Book Reviewed: A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life by Stuart A. Kauffman

The Cosmic Song: Life, matter, energy, order and non-equilibrium thermodynamics

How did matter (non-life), a non-machine-like existence turned into a living cell (life) 3.8 billion years ago? Living cells are "machines" that construct and assemble their own working parts. The emergence of such systems, the origin of life was due to spontaneous phase transition that allowed self-organization in complex prebiotic systems. The protocells were capable of Darwin's heritable variation, hence open-ended evolution by natural selection. Evolution propagates this organization. Evolving living creatures, by existing, create new niches into which yet further new creatures can emerge. Biological evolution is un-predictable, and it has its own growing and subtends to economically possible solutions it is presented with by nature. In this respect living cell operates like the economic web, which is also un-predictable but grows with economic opportunities. There are parallels between biological evolution and evolution of the economy. There are no mathematical models for a predictable evolution, and reductionism which is at the heart of modern science fails to explain the “wholeness” of structure and organization of a biological cell that no one can build. It turns out that life’ is not an objective property of creation, but it’s a very special case made on this planet!

Economics creates our world; it creates wealth, technology and our way of living. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico where the author is affiliated with have been pursuing a revolution in science and economics. Ignoring the boundaries of disciplines, they are searching for novel fundamental ideas, theories, and practices that integrates a full range of scientific inquiries that will help us understand the complexities of reality. Much of the order and self-building of living cells are being understood by non-equilibrium thermodynamics and negentropy (also referred by terms such as negative entropy or anti-entropy) and phase transitions in early pre-biotic systems rich with a wide varieties of biomolecules.

This is a small book of only 168 pages that reads quickly. It is well described and easy to follow. However, the author proposes that we need new physics to explain the oddities of a living cell: This may be far-fetched!