quote:Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.
quote:... dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.
I like it! Nice turn of phrase that is. Didn't read or even take a gander at the papers linked to in the article, but if he has the maths to describe these long held fuzzy ideas then I would say he has cut a path a bit deeper into the unknown.
I'm pretty sure that I've seen something similar a few years back.
I've been looking for it for a big portion of the day but I also remember reading where some folks were saying some years ago that because of the resources, thermodynamics and time involved on the early earth the development of some flavor or other of life was pretty much inevitable. Apparently, the young Dr. England has taken the concept further into a model that can now be tested and refined.