Laws of nature, which have a central role to play in scientific applications, like Newton’s law of gravitation, thermodynamics, Newton’s laws of motion, electromagnetism, and Charles Darwin’s framework for life’s evolution by natural selection, among others, describe the whys and hows of natural systems working in the universe.
And now, scientists from the US and Japan have identified a potential ‘missing law’ that fills the gaps that the existing macroscopic physical laws have left out.
The missing law
Called the “law of increasing functional information,” the law explains the natural tendency of our systems to evolve. Providing a cross-disciplinary discourse on our evolving systems, the study says that the natural tendency of functions to increase in complexity through time is not specific to biology but is a fundamental property observed throughout the universe.
The evolution of varied systems like stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life are composed of diverse components that can evolve to states of greater complexity. In other words, evolution is not limited to life on Earth; it also occurs in other massively complex systems, explained the researchers in a press release.
To explain how interwoven a collection of systems is, the researchers give an example of the common phenomenon that ties together Apples and the Moon: "… they are similar with respect to the apple and the Moon sharing the property of having mass, and thus the motions of both objects may be described in nonrelativistic contexts by Newton’s universal law of gravitational attraction."
Three universal concepts of selection
The team of scientists identified three universal concepts of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—that underpin function and drive systems to evolve through the exchange of information between the environment and the system.
Static persistence can be understood in reference to universal structures selected for their stability against decay to equilibrium. Static persistence fuels dynamically persistent entities, where structures play a functional role in maintaining their own creation. Novelty generation refers to selection pressures that favor systems that can invent entirely new functions.
"This is a superb, bold, broad, and transformational article. … The authors are approaching the fundamental issue of the increase in complexity of the evolving universe. The purpose is a search for a ‘missing law’ that is consistent with the known laws,” said Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle, WA.
"At this stage of the development of these ideas, rather like the early concepts in the mid-19th century of coming to understand ‘energy’ and ‘entropy,’ open broad discussion is now essential," added Kauffman.
The researchers wrote in their paper that the new law of functional information applies to a wide range of physical, biological, and symbolic systems. As evolving systems become more complex and increase in order, their functional information will increase as well.
“I believe this contribution has also the merit of speaking to different scientific communities that might find a common ground for open and fruitful discussions on complexity and evolution,” added Andrea Roli, assistant professor at Università di Bologna.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Study abstract:
Physical laws—such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics—codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural systems across space and time. We propose that an additional, hitherto-unarticulated law is required to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving universe. An important feature of the classical laws of physics is the conceptual equivalence of specific characteristics shared by an extensive, seemingly diverse body of natural phenomena. Identifying potential equivalencies among disparate phenomena—for example, falling apples and orbiting moons or hot objects and compressed springs—has been instrumental in advancing the scientific understanding of our world through the articulation of laws of nature. A pervasive wonder of the natural world is the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life. These evolving systems appear to be conceptually equivalent in that they display three notable attributes: 1) They form from numerous components that have the potential to adopt combinatorially vast numbers of different configurations; 2) processes exist that generate numerous different configurations; and 3) configurations are preferentially selected based on function. We identify universal concepts of selection—static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation—that underpin function and drive systems to evolve through the exchange of information between the environment and the system. Accordingly, we propose a “law of increasing functional information”: The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.
Originally published on Interesting Engineering : Original article