Kaufman believes that biological evolution will not only create new organisms, but also new possibilities for organisms that do not exist in the early stages of evolution, but are also impossible. From the soup of the single-celled creatures that made up the life on Earth three billion years ago, no elephant suddenly appeared – it required a large, accidental but specific innovation.
However, there is no theoretical limit on the number of objects used. This means that new features cannot be predicted in evolution, but some new features can determine the rules of how the system evolves. “The biosphere is creating its own possibilities,” Kaufman said. “Not only do we have no idea what will happen, we don’t even know what will happen.” Photosynthesis is such a profound development. The same is true for eukaryotes, nervous system and language. As microbiologist Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld said in 2011, “We need a set of rules that describe the evolution of the original rules. However, this upper rule itself requires evolution. So we end up with an infinite hierarchy.”
Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies agreed that biological evolution “creates its own space for extended possibilities that cannot be reliably predicted or captured by any deterministic process from previous states.
Mathematically, “phase space” is a way to describe all possible configurations of a physical system, whether it is as simple as an ideal pendulum or as complex as all atoms containing the earth. Davies and colleagues recently proposed that evolution in the ever-expanding phase space may be formally equal to the “incomplete theorem” designed by mathematician Kurt Gödel. Gödel shows that any axiom system in mathematics allows statements that cannot be proven to be true or false. We can only decide on such statements by adding new axioms.
Davies and colleagues say that, like Gödel’s theorem, the key factors in biological evolution make biological evolution open and prevent us from being able to express it in a self-contained and all-encompassing stage space is self-referential: it is self-referential: the emergence of new actors in space in those that have created new possibilities to create new possibilities. This is not the case for physical systems, even if they have millions of stars in the Milky Way, they are not self-deniable.
“The increase in complexity is to find the future potential of new strategies,” said Marcus Heisler, a plant development biologist at the University of Sydney and co-author of the incomplete paper. Davis said this link between biological evolution and the problem of inaccessibility, saying “directly reaching the core that makes life so magical.”
So, does biology have an open evolutionary process generated by self-reference in its evolution? Hazen believes that in fact, once complex cognition is added to the mixture, the components of the system can reason, select and run experiments “in their minds”, then the potential for macromicrofeedback and open growth is even greater. “Technical application brings us beyond Darwinism,” he said. If watchmakers are not blind, watches are faster.
Back to the bench
If Hazen and his colleagues are correct, does the evolution involving any form of choice inevitably increase functional information (effective, complexity) means that life itself, possibly, and higher intelligence is inevitable in the universe? That would go against the ideas of some biologists. Ernst Mayr, a well-known evolutionary biologist, believes that searches for alien intelligence are doomed to fail because the appearance of human-like intelligence is “completely impossible”. After all, if intelligence at a level that leads to culture and civilization is so adaptable in Darwin’s theory of evolution, how can it only appear once in the entire tree of life?
Mayr’s evolutionary point may have disappeared in the jump to human-like complexity and wisdom, so the entire sports field has been completely changed. Humanity has become so rapidly (for better or worse, when it happens again) to dominate the planet so quickly.
Illustration: Irene Pérez
But what about the chance of such a jump first? If the new “law of adding functional information” is correct, life will become more complex once it exists through leaps and boundaries. It doesn’t have to rely on some extremely unlikely opportunity events.
More importantly, this increase in complexity seems to imply the emergence of new laws of causality, which, while not compatible with the laws of physics of the smallest components, effectively took over them when determining what will happen next. It can be said that we have seen this in biology: Galileo’s experiment is that when the masses are not shells but live birds, two masses fall from the tilted tower of Pisa and no longer have predictive power.
