Nov 22, 2010 10:18 GMT  ·  By
Life may be just a local minima in a much more complex framework set by evolution
   Life may be just a local minima in a much more complex framework set by evolution

There are few ideas in the world that had groundbreaking implications on the way we understand science. The microscope, the telescope and some theories are examples of this, but now researchers are proposing a new approach to looking at life itself, and at how it developed

One of the major realizations that we had was that scientist discovered that biology is the product of evolution. For centuries, it was believed that it was the other way around, but theories demonstrated the error of the old ways.

Another impressive discovery was when physicists determined that forces such as chemical energy, thermodynamic energy, and kinetic energy are manifestations of the same phenomenon, and not separate ones, as first thought.

If biology indeed stems from evolution, then the implication is that the latter phenomenon is an algorithm of unimaginable power. Computer scientists have begun tapping into this power lately, trying, among others, to make sense of the peculiar type of progress evolution promotes.

In their investigations, the researchers developed genetic algorithms, which they then put to work in a simulated evolutionary landscape. They determined that the algorithms always look for local minima, and not necessarily for instances that are the best possible solution to problems stemming from the landscape itself.

As such, one can never be sure that a certain state of affairs is the best possible solution to a situation, or if it sits just a short distance away from another, entirely-different approach to solving the same problem.

But enough theory. In practical terms, this means that life which evolved on Earth – with all its complexity – may be nothing more than a local minima in a very large ocean of evolutionary possibilities. The implication of this is that biologists may in fact be studying only a minute fraction of a much bigger whole.

This issue is the topic of a new research paper (.pdf) published in the online journal arXiv, by University of Illinois expert physicists Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese. In the study, the two argue that biologists should regard their field of research as a branch of condensed matter physics.

“Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited,” the authors write.

“As a result, the key issues of how rapidly evolution occurs, and its coupling to ecology have not been satisfactorily addressed and formulated,” they go on to say.

“The lack of widespread appreciation for, and understanding of, the evolutionary process has arguably retarded the development of biology as a science, with disastrous consequences for its applications to medicine, ecology and the global environment,” Goldenfeld and Woese believe.

As such, their research was conducted considering evolution to be a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, which is a new approach altogether, Technology Review reports.

“We discuss how condensed matter physics concepts might provide a useful perspective in evolutionary biology, the conceptual failings of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the open-ended growth of complexity, and the quintessentially self-referential nature of evolutionary dynamics,” they add.

In other words, the team believes that life – thought of as an emergent phenomenon – is more possible in systems that are far out of equilibrium. As such, the issues that need answers become finding the basic laws that govern these systems, as well as developing methods to conduct such studies.