2023-10-16 19:00:00
What if evolution wasn’t limited to life on Earth? This is, in essence, what a team of nine American scientists and philosophers led by the Carnegie Institution for Science suggests, through a new article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 16, 2023).
The publication sets out the “law of increasing functional information”according to which all “complex natural systems” – whether life on Earth or atoms, minerals, planets and stars – evolve into states “more structured, more diversified and more complex”.
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Living, atoms, stars…
Concretely, what does this mean? Just before coming to the examples, we need to define in a few words what the authors mean by “evolution”. A term that must be understood here as “selection for function”. Stay focused, it’s simple!
If the 19th century naturalist Charles Darwin had generally assimilated the “function” to the survival of beings, that is to say the ability to live long enough to produce fertile offspring, the authors go further by also recognizing as functions the “stability” (capacity to persist) and the “novelty” (new configurations).
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To illustrate the selection of the “novelty”, the article discusses both cases which concern living things, such as photosynthesis, multicellular life (when cells have “learned” to cooperate until they form only one organism) and animal behaviors. But also examples from within the mineral kingdom!
Thus, the Earth’s minerals, which numbered around twenty at the dawn of our solar system, today number nearly 6,000. And that’s from just two major elements – hydrogen and helium – which were formed, shortly following the big bang, by the first stars, within which around twenty heavier chemical elements were then formed, before the next generation of stars relied on this diversity initial to produce nearly a hundred other elements.
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“Evolution is everywhere”
“Charles Darwin eloquently described how plants and animals evolve by natural selection, with many variations and characteristics of individuals and many different configurations. We argue that Darwinian theory is only a very special case and very important within a much larger natural phenomenon”summarizes in a press release Professor Robert M. Hazen, of Carnegie, who supervised the work.
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And his colleague Michael L. Wong, astrobiologist at Carnegie and first author of the study, adds: “the universe generates new combinations of atoms, molecules, cells, etc. Combinations that are stable and can generate even more novelty will continue to evolve.”
“This is what makes life the most striking example of evolution, but evolution is everywhere.”
This new “law of nature” which describes an increasing complexity is reminiscent of another: the second law of thermodynamics. This in fact states that “entropy” (in other words, the disorder) of an isolated system increases with time – which is why heat always flows from hotter objects to colder objects.
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Open discussion
Forces and movement, gravity, electromagnetism, energy… Most “laws of nature”, describing and explaining the phenomena constantly observed in the natural world, were stated more than 150 years ago.
There is no doubt that the new “law of nature” set out by the American team – made up of three philosophers of science, two astrobiologists, a data specialist, a mineralogist and a theoretical physicist – will provoke many reactions. within the scientific community.
“At this point in the development of these ideas, much like the first concepts in the mid-19th century to understand “energy” and “entropy”, an open and broad discussion is now essential”, commented in the press release Stuart Kauffman, researcher at the Institute of Systems Biology (Seattle). As a reminder, a theory is only considered “scientific” if it is refutable…
On the same topic :
⋙ “Microbial lion”: a new form of life on Earth discovered by scientists?
⋙ Emergence of complex life on Earth: scientists contradict the “oxygen control” theory
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