论文标题

生物学:诞生一门新科学

Biocosmology: Towards the birth of a new science

论文作者

Cortês, Marina, Kauffman, Stuart A., Liddle, Andrew R., Smolin, Lee

论文摘要

宇宙学家希望解释我们的宇宙在其复杂性上如何产生。为此,我们现在评估宇宙中的状态数量。这在宇宙的热力学中起着熵的作用,并揭示了要解决的初始条件问题的大小。通常的预算是重力,热动作,最后是真空能量,其熵由Bekenstein Bound给出,占主导地位的熵预算。但是,我们尚未考虑一个数字:复杂生物圈中的状态数量。生活的熵是什么,它足够大,需要在大爆炸中考虑到?在理论生物学中的新兴思想的基础上,我们表明,与其基本物理学的配置空间不同,其基本物理学的配置空间可以迅速增长,以响应新兴的生物学复杂性。通过相邻可能的理论(TAP)及其相应的TAP方程来提供这种扩展的模型,我们调查了其解决方案,证实了快速状态速度增长的可能性。尽管这项工作的结果尚未牢固确立,但我们提供的证据却是多种且强大的。这些含义是深远的,并为未来的研究开放了各种线条,这是一个新的科学领域,我们称为生物学。特别是,生活中的信息内容与宇宙中的信息内容之间的关系可能需要从头开始重建。

Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals the magnitude of the problem of initial conditions to be solved. The usual budgeting accounts for gravity, thermal motions, and finally the vacuum energy whose entropy, given by the Bekenstein bound, dominates the entropy budget today. There is however one number which we have not accounted for: the number of states in our complex biosphere. What is the entropy of life and is it sizeable enough to need to be accounted for at the Big Bang? Building on emerging ideas within theoretical biology, we show that the configuration space of living systems, unlike that of their fundamental physics counterparts, can grow rapidly in response to emerging biological complexity. A model for this expansion is provided through combinatorial innovation by the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP) and its corresponding TAP equation, whose solutions we investigate, confirming the possibility of rapid state-pace growth. While the results of this work remain far from being firmly established, the evidence we provide is many-fold and strong. The implications are far-reaching, and open a variety of lines for future investigation, a new scientific field we term biocosmology. In particular the relationship between the information content in life and the information content in the Universe may need to be rebuilt from scratch.

扫码加入交流群

加入微信交流群

微信交流群二维码

扫码加入学术交流群,获取更多资源