Scientists unveil ‘missing’ law of nature in landmark discovery (Harriet Brewis,
In a paper published in the PNAS journal on 16 October, a multidisciplinary team from some of the US’s top institutes and universities, unveiled a new law claiming to do just that.
In a nutshell, their law states that evolution is not limited to life on Earth, it also occurs in other massively complex systems – from planets to atoms.
This means that these systems naturally “evolve” to states of greater diversity, and complexity.In other words, the researchers found evolution to be a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems which, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science, comprise the following characteristics:
“They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly.”
They are subject to “natural processes that cause countless different configurations to be formed.”
And only a small fraction of these configurations survive via a process of natural selection called “selection for function”.
According to the researchers, regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a new configuration works and function improves, evolution occurs.
Shorter nutshell: stuff that works works.