A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity

http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics-rp

by dnetesn • 9 years ago

90 35 9 years ago

nautil.us

hprotagonist• 9 years ago

“Red,” for instance, is a translation of the phrase “620-750 nanometer wavelength.”

only sometimes.

kamac• 9 years ago

Do you mean only sometimes, as in only when talking about electromagnetic waves? Or something else?

munificent• 9 years ago

It can also mean a sum of wavelengths outside of that range whose average is in the range.

roywiggins4• 9 years ago

And the temperature example is even worse. Our subjective experience of temperature is only kind of correlated with what physicists call temperature.

Odenwaelder• 9 years ago

Here's a better article without the theological nonsense: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

FlashGit• 9 years ago

Never ceases to amaze me how some scientists can embrace a bunch of 2000+ year old nonsense.

woodandsteel2• 9 years ago

That's a really good article.

axhue• 9 years ago

Very interesting! I wonder that if they are expecting to use dissipative mechanisms in small system how would they be able to control thermal noise and reproducibility of the calculations?

medymed• 9 years ago

Not new.

Seems like a repost. Also: "This article was originally published in our “Adaptation” issue in March, 2016." Someone is really pushing this guy's scientific (or literary) branding.

rpedela3• 9 years ago

March 2016 is pretty new, and I am happy for the repost because I didn't see it the first time and it is a very interesting idea.

mercer• 9 years ago

Quite a few publications re-post older articles, and I vaguely recall Aeon doing so in the past (not 100%).

That said, usually they're a bit older than a year or so.

boromi• 9 years ago

Yep. Some of the headlines are particularly egregious. https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=%22jeremy+england%22&qs=n...

I suspect he is up for tenure review :P His proposals are not knew just spun differently. You can find critics from other physics/chemist regarding their suspicions as well.

woodandsteel2• 9 years ago

His proposals are not knew just spun differently. You can find critics from other physics/chemist regarding their suspicions as well.

I have a rule that people shouldn't post negative comments without including specific arguments and/or links. You just violated that rule.

EGreg3• 9 years ago

Heard this before.

What do y'all think of this twist on "atheism vs intelligent design" debate? A wild swing from "life is improbable" to "life is almost certain".

I think there's some major flaw in this reasoning. Otherwise, how do you explain Drake's equation? How come every planet we have seen so far doesn't have any form of complex life on it so far as we know?

Here's what I think the flaw is: the more a planet heats up, the more it can radiate into space as infrared radiation. Obviously an equilibrium can be achieved without a constant increase in complexity.

JoBrad2• 9 years ago

I don't think we have enough data to be sceptical about the presence of certainty of life on other planets. We've only found ~3,700 planets other than Earth - and only ~20 of those are near the size of Earth[0]. We couldn't even see those planets directly until very recently, so it doesn't seem certain (to me, a layman) that we could even identify Earth as having life, at the same resolutions. That's assuming that we would recognize life, if we saw it. (Side note: Children of Men is a book I recently read that touches on this topic. ) I'll admit that I am very optimistic about the presence of advanced life on planets other than Earth, so this is definitely influencing my outlook.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016/05...

EGreg3• 9 years ago

But we have explored Mars and the moon!

chiefalchemist4• 9 years ago

But, what does life have to do with an earth like planet? And when you study the history of the earth you come to realize that life as we know it today is the result of countless events, some of them catastrophic.

As I understand it, if you simply shifted the location of Antarctica, that would change ocean currents, this effect weather, and so one. Life as we know it today might not exist if it weren't for Antarctica.

And the fact is, we'd be toast, literally, without a magnetic field. That's more important that planet size. How many planets have we found with a magnetic field like ours? What are THOSE odds?

So it seems to me, an earth like planet (in size) is a cute exercise but in the end close to irrelevant.

agumonkey• 9 years ago

What I am curious about is non carbon based lifeforms.

schiffern• 9 years ago

Here's what I think the flaw is: the more a planet heats up, the more it can radiate into space as infrared radiation.

What do you mean by that? The planet radiates exactly as much heat out as it absorbs from incoming starlight.

The only thing that change this parameter is the planet's albedo. Darker planets radiate away more heat because they absorb more heat. Even radiant forcing (from CO2 et al) doesn't change the equilibrium amount of infrared radiation escaping, just the surface temperature required to achieve radiant balance.

Note that increasing the surface temperature reduces the amount of thermodynamically useful energy (exergy) available to the biosphere, because it's like increasing the heatsink temperature of a Carnot engine.

j_m_b• 9 years ago

This theory reminds me a lot of the folding funnel. It used to be thought of as a paradox that a protein could fold in mere minutes if it needed to explore each possible configuration before arranging into its "correct" configuration. This paradox was solved with the theory of the folding funnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_funnel) which states that the potential energy surface is not flat, but rather it is 3 dimensional funnel with points where it is practically impossible to go backwards. The nascent protein does not explore the entire potential energy surface, instead it just folds into relatively few transition states before assuming its final form.

vanderZwan• 9 years ago

The wiki page still calls it a hypothesis, but also doesn't seem to have had substantial updates in a decade (where I define "substantial" as "an expert updated the information" - not a critique of the other types of edition that have happened). Is there any more recent material on this? An animated visualisation, perhaps?

tstactplsignore• 9 years ago

I did my undergrad in biophysics and this is basically a simplified version of the currently accepted view. We now also know that some proteins fold in units, and can have multiple stable fold stopping points along the folding paths, and a good deal of proteins never really have a single stable fold at all. Basically google scholar "protein folding energy landscape" for more details. http://m.pnas.org/content/113/12/3159.short

Here's a nice visualization:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manajit_Hayer-Hartl/pub...

Myrth• 9 years ago

The next step will be the realization that asymmetry of direction towards self organization on all levels, coded as energy consumption/dissipation efficiency, is a built in property of our reality, and life and counsciousness as we understand then are not random accidents.

Quarks -> protons/neutrons, nucleus+electrons -> atoms, atoms -> molecules, molecules -> proteins, proteins -> cells, cells -> organisms, organisms -> ecosystems, stars -> galaxies, galaxies -> clusters, etc.

pnut• 9 years ago

There seems to be more of a bell curve of complexity as you move through the powers of ten... Galaxies have some general organizational properties at the very large scale, as do atoms etc at the very small end, but directly in the middle of those extremes lie us, the alchemical pinnacle of self organisation until proven otherwise.

chiefalchemist4• 9 years ago

This just struck me. As something is becoming organized, something else is becoming disorganized or even failing to exit. We seem to recognize and study the one, but ignore the other. But perhaps there's something to be gleaned from taking the perspective of what's gone, not what is now?

A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity

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