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Comment by galenmarchetti | Hacker News Reader

This is one of my favorite threads of theoretical physics. An entropy modeling of life.

The article says it "underlies rather than replaces" Darwinian evolution but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case. Sure general relativity "underlies rather than replaces" Newtonian gravity, but honestly, the understanding of GR gravity does "replace" a pure Newtonian understanding.

Darwinian evolution focuses on survival pressures to force natural selection. An entropic basis for evolution can explain things other than survival pressures; evolution can occur on a basis that rather than "improving survivability" it simply is a more functional expression of entropic drive.

How would this change how how we view evolution? It would be massive and perhaps explain a lot of the oddities in the evolution of very complex features where full functionality and marked increase in survivability is very delayed...

Would love to see further research along these lines

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Darwinian evolution explains how self-replicating entities can evolve into the sort of life we see around us today, but it does not explain how those self-replicating entities got that way in the first place.

It is not clear to me from the article, however, that this theory goes so far as to explain the latter, either. It seems to be saying that if you take something like what we believe the primordial earth was like, then one might expect life to emerge, but it does not seem to have suggested specific processes leading to that outcome.

Nor does the article give any example of how it has led to a satisfactory non-Darwinian explanation of an allegedly problematic case of evolution. If that has changed since the article's publication in 2014, I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Indeed these are normative claims, not descriptive. The emergence of life is is an extremly complex stochastic process, and likely impossible to describe. However, it does seem plausible that if a) high dissipative systems are more likely to perdure in time given the 2nd law, b) self-replication enhances the global entropic dissipation of a category of systems (because there are more) and c) the process of developing such a system is easier done by replication than by the same evolutionary pathway that led to the appearance of said system in the first place, then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear. I would like to see a formalisation of c) though, my formulation is quite tenuous.

I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution. As has been said by in the parent comment, survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems. It's remarkable that this is a claim that can be falsified, whereas Darwinian evolution, well..

> then given enough time a self-replicating system MUST appear.

The cause "given enough time" seems to leave the questions of how probable it is, and how widespread a phenomenon it would be, wide open.

> I don't see why it would have to lead to a non-Darwinian explanation of evolution.

To be clear, I don't think it does, and I don't read galenmarchetti as going that far, either.

> It's remarkable that this [survivability might just be a high-level manifestation of entropic drive of self-replicating systems] is a claim that can be falsified.

Can it be falsified? It seems a rather broad claim, and it is unclear to me that the falsification of England's theory would rule out some other theory succeeding.

Agree. I cannot comment on how probable or how widespread, but only that it is possible, and in fact it is arguably a certainty based on the premises above. Now if entropy was the only driver then self-replicating systems would be the norm. But alas, the Fermi paradox. I think we are asking too much.

Could it be falsified? I think if you could show that natural selection led to the survival of less dissipative life forms then you could claim falsification.

I take your point about falsification, though it seems to depend on accepting that the Darwinian theory of evolution via natural selection is itself sufficiently falsifiable to present the 'threat' of falsification to the premise in question.

When you have a vast near infinite canvas, it's just a numbers game.

Quoting England:

> I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.

I think this is exactly alligned with your Newtonian-GR analogy.

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