MIT assistant professor of physics who may have discovered, via theorizing about thermodynamics and entropy, a supplement to natural selection, showing the origin and evolution of life to be, not a difficult climb up Mount Improbable, but an unavoidable tumble down Mount Inevitable.
Dissipation-driven adaptation, or dissipation-driven adaptive organization (you pick). The energy surrounding a clump of atoms puts those atoms under formative pressure–selective pressure–to conform with its direction (which is toward ever greater entropy).
If you’re a configuration of atoms–a clump of matter–in the path of a heat source, and you efficiently incorporate and slough-off the heat coming your way–in other words, if you facilitate maximal entropy creation through time–you’ll go on existing longer than if you don’t do this efficiently. Clumps of matter, from snowflakes to proteins, are like well-oiled revolving doors, taking in and spitting out the energy that comes their way as they pass through time. They look improbable, but actually there’s no improbable climbing and a lot of probable dropping through space and time that is generating them.
So the better you are at going with the heat (eating it at the front end, channeling it through your system, and dissipating it out your rear) the more likely your pattern-type will survive and replicate itself.
Matter, in other words, is adaptive to energy. Energy puts evolutionary pressure on matter. From so simple a beginning–random clumps of atoms in a bath of dissipating energy–comes things like leaves (if given enough time).
link
Dissipation-driven adaptation, or dissipation-driven adaptive organization (you pick). The energy surrounding a clump of atoms puts those atoms under formative pressure–selective pressure–to conform with its direction (which is toward ever greater entropy).
If you’re a configuration of atoms–a clump of matter–in the path of a heat source, and you efficiently incorporate and slough-off the heat coming your way–in other words, if you facilitate maximal entropy creation through time–you’ll go on existing longer than if you don’t do this efficiently. Clumps of matter, from snowflakes to proteins, are like well-oiled revolving doors, taking in and spitting out the energy that comes their way as they pass through time. They look improbable, but actually there’s no improbable climbing and a lot of probable dropping through space and time that is generating them.
So the better you are at going with the heat (eating it at the front end, channeling it through your system, and dissipating it out your rear) the more likely your pattern-type will survive and replicate itself.
Matter, in other words, is adaptive to energy. Energy puts evolutionary pressure on matter. From so simple a beginning–random clumps of atoms in a bath of dissipating energy–comes things like leaves (if given enough time).
link
