I think it follows the same basic pattern as biological evolution: there is a semi-random process that introduces new forms, but when you see a preponderance of some particular form (or attribute) it's simply due to the fact it wasn't eliminated like competing forms/attributes were.
I think what's missing from my description though was an account of how the dissipative efficacy of the non-reversible formations compounds in time. I re-checked the article and it is IMO vague on the subject aside from saying that that does in fact happen. In any case here's a relevant quote by Jeremy England given in the article:
While any given change in shape for the system is mostly random, the most durable and irreversible of these shifts in configuration occur when the system happens to be momentarily better at absorbing and dissipating work. With the passage of time, the “memory” of these less erasable changes accumulates preferentially, and the system increasingly adopts shapes that resemble those in its history where dissipation occurred. Looking backward at the likely history of a product of this non-equilibrium process, the structure will appear to us like it has self-organized into a state that is “well adapted” to the environmental conditions. This is the phenomenon of dissipative adaptation.
Doesn't that just say roughly that "a new form that is more likely to persist in a given environment came from a previous form that was more likely to persist in that given environment"? That almost boils down the same thing as before. The persistence of life still seems entirely orthogonal to the odds of a self replicating life arising in the first place, right?
I once heard someone say something like "a molecule is 'biological' if it describes the environment [for its organism]." The key takeaway from my crude recollection of the quote is that "information" is a kind of master theory (which, tangentially, makes it a meaningless theory - the hypothesis "this event occurs because of information" is true 100% of the time).
Let's suppose for the purpose of a thought experiment that abiogenesis occurred because of specific conditions during or shortly after the Big Bang. Increasing entropy is the direction of the arrow of time, but there would be no such direction of time if the universe were at its theoretical maximum entropy, heat death - all would be indistinguishable. So, the Big Bang must have had lower entropy than the cosmological inflation that followed it, which was a stage of hot gas that was actually pretty much at maximum entropy for its volume. The entropy of the early universe only increased by increasing its volume into an open space.
But then..
- time moves in the direction of increased entropy..
- the universe started in a highly ordered state..
- ..so the uniform ball of gas became highly varied as a result of time-symmetric physical processes..?
- ..so whatever non-symmetric, entropy-increasing process made the differentiation of regions of the universe likely would also gave rise to an astonishingly rare process that appears to achieve local entropy decrease by dissipating it into its surroundings?
The chance anything as intricate as life (or any type of 'information', really) would result from total uniformity is perplexing. Let alone that biology can't exist if environments were not yet a part of nature, and environments only came to exist as result of universal spontaneous symmetry breaking.. For all we know, the laws of physics were themselves also subject to cosmological natural selection before or near the Big Bang [1]. The laws we know now would just be the ones that lasted - maybe because the others underwent some kind of self-annihilation, or maybe because the 'successful' laws we know now in some way reconstituted the cosmos, so that the others were no longer propagable and vanished. Apparently wave function collapse is a time-irreversible process, though it happens because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics rather than causing it.
So, what if self-replicating life seems transcendental because of our assumptions about the distribution from which the parameters that we call "the laws of physics" come from?
In my opinion, we typically assume the laws of physics come from a stationary ergodic process, which means
- the properties of the probability distribution of the process generating the laws of physics don't change over time
- the process producing the laws of physics is ergodic, roughly meaning there'd be no disagreement between a time-averaged (from before the big bang up to now) estimate of physical law from an individual observer/experiment/sensor, and a group-averaged estimate of observers/experiments/sensors at one particular time
I have no real knowledge of wave function collapse, but time-irreversibility, I assume, would imply non-ergodicity. There are various types of non-ergodicity, though. I guess I also could have eliminated much of what I've written by just relying upon the 2nd law of thermo already being suggestive of non-ergodicity.
All that said when you place a bet on a small probability event, every source (e.g. cosmological natural selection) of higher-order uncertainty (your uncertainty about your uncertainty, ... etc.)) tends to increase the payoff of the bet [2]. Not because the uncertainty causes the event to happen more or changes the bet's reward, but because the observed probability in the past is less likely to overestimate something in the future that is rare, than it is likely to underestimate it. And the more unclear the relationship between past factors and future sources of uncertainty, the less underestimated the future event. So to consider sources of higher-order uncertainty that predate abiogenesis is crucial to correcting estimates of life's prevalence at all.
I think what's missing from my description though was an account of how the dissipative efficacy of the non-reversible formations compounds in time. I re-checked the article and it is IMO vague on the subject aside from saying that that does in fact happen. In any case here's a relevant quote by Jeremy England given in the article:
While any given change in shape for the system is mostly random, the most durable and irreversible of these shifts in configuration occur when the system happens to be momentarily better at absorbing and dissipating work. With the passage of time, the “memory” of these less erasable changes accumulates preferentially, and the system increasingly adopts shapes that resemble those in its history where dissipation occurred. Looking backward at the likely history of a product of this non-equilibrium process, the structure will appear to us like it has self-organized into a state that is “well adapted” to the environmental conditions. This is the phenomenon of dissipative adaptation.