Law of Increasing Functional Information
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Not only do living things evolve, but many natural systems evolve to be more functional.
Essentially, you can use the rough equivalent of biological evolutionary concepts (though the authors wish you wouldn’t) to describe the tendency of certain systems towards evolving more functionality.
These system require many interacting pieces, generating many configurations, and some of the configurations are more stable or more functional than other configurations. Essentially, Darwinism for non living things.
The example they give is how stars start by burning hydrogen, which ends up creating helium, which then burns the helium, which helps create carbon, and this process continues until the star creates and burns the entire periodic table of elements. Basically, the star is creating functionality.
The nature of the proposed law is that the universe tends towards more functionality under certain conditions.
The conditions they identify are: static persistence (stuff stays in the configuration for a while rather than breaking down quickly), dynamic persistence (the system actively recreates configurations), and novelty generation (the system creates new functions).
The easiest way to understand all of this is that biological evolution is only one example of a larger law: that certain systems tend towards more functionality. Or to flip it around, even non living systems can evolve similar to biological evolution.
The simple, real world example I Iike to use when talking about this: throw some headphone cables into a bag and shake it. What happens? The cables become more tangled and rarely become less tangled. Why is that?
Personal commentary: If this law is true… That means that life is really not that special, it’s just one form of many systems of evolving functionality.
Random comment: When I was getting my degree in Computer Science, there was a small field of research called “Artificial Life.” The idea was to create computer systems that created more functionality by themselves. The most famous was “Conway’s Game of Life” where simple board game rules would take random grid configurations and tend towards complex functions. It would be fascinating to be studying Aritificial Life again under the ideas of this new proposed law!
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