Kauffman argues that biological evolution is therefore constantly creating not only new types of organisms, but new possibilities for organisms, those that not only did not exist in a phase of previous evolution but could not have existed. From the soup of monocell of organisms that constituted life on earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged: this required a series of previous contingent but specific innovations.
However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses that an object has. This means that the aspect of new evolving functions cannot be foreseen and yet some new functions can dictate the rules of how the system evolves later. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” said Kauffman. “Not only do we don’t know what will happen, we don’t even know what can happen.” Photosynthesis was such a profound development; So they were eukaryotes, nerve systems and language. As in 2011, the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, we need a further set of rules that describe the evolution of the original rules. But this higher level of rules must evolve. Therefore, we end up with an infinite hierarchy “.
The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees on the fact that the biological evolution “generates his extended space that cannot be foreseen or captured reliably through any deterministic process from previous states. Therefore life evolves in part to the unknown”.
Mathematically, a “phase space” is a way to describe all the possible configurations of a physical system, it is comparatively simple as an idealized or complicated pendulum like all the atoms that include the earth. Davies and his colleagues have recently suggested That evolution in an expanding accessible phase space could be formally equivalent to “Theorems of incompleteness“Designed by the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel has shown that any system of math axiomas allows the formulation of declarations that cannot be demonstrated true or false. We can only decide these statements by adding new axioms.
Davies and colleagues say that, as with Gödel’s theorem, the key factor that makes biological evolution open and prevents us from being able to express it in an autonomous and all -inclusive phase space is that it is self -referential: the appearance of new actors in the food food on those already there to create new possibilities of action. This is not the case of physical systems, which, even if, say, millions of stars in a galaxy, are not self -referential.
“An increase in complexity provides the potential future to find new strategies not available for simpler organisms,” said Marcus Heisler, biologist for the development of plants at the University of Sydney and co -author of the incomplete document. This connection between the biological evolution and the problem of non -computability, said Davies: “goes directly to the heart of what makes life so magical”.
Is biology special, therefore, among the evolutionary processes in having an open expression generated by the authority? Hazen thinks that in fact once a complex mix-on-once adding the system can be added that the components of the system can reason, choose and perform experiments “in their heads”-the potential for macro-music feedback and the open growth is even greater. “Technological applications bring us far beyond Darwinism,” he said. A watch is made faster if the watchmaker is not blind.
Back on the bench
If Hazen and colleagues are right that the evolution that involves any type of selection inevitably increases functional information – in fact, complexity – this means that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? This would be contrary to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was condemned because the aspect of human intelligence is “absolutely unlikely”. After all, he said, if the intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations was so useful in an adaptive way in the Darwinian evolution, why did he only be born once through the entire tree of life?
Mayr’s evolutionary point probably vanishes in the jump to human complexity and intelligence, after which the entire playing field is completely transformed. Humans have reached the planetary domain so quickly (for better or for worse) that the question of when it happens again becomes questionable.
Illustration: Irene Pérez for how much magazine
But what about the possibilities of such a jump first? If the new “law of the increase in functional information” is right, it seems that life, once exists, is destined to become more complex with giant steps. He must not rely on some highly unlikely event.
In addition, such an increase in complexity seems to imply the aspect of new causal laws in nature which, although not incompatible with the fundamental laws of physics that regulate the parts of the smallest components, actually take from them in determining what will happen later. We probably already see him in biology: Galileo’s (apocryphal) experiment to drop two masses from the pendant tower of Pisa no longer has predictive power when the masses are not cannon balls but living birds.
