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Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex
A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.
In these jumps, Wong pictures the evolving objects as accessing an entirely new landscape of possibilities and ways to become organized, as if penetrating to the “next floor up.” Crucially, what matters — the criteria for selection, on which continued evolution depends — also changes, plotting a wholly novel course. Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. Hazen thinks that in fact once complex cognition is added to the mix — once the components of the system can reason, choose, and run experiments “in their heads” — the potential for macro-micro feedback and open-ended growth is even greater.
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