{"id":15448,"date":"2025-06-09T05:05:48","date_gmt":"2025-06-09T05:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15448"},"modified":"2025-06-09T05:05:48","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T05:05:48","slug":"a-new-law-of-nature-attempts-to-explain-the-complexity-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15448","title":{"rendered":"A New Law of Nature Attempts to Explain the Complexity of the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Kauffman argues that biological evolution is thus constantly creating not just new types of organisms but new possibilities for organisms, ones that not only did not exist at an earlier stage of evolution but could not possibly have existed. From the soup of single-celled organisms that constituted life on Earth 3 billion years ago, no elephant could have suddenly emerged\u2014this required a whole host of preceding, contingent but specific innovations.<\/p>\n

However, there is no theoretical limit to the number of uses an object has. This means that the appearance of new functions in evolution can\u2019t be predicted\u2014and yet some new functions can dictate the very rules of how the system evolves subsequently. \u201cThe biosphere is creating its own possibilities,\u201d Kauffman said. \u201cNot only do we not know what will happen, we don\u2019t even know what can happen.\u201d Photosynthesis was such a profound development; so were eukaryotes, nervous systems and language. As the microbiologist Carl Woese and the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld put it in 2011, \u201cWe need an additional set of rules describing the evolution of the original rules. But this upper level of rules itself needs to evolve. Thus, we end up with an infinite hierarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The physicist Paul Davies of Arizona State University agrees that biological evolution \u201cgenerates its own extended possibility space which cannot be reliably predicted or captured via any deterministic process from prior states. So life evolves partly into the unknown.\u201d<\/p>\n