Let there be life

The laws of thermodynamics are often brought up in discussions about evolution, usually to try and refute the idea that life could arise spontaneously.

Researchers today are finding out that these laws when applied to systems that are exposed to an external energy source, spontaneously increase in complexity.

The following is a small section taken from a post in Quanta Magazine written by Natalie Wolchover

Link to her post
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

“We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there."
Jeremy England is a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, who has worked on the underlying physics that is driving the origin and evolution of life.

Interested readers my like to read a bit more from this article.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.