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… and as Philip Ball reports, a team of scientists at Carnegie Science agrees…

In 1950 the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of intelligent alien life with his colleagues. If alien civilizations exist, he said, some should surely have had enough time to expand throughout the cosmos. So where are they?

Many answers to Fermi’s “paradox” have been proposed: Maybe alien civilizations burn out or destroy themselves before they can become interstellar wanderers. But perhaps the simplest answer is that such civilizations don’t appear in the first place: Intelligent life is extremely unlikely, and we pose the question only because we are the supremely rare exception.

A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics — the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder. If they’re right, complex and intelligent life should be widespread.

In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter — living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe. According to this principle, entities are selected because they are richer in a kind of information that enables them to perform some kind of function.

This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen [here] and the astrobiologist Michael Wong [here] of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative about fundamental laws of nature. They argue that the basic laws of physics are not “complete” in the sense of supplying all we need to comprehend natural phenomena; rather, evolution — biological or otherwise — introduces functions and novelties that could not even in principle be predicted from physics alone. “I’m so glad they’ve done what they’ve done,” said Stuart Kauffman, an emeritus complexity theorist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’ve made these questions legitimate.”…

[Ball explains the origin and outline of Hazen’s and Wong’s conjecture, explores the critiques– among them, that it’s not clear how to test the hypothesis– and examines the resonant work on Assembly Theory being done by Lee Cronin and Sara Walker…]

… Wong said there is more work still to be done on mineral evolution, and they hope to look at nucleosynthesis and computational “artificial life.” Hazen also sees possible applications in oncology, soil science and language evolution. For example, the evolutionary biologist Frédéric Thomas of the University of Montpellier in France and colleagues have argued that the selective principles governing the way cancer cells change over time in tumors are not like those of Darwinian evolution, in which the selection criterion is fitness, but more closely resemble the idea of selection for function from Hazen and colleagues.

Hazen’s team has been fielding queries from researchers ranging from economists to neuroscientists, who are keen to see if the approach can help. “People are approaching us because they are desperate to find a model to explain their system,” Hazen said.

But whether or not functional information turns out to be the right tool for thinking about these questions, many researchers seem to be converging on similar questions about complexity, information, evolution (both biological and cosmic), function and purpose, and the directionality of time. It’s hard not to suspect that something big is afoot. There are echoes of the early days of thermodynamics, which began with humble questions about how machines work and ended up speaking to the arrow of time, the peculiarities of living matter, and the fate of the universe…

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution: “Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex,” from @philipcball.bsky.social and @quantamagazine.bsky.social.

See also: Benjamin Bratton‘s explantion of the work he and his collegues are doing at a new institute at UCSD: “Antikythera.” See his recent Long Now Foundation talk on this same subject here.

* Stephen Hawking

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As we celebrate complication, we might spare a thought for G. N. Ramachandran (Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran); he died on this date in 2001. A biophysicist, he discovered the triple helical “coiled coil” structure of the collagen molecule, among other remarkable contributions to structural biology.

Ramachandran was a master of X-ray crystallography, and with his colleagues, constructed space filling models of protein molecules. He devised the Ramachandran Plot, a method to diagram the conformation of polypeptides, polysaccharides and polynucleotides– which remains the international standard to describe protein structures.

Ramachandran, inspired by the ancient Syaad Nyaaya (doctrine of “may be”), also explored artificial intelligence. He developed the Boolean Vector Matrix Formulation which has important application in writing software for AI.

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