A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life

Book Preface

Classical physics, our gift from Newton, is our world written in
the passive voice: rivers flow, rocks fall, planets orbit, stars arc in
the space-time deformed by their masses. There are no doings,
only happenings: myriad, miraculous, but brute.
I broach 78 years as I sit to write, having angled to the kitchen
to pick out a nectarine to eat. Yesterday, I clambered aboard the
“Poised Realm,” my 22-foot boat, to skiff across to the Crane
Dock on Orcas Island to drive to Eastsound, Washington, to buy
the nectarine I just retrieved as an afternoon snack. My heart
thumps a bit, my own human heart. Most of my readers have a
human heart as well.
Just where did my human heart, the nectarine, my kitchen,
the boat, and Eastsound come from since the brute happening of
the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago?
Since Newton, we have turned to physics to assess reality: what is REAL. But physics will not tell us whence we come,
how arrived, why the human heart exists, nor why I can buy
nectarines in Eastsound, let alone what “buying” is.

We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we
know and more to say than we can say.
We are in a world beyond physics.
We are in a world of living creatures that construct themselves. Yet we lack the concepts to say it. A tree, from a seed,
builds itself, launches itself upward toward the sun. We see it
and do not yet know what to say. A forest builds itself, rooted,
branched, quiet, as if longing. Our biosphere too grows in diversity into what it can become and has done so for some 3.7 billion
years. A giraffe? Who knew three billion years ago? None could
have known. And nectarines: Who could then have said?
We estimate that 50 to 90 percent of the 10 to the power
of 22 (1022) stars in the known universe have planets cycling
them. If, as I believe and will say, life is abundant, the universe
is rife with becoming, based on physics but beyond any physics
we know.
The concept of perhaps 1022 biospheres staggers me. Yes, we
thrill at Hubble’s image of billions of galaxies, some 1011 of them.
But are there 1022 biospheres, ebullient like ours? Not “a world
beyond physics,” but “worlds beyond physics,” as vast as the vastness of the physics we know, almost unknowable.
We miss in our science the idea of a system that constructs
itself. I will introduce the requisite concept due to Maël Montévil
and Mateo Mossio (2015) called “Constraint Closure”. These
young scientists have found a, or maybe “the,” missing concept
of biological organization. We will grow to understand it clearly
and build on it. The ideas are a tiny bit complex, but not very. We
will get to them. But for now we can think of constraint closure
like this: it is a set of both constraints on the release of energy
in non-equilibrium processes, and those processes, such that the
system constructs its own constraints. This is an amazing idea.
Cells do this, automobiles do not.

Living systems achieve this constraint closure and do what
are called “thermodynamic work cycles” by which they can reproduce themselves. Living systems also exhibit Darwin’s heritable
variation, so can undergo his natural selection, hence evolve. I’ve
written about that in some of my earlier books. But I was nagged
by a feeling that there was something missing. With constraint
closure a crucial puzzle piece is put into place.
But what evolves cannot be said ahead of time: what evolves
emerges unprestatably—I know of no better word—and builds
our biosphere of increasing complexity. We are its children: as are
giraffes, nectarines, and sea cucumber.
Some years ago, at his 70th birthday fest, a physicist friend of
mine smiled at the way biologists see the world. Were biologists
with Galileo on the tower of Pisa, they would have dropped red
stones, orange stones, pink stones, blue stones, green stones,
and so on.
My physicist colleagues chuckled knowingly. Physicists seek
to simplify to find laws, biologists to study how life became complex. So of course, the red stones were giraffes; the orange stones
nectarines; the blue stones sea cucumbers; and the green stones,
well, just us. The question is not whether the sea cucumber, giraffe, us, or the nectarine falls faster, but where did they come
from in the very first place?
Physics won’t say. No one knows.
There is a world beyond physics.
Darwin taught that new species drive wedges into the crowded
floor of nature to make room for their own existence: yes, but
no. Creatures, by existing, create the very conditions for other
creatures to come into existence. Species constitute the very
cracks in the floor of nature that constitute the niches for yet
new species to come into existence, creating yet more cracks for
still more species to spring forth.