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DISSIPATION AND ORGANIZATION. "Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process...Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

INANIMATE SELF-ORGANIZATION. "Under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

GRADUAL INTEGRATION. "The integration of new genes into gene-gene interaction networks is a gradual evolutionary process. The new genes started, at a young age, to be integrated into networks to form new and less connected branches; however, with the elapse of evolutionary time, as genes grow older, they acquired more interacting links." https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-015-0772-4 View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXIFICATION. "Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

FORBIDDEN SILENT MUTATIONS. "New genes arise when existing genes are duplicated, undergo "forbidden mutations" as silent DNA, and reemerge as new genes with new functions. While silent, a gene cannot be improved or even maintained by natural selection. To arrive at a substantially different nucleotide sequence, we would expect many mutations to be required. These mutations will randomize the original sequence of the gene and it will lose its original meaning." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

MORE INANIMATE LEAKS. "Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

NEW GENES tend to be born out of the toolkit of spare parts. We will now consider how this occurs and how it arose. This is the driver of diversity, adaptation and evolution itself. The heart of life as we know it is the ability to evolve information by reproduction, and that information is encoded in genes. View in LinkedIn

NON-LIVING LEAKING. "Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

THE SOLUTION. "It is surprising that mixing entropy and biology still fosters confusion. The relevant concepts from physics pertaining to the second law of thermodynamics are at least 100 years old. The confusion can be eradicated if we distinguish thermodynamic entropy from logical entropy, and admit that Earth's biological system is open to organizing input from outside." Fabulous summary of entropy issues. http://www.panspermia.org/seconlaw.htm View in LinkedIn

DRIVER OF TRANSITION. "This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well...It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn