Related papers: Why did life emerge?
Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…
Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Every production-recycling iteration accumulates an inevitable proportion of its matter-energy in the environment, lest the production process itself would be a system in perpetual motion, violating the second law of Thermodynamics. Such…
Using information theory we derive a thermodynamics for systems evolving under a collective motion, i.e. under a time-odd constraint. An illustration within the Lattice gas Model is given for two model cases: a collision between two complex…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
Trailing the modern ideas of sociophysics, a minimalistic thermodynamic model of society is proposed, which consists of three social ingredients: people, economy, and entropy. Employing the universal van der Waals equation of state, many…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
Exact law of mortality dynamics in changing populations and environment is derived. The law is universal for all species, from single cell yeast to humans. It includes no characteristics of animal- environment interactions (metabolism etc)…
Life occurs in concentrated `Ringer Solutions' derived from seawater that Lesser Blum studied for most of his life. As we worked together, Lesser and I realized that the questions asked of those solutions were quite different in biology…
The microscopic explanation of entropy has been challenged from both experimental and theoretical point of view. The expression of entropy is derived from the first law of thermodynamics indicating that entropy or the second law of…
In this work we focus on the thermodynamics consistency of a new set of solutions emerging from a cosmology in which dark matter is able to decay into relativistic particles within the dark sector. It is important to stress that the…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
The well-defined but intricate course of time evolution exhibited by many naturally occurring phenomena suggests some source of dynamic order sustaining it. In spite of its obviousness as a problem, it has remained absent from the…
Living systems are maintained out-of-equilibrium by external driving forces. At stationarity, they exhibit emergent selection phenomena that break equilibrium symmetries and originate from the expansion of the accessible chemical space due…
Biological systems perform an astonishing array of dynamical processes -- including development and repair, regulation, behavior and motor control, sensing and signaling, and adaptation, among others. Powered by the transduction of stored…
The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall origin of life model gives new explanations for the emergence of the genetic code and the…