“The cliché that life transcends the laws of thermodynamics is completely wrong. The truth is almost exactly the opposite,” physicist Jeremy England tells us:
Living things are so impressive that they’ve earned their own branch of the natural sciences, called biology. From the perspective of a physicist, though, life isn’t different from non-life in any fundamental sense. Rocks and trees, cities and jungles, are all just collections of matter that move and change shape over time while exchanging energy with their surroundings. Does that mean physics has nothing to tell us about what life is and when it will appear? Or should we look forward to the day that an equation will finally leap off the page like a mathematical Frankenstein’s monster, and say, once and for all, that this is what it takes to make something live and breathe?
As a physicist, I prefer to chart a course between reductionism and defeat by thinking about the probability of matter becoming more life-like. The starting point is to see that there are many separate behaviours that seem to distinguish living things. They harvest energy from their surroundings and use it as fuel to make copies of themselves, for example. They also sense, and even predict things about the world they live in. Each of these behaviours is distinctive, yes, but also limited enough to be able to conceive of a non-living thing that accomplishes the same task. Although fire is not alive, it might be called a primitive self-replicator that ‘copies’ itself by spreading. Now the question becomes: can physics improve our understanding of these life-like behaviours? And, more intriguingly, can it tell us when and under what conditions we should expect them to emerge?
Increasingly, there’s reason to hope the answer might be yes. The theoretical research I do with my colleagues tries to comprehend a new aspect of life’s evolution by thinking of it in thermodynamic terms. When we conceive of an organism as just a bunch of molecules, which energy flows into, through and out of, we can use this information to build a probabilistic model of its behaviour. From this perspective, the extraordinary abilities of living things might turn out to be extreme outcomes of a much more widespread process going on all over the place, from turbulent fluids to vibrating crystals – a process by which dynamic, energy-consuming structures become fine-tuned or adapted to their environments. Far from being a freak event, finding something akin to evolving lifeforms might be quite likely in the kind of universe we inhabit – especially if we know how to look for it.
Jeremy England, “Why trees don’t ungrow” at Aeon (November 1, 2017 — but republished quite recently)
But if life could just evolve via thermodynamic processes, it ought to be evolving all the time. Yet it is not. All current life, so far as we know, dates back to live that began to exist three billion years ago or so.
Reader Jorge Fernandez writes to say, “I’ve been running into England’s writings for years. The ‘trees’ prevent England from seeing the ‘forest’. England is a Materialist Faithful that arrived at his conclusion long ago. Now he uses his smarts to try to ‘justify’ that conclusion. He employs the familiar tactic of mixing scientific facts (e.g., the laws of thermodynamics and material properties) with ideological assertions (e.g., ‘abiogenesis must have happened because, after all, here we are!’). For instance, England came up with the idea of ‘dissipative adaptation’ as a mechanism for self-organization. To test that idea he constructed computer simulations that — would you believe it — yielded ‘positive’ results. And so, predictably, England concluded: “This process might explain how evolution can get going in inert matter.” Yeah, computer simulations can yield just about anything.”
Well, no sale there.
Eric Anderson writes to point out that physicist Brian Miller has discussed England’s work in two podcasts: Here and here. He adds, “Brian is, as always, incredibly good natured and polite about England’s work and his interactions with him. To England’s credit, he has also interacted positively and politely with Brian. But, yes, at the end of the day, England’s proposal and conclusions are completely wrong as it relates to OOL and what is needed for living systems. He’s gotten a lot of press (and is very good at self-promotion), but his is another flash-in-the-pan idea that will fade as more people examine it closely and see it for the nonsense it is.”
Another reader writes to note that most of the ideas England presents are found in the work of Nobelist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), “whose work evidently has been forgotten by the physics community.”
Well, England certainly has a knack for starting a discussion.