096.
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