Abstract
In evolutionary biology, attention to the relationship between stochastic organisms and their stochastic environments has leaned towards the adaptability and learning capabilities of the organisms rather than toward the properties of the environment. This article is devoted to the algorithmic aspects of the environment and its interaction with living organisms. We ask whether one may use the fact of the existence of life to establish how far nature is removed from algorithmic randomness. The paper uses a novel approach to behavioral evolutionary questions, using tools drawn from information theory, algorithmic complexity and the thermodynamics of computation to support an intuitive assumption about the near optimal structure of a physical environment that would prove conducive to the evolution and survival of organisms, and sketches the potential of these tools, at present alien to biology, that could be used in the future to address different and deeper questions. We contribute to the discussion of the algorithmic structure of natural environments and provide statistical and computational arguments for the intuitive claim that living systems would not be able to survive in completely unpredictable environments, even if adaptable and equipped with storage and learning capabilities by natural selection (brain memory or DNA).
Highlights
In evolutionary biology, attention to the relationship between stochastic organisms and their stochastic environments has leaned towards the adaptability and learning capabilities of the organisms rather than toward the properties of the environment
Physics is unrestricted in its domain; anything happening in the universe is always potentially a falsification of a physical theory, which is possibly not true for biology, but unlikely [1]
What Wolfram suggests—and this has its basis in [4]—is not too far afield of claims made by other pioneers such as Hopfield [3], viz., that the special features of biology as a field are apparent rather than actual, because rather than being accidental, biological phenomena are more likely subject to informational rather than physical laws
Summary
Chemical and physical laws are assumed valid anywhere in the universe while biology only describes terrestrial life (even exo- or astrobiology has only DNA-based terrestrial life for an example). In this sense, physics is unrestricted in its domain; anything happening in the universe is always potentially a falsification of a physical theory, which is possibly not true for biology, but unlikely [1]. Hopfield underscores the fact that there seems to be no particular reason to believe that biology is markedly different from physics, insofar as we understand physics as having laws If this is the case, information and computation may someday describe and provide laws for biological phenomena, just as they are already providing tools to help develop new physical models (e.g., theories of quantum gravity) [5]
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