Life Emerges from the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one. From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constr...

 Progress of Science in the Eighth Epoch

The march of the sciences is rapid and brilliant. The Algebraic language becomes generalized, simplified and perfected, or rather it is now only that it was truly formed. The first foundations of the general theory of equations are laid, the nature of the solutions which they give is ascertained, and those of the third and fourth degree are resolved. The ingenious invention of logarithms, as abridging the operations of arithmetic, facilitates the application of calculation to the various obj...

 Ignoring Inconvenient Truths In Astronomy

Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at 9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, perhaps built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support ...

 Campbell's Rule of Design Through Evolution

We should think of it like this - evolutionary theory describes how design is created by the competition between replicators. Genes are one example of a replicator and memes another. The general theory of evolution must apply to both of them, but the specific details of how each replicator works may be quite different. This relationship was clearly seen by the the American psychologist Donald Campbell (1960, 1965) long before the idea of memes was invented. He argued that organic evolution, ...