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Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

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Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#281

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

johngossman wrote: post #171
lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

Stephen Gould wrote a whole book disputing this idea that the complexity of life increases: "Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin." The basic argument is that almost all life on Earth is still prokaryotic...the rest of us are just a rounding error. He wrote several books about how evolution was not directional, notably "Wonderful Life" and "Time's Arrow". I'm not completely convinced by any of th…

Effectively, we've been out-competed in all the low complexity niche; life adds complexity to take advantage of novel niche where there is less competition.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#282

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #277
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.

Then energy is relative? An object is 'stationary' in space, a comet comes along and hits it. The comet has energy. OR the comet is just sitting there, 'stationary', the object hits it. Not the object has energy. There's no total energy to a system, except calculated from some point of view?

energy is a term we use that describes the probability for some unit of matter to be in a different state at time T' than it was at time T.

if you consider the state to include position - relative to a frame of view - then energy describes (at least in part) the likelihood that the position at time T' is different than at time T

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#284

Post by [deleted] »

lachlan_gray wrote: post #79

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring,…

[deleted]

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#285

Post by [deleted] »

mjburgess wrote: post #3

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

[deleted]

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#288

Post by dvt »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #207
dvt wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Existence is a property of consciousness. Kant would vehemently disagree. Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points. So I think there's a lot of work here that needs to be done to make your argument stronger.

> Not that I'm a Kantian, but he makes some pretty good points It is even debatable what points he really made. As always in philosophy.

I'd say that existence not being a predicate of any object is kind of non-debatable :)

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#289

Post by jmcqk6 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274
jmcqk6 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current intuition goes something like this: Energy MUST flow. No matter how energy is captured and stored, there is a pressure for it to continue moving. The movement of energy means that matter is always moving, and new configurations are always being "discovered." Some configurations allow for energy to flow more easily, and when one of those configurations is "discovered" the movement of energy keeps that confi…

Tweak your intuition: energy IS motion. When things are not moving, there is no energy. When there is energy, things are moving.

How would you describe a rock sitting on the top of a mountain? It is not moving relative to the matter around it, but it certainly contains quite a bit of energy, in a variety of different forms.

I am trying to recognize that even in that rock, energy is dissipating in multiple ways, and any number of different events can lead to it dissipating in different ways.

I suppose you can say that the individual atoms composing the rock are moving, but are those movements connected to the potential energy it has by virtue of being far from the relative minimum in a gravity well?

That rock could fall down the mountain mostly intact - a highly energetic event, compared to being eroded away chemically by rain over millennia.

Re: Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

#290

Post by IggleSniggle »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #182
gfodor wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.

Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation. Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening. BTW lots of other logical mistakes.

It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention
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