Life is Physics: Evolution as a Collective Phenomenon Far From Equilibrium
By N. Goldenfeld, Carl R. Woese. 2010
261 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 nonequilibrium 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.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bc6310ce72680e049f872127269ed4b3cbd5e3e
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Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium: Criticality and dynamical scaling in living systems (2017, background): “…strategy consists in looking at complex biological problems from a global perspective, shifting the focus from specific details of the molecular machinery to integral aspects (Alon, 2006; Bialek, 2012; Goldenfeld and Woese, 2011; Hartwell et al., 1999; Kaneko, 2006; Sauer et al., 2007).”
- Statistical mechanics of ecological systems: Neutral theory and beyond (2015, background): “Statistical physics is contributing decisively to our understanding of biological and ecological systems by providing powerful theoretical tools and innovative steps [56, 57] to understand empirical data about emerging patterns of biodiversity.”
- The problem of pattern and scale in ecology: what have we learned in 20 years? (2013, background): “Goldenfeld & Woese (2011) recently developed the view that physics has not been much luckier than biology in grappling with the study of complex systems, a study that biology was faced to at the outset.”