Statistical Physics of Adaptation

Abstract

All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural selection, whereby maladapted individuals do not pass their traits effectively to future generations. However, we may also consider the phenomenon of adaptation from the standpoint of physics, and ask whether it is possible to delineate what the difference is in terms of physical properties between something that is well-adapted to its surrounding environment, and something that is not. In this work, we undertake to address this question from a theoretical standpoint. Building on past fundamental results in far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics, we demonstrate a generalization of the Helmholtz free energy for the finite-time stochastic evolution of driven Newtonian matter. By analyzing this expression term by term, we are able to argue for a general tendency in driven many-particle systems towards self-organization into states formed through exceptionally reliable absorption and dissipation of work energy from the surrounding environment. Subsequently, we illustrate the mechanism of this general tendency towards physical adaptation by analyzing the process of random hopping in driven energy landscapes.

23 preprint pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Spontaneous motion in hierarchically assembled active matter
• Thermodynamic uncertainty relation for biomolecular processes
• Statistical Physics of Self-Replication
• Rare events and the convergence of exponentially averaged work values
• The thermodynamics of prediction
• Inequalities generalizing the second law of thermodynamics for transitions between non-stationary states

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• Theory of nonequilibrium free energy transduction by molecular machines
• Negative differential response in chemical reactions
• Thermodynamic uncertainty relation of interacting oscillators in synchrony
• Design of conditions for emergence of self-replicators
• Intrinsic and extrinsic thermodynamics for stochastic population processes with multi-level large-deviation structure
• Self-replication of a quantum artificial organism driven by single-photon pulses
• Drive-specific adaptation in disordered mechanical networks of bistable springs
• Non-equilibrium time dynamics of genetic evolution
• Jarzyski's equality and Crooks' fluctuation theorem for general Markov chains with application to decision-making systems
• Fluctuation theorems with optical tweezers: theory and practice
• Steering Active-Colloid Assembly by Biasing Dissipation
• The Emergence of Cognition and Computation: A Physicalistic Perspective