Life is physics: evolution as a collective phenomenon far from equilibrium
arXiv:1011.4125 · doi:10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-062910-140509
Abstract
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly evolution occurs, and its coupling to ecology have not been satisfactorily addressed and formulated. The lack of widespread appreciation for, and understanding of, the evolutionary process has arguably retarded the development of biology as a science, with disastrous consequences for its applications to medicine, ecology and the global environment. This review focuses on evolution as a problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, where the key dynamical modes are collective, as evidenced by the plethora of mobile genetic elements whose role in shaping evolution has been revealed by modern genomic surveys. We discuss how condensed matter physics concepts might provide a useful perspective in evolutionary biology, the conceptual failings of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the open-ended growth of complexity, and the quintessentially self-referential nature of evolutionary dynamics.
To appear in Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics (2011)
References in corpus (7)
- Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
- Gene surfing
- Biology's next revolution
- Rapid contemporary evolution and clonal food web dynamics
- Spontaneous Emergence of Modularity in a Model of Evolving Individuals and in Real Networks
- Cascade of Complexity in Evolving Predator-Prey Dynamics
- Einstein and the Early Theory of Superconductivity, 1919-1922
Cited by in corpus (40)
- Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems
- An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and its Applications
- The Algorithmic Origins of Life
- Statistical Mechanics of Ecological Systems: Neutral Theory and Beyond
- The compositional and evolutionary logic of metabolism
- Exoplanet Biosignatures: Future Directions
- Genotype to phenotype mapping and the fitness landscape of the E. coli lac promoter
- Tuning environmental timescales to evolve and maintain generalists
- Antipolar ordering of topological defects in active liquid crystals
- Large-deviation principles, stochastic effective actions, path entropies, and the structure and meaning of thermodynamic descriptions
- Physical constraints on the likelihood of life on exoplanets
- Genome Sizes and the Benford Distribution
- Evolving generalists via dynamic sculpting of rugged landscapes
- Subsurface Exolife
- Methods for scoring the collective effect of SNPs: Minor alleles of common SNPs quantitatively affect traits/diseases and are under both positive and negative selection
- Towards physical principles of biological evolution
- Nanoscale correlated disorder in out-of-equilibrium myelin ultrastructure
- Path integral calculation for emergence of rapid evolution from demographic stochasticity
- Learning developmental mode dynamics from single-cell trajectories
- The Sznajd model with limited persuasion: competition between high-reputation and hesitant agents
- Spatial Dispersal of Bacterial Colonies Induces a Dynamical Transition From Local to Global Quorum Sensing
- Dynamical mean-field theory: from ecosystems to reaction networks
- Statistical Mechanics of Horizontal Gene Transfer in Evolutionary Ecology
- Self-referencing cellular automata: A model of the evolution of information control in biological systems
- Rock-paper-scissors played within competing domains in predator-prey games
- Universal constraints on selection strength in lineage trees
- Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics
- Delays in fitness adjustment can lead to coexistence of hierarchically interacting species
- Fate of Duplicated Neural Structures
- Physical foundations of biological complexity
- Correlated disorder in myelinated axons orientational geometry and structure
- Social Evolution: New Horizons
- Dynamics of one-dimensional spin models under the line-graph operator
- Non Equilibrium Transitions in a Polymer Replication Ensemble
- The Universal Evolution and the Origin of LIfe
- Information theory, predictability, and the emergence of complex life
- Evolutionary Innovations and Where to Find Them: Routes to Open-Ended Evolution in Natural and Artificial Systems
- A comparison between the quasi-species evolution and stochastic quantization of fields
- Patterns that persist: Heritable information in stochastic dynamics
- Modular knowledge systems accelerate human migration in asymmetric random environments