Seeing Emergent Physics Behind Evolution — Interview with Nigel Goldenfeld

Quanta Magazine recently spoke with Goldenfeld about collective phenomena, expanding the Modern Synthesis model of evolution, and using quantitative and theoretical tools from physics to gain insights into mysteries surrounding early life on Earth and the interactions between cyanobacteria and predatory viruses. A condensed and edited version of that conversation follows.

Quanta Magazine
Seeing Emergent Physics Behind Evolution
Interview with Nigel Goldenfeld, Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute for Universal Biology at UIUC, and head of the Biocomplexity Group at the University's Institute for Genomic Biology

Natalie Wolchover — First Support for a Physics Theory of Life

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”...

Quanta
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life
Natalie Wolchover | Senior Writer