A group of scientists and philosophers believes Charles Darwin’s 19th-century theory of evolution is just a special case within a far more universal principle — one that governs not only life, but also minerals, planets, and even stars. Get ready for a lively debate.
What if evolution didn’t stop with living things? That’s the bold claim of nine researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science, whose new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 16, 2023) proposes a sweeping framework for how complexity itself evolves across the universe.
Their idea centers on what they call the “law of increasing functional information.” It suggests that every complex natural system — from atoms and minerals to planets and biological life — naturally evolves toward states that are more structured, more diverse, and more intricate over time.
Life, atoms, and stars
So, what does that really mean? Before looking at examples, it’s key to understand how the authors define “evolution.” In this context, it means “selection for function.”
While Darwin saw function mainly in terms of survival — an organism’s ability to live long enough to reproduce — the team expands the idea to include “stability” (the ability to persist) and “novelty” (the emergence of new patterns or configurations).
To show how novelty evolves, the paper points to examples ranging from biology to geology: photosynthesis, multicellular life (when cells began working together as one organism), and even complex animal behaviors. The same principle applies to the mineral world.
When our solar system formed, Earth’s minerals numbered only about twenty. Today, there are nearly 6,000. Likewise, after the Big Bang, the universe began with just hydrogen and helium. From these two simple elements, the first stars forged roughly twenty heavier ones — the seeds from which later generations of stars produced nearly a hundred more.
“Evolution is everywhere”
“Charles Darwin described beautifully how plants and animals evolve through natural selection, producing countless variations among individuals,” said Professor Robert M. Hazen of Carnegie, who led the study. “We argue that Darwin’s theory represents one very special, though crucial, example of a much broader natural phenomenon.”
His coauthor, astrobiologist Michael L. Wong, added: “The universe constantly generates new combinations of atoms, molecules, and cells. The ones that are stable and capable of generating even more novelty will continue to evolve.”
“That’s why life stands out as evolution’s most dramatic expression — but evolution is truly everywhere.”
This proposed “law of nature,” which describes the steady rise of complexity, echoes another well-known principle: the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy — or disorder — in a closed system always increases over time. It’s the reason heat naturally flows from warmer objects to cooler ones.
A new debate begins
Forces, motion, gravity, electromagnetism, energy — most of the classic “laws of nature” were formulated more than 150 years ago.
Now, this new idea — shaped by a team of philosophers, astrobiologists, a data scientist, a mineralogist, and a theoretical physicist — is certain to spark discussion throughout the scientific world.
“At this stage, much like the early efforts to define ‘energy’ and ‘entropy’ in the 19th century, we need open and wide-ranging dialogue,” said Stuart Kauffman of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.
It’s also a reminder that a theory only becomes scientific when it produces testable predictions — results precise enough to be verified or disproved through observation and experiment.
