Addy Pross
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Addy Pross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And the direction is very simple as that simple differential equation that I described earlier states. Systems go from less persistent to more persistent. But something here also has to be stated because it confuses biologists a lot and it troubled me initially. If I'm saying there's this tendency towards greater complexity, why are bacteria still around? Because they're simple.
So that seems to counter the complexification argument. The answer is bacteria aren't simple at all. They live in in networks, they don't live individually and all life is increasingly an interconnected network where all the living things are interacting with one another Your microbiome lives very comfortably off you. So it's wrong to think of bacteria as an individual as simple.
But life is a complex network, and it's complexifying all the time. And that's why life has basically taken over the planet. It's everywhere in this very intricate network. And it goes back to the Gaia ideas of, who was it, Lovelock? Lovelock, yeah. It's very interesting that now biologists are starting to say, hey, you know what?
Maybe modern biologists recently are starting to say maybe he was onto something and one should view life as almost… I don't want to say one system, but there is something in that idea that it's a dynamic system where everything is connected to everything else.
Look, there's no question that the power behind life expanding as it has is the power of replication. If you take one single fertilized egg, a human fertilized egg, it undergoes something like 40 to 45 acts of replication to become something like 50 or 70 trillion cells. I mean, the kinetic power of replication is awesome.
But of course, as Malthus pointed out some years ago, you can't keep doing that. You run out of resources. So what happens is the best you can hope for, and this is where we are all the time, a balance. You have rate of formation balanced by a rate of decay, and these have to be balanced. attuned to one another.
So flies replicate at a rate that requires them to live for one day because that's when the balance comes about. Humans, it's close to 100 years for that balance to be maintained, though I'm beginning to worry about that because we've become, you know, We're starting to edge towards that 9 billion or whatever.
But maybe that'll... Because once you... Nature, once replication forgets about that Malthusian rule, nature is very cruel. Nature doesn't forgive. And it comes back one way or another back to equilibrium, either kindly or unkindly.
Yeah. Well, I owe a lot of credit to a young guy, Steve Grant, who wrote a wonderful book in the year 2000, Creation, where he said a statement that I saw was barely acknowledged in the literature. He said, the most important law of nature. That's quite an introduction to a law that you want to propose.
And his most important law of nature was things that persist persist and things that don't don't. So he was claiming that a tautology was the most important law of nature. Well, I think that can be improved a little bit, taken away from being a tautology and changed to there's a general tendency for things to go from less persistent to more persistent.
And the second law of thermodynamics fits into that category, but the persistence principle is wider than the second law because the second law is restricted to energetically stable whereas the kinetically the kinetic systems expand the space to kinetically stable, persistent systems that aren't energetically stable.
So there it is, you can have stability of this dynamic kind, and that's part of nature as well. So in that sense, life isn't a totally unexpected phenomenon, because you can see that now in this new thermodynamic or kinetic perspective, the only thing one has to realize is that it seems that the ability for this to get going is highly contingent.
So if you're going to ask me, are we gonna have life in every other planet in some form or other, the answer is I don't know, because the high contingency means the probability that it will happen, that the circumstances will allow Naturally, for a dynamic kinetically stable system to emerge and for it then to become replicative so that it can evolve and expand, I am at a loss.
I do not know the likelihood of that, except that it did happen once. Happened once, right.
Absolutely, because every cell in your body is a DKS system because the cell is a dynamic kinetic system where all the molecules in the cell are continually turning over. Your body is a DKS system because your cells are turning over, some faster than others. Apparently, brain cells turn over more slowly. Skin cells, blood cells, you're shedding millions, billions of these daily.
So it's a dynamic system at many levels. So it's at the molecular level it's happening, at the cellular level, at the organismal level, and of course at the societal level. So, you know, in 100 years' time all the people roaming the earth will be different people to us.
Oh, well, maybe. Look, biology has been in a situation of ongoing crisis, developing crisis for several decades. The genomic paradigm has been very powerful and very useful, but it hasn't been able to answer certain things. And the way biology has gotten around that is by band-aids.
Well, you know, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, continually looking for ways to maintain the fundamental idea that – which is genome-centric. And that is the essence of neo-Darwinian theory. But together with actually a bunch of some 20 very serious biologists, we put out a monograph just a year ago with the title Evolution on Purpose. So, you know…
Biologists have been realizing for quite a while that this purpose, wherever we look, and that doesn't fit in with the physical perspective that biology was trying to push onto itself to kind of be respected by physicists. They want physicists to look at them respectfully. So they were saying random mutation, natural selection, all physically logical. But It's simply not the case.
And what happens is you cannot replace an old paradigm with a new one The paradigm doesn't change through failures in the old paradigm, because what happens when the paradigm starts to not work, you add band-aids. What you need is a new paradigm that will encompass the new information, and that has been slow to come about.
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