[Paper Review] Biocosmology: Towards the birth of a new science

Marina Cortês, Stuart Kauffman+2 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Apr 20, 2022

Earth Systems and Cosmic EvolutionEarth and Planetary Sciences19 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes biocosmology—a new interdisciplinary science linking cosmology and biology—by arguing that the biosphere's configurational complexity may dominate the Universe's information content. Using the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP), it models explosive growth in biological state space through combinatorial innovation, suggesting life could generate more information than fundamental physics, challenging reductionist views of cosmic initial conditions.

ABSTRACT

Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals the magnitude of the problem of initial conditions to be solved. The usual budgeting accounts for gravity, thermal motions, and finally the vacuum energy whose entropy, given by the Bekenstein bound, dominates the entropy budget today. There is however one number which we have not accounted for: the number of states in our complex biosphere. What is the entropy of life and is it sizeable enough to need to be accounted for at the Big Bang? Building on emerging ideas within theoretical biology, we show that the configuration space of living systems, unlike that of their fundamental physics counterparts, can grow rapidly in response to emerging biological complexity. A model for this expansion is provided through combinatorial innovation by the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP) and its corresponding TAP equation, whose solutions we investigate, confirming the possibility of rapid state-pace growth. While the results of this work remain far from being firmly established, the evidence we provide is many-fold and strong. The implications are far-reaching, and open a variety of lines for future investigation, a new scientific field we term biocosmology. In particular the relationship between the information content in life and the information content in the Universe may need to be rebuilt from scratch.

Motivation & Objective

• To reassess the role of biological systems in the cosmic information budget, challenging the assumption that fundamental physics dominates entropy and information content.
• To investigate whether emergent biological complexity can generate a state space large enough to rival or exceed gravitational and vacuum contributions to the Universe's entropy.
• To explore the implications of non-reductionist, emergent complexity in biology for cosmological initial conditions and the origin of cosmic information.
• To develop a theoretical framework—based on the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP)—to model the explosive growth of biological configuration space.
• To question whether the Newtonian paradigm, which assumes all information is present at the Big Bang, can account for the emergence of life and its information-rich states.

Proposed method

• Adapts the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP) to model combinatorial innovation in biological systems, where new configurations emerge from existing ones.
• Uses the TAP equation to describe the rate of growth in the number of possible biological states, allowing for super-combinatorial expansion beyond standard permutational counting.
• Applies the TAP model to hierarchical biological systems, such as cells and multi-cellular biospheres, to estimate their configurational state space.
• Compares the resulting state space growth to traditional entropy estimates from black holes and vacuum energy, using the Bekenstein bound as a benchmark.
• Introduces the concept of 'creative potential' (Q), distinguishing between Newtonian physics (Q^NP = 1) and evolving-law frameworks (Q^EL ≫ 1), where new information is created over time.
• Emphasizes that biological information is not just encoded in genomes but in sustainable ecosystems capable of repeated innovation and replication.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Can the configuration space of biological systems grow rapidly enough to make a dominant contribution to the Universe's total information content?
• RQ2 To what extent does the emergence of complex biological systems challenge the reductionist view that all information in the Universe was present at the Big Bang?
• RQ3 How does the TAP equation model the explosive growth of biological state space, and can it outpace traditional permutational counting in physics?
• RQ4 What is the role of 'remembered' information—such as in DNA, culture, or patents—in enabling sustained combinatorial innovation in biology?
• RQ5 Does the emergence of life imply a creative universe where new information is generated over time, contradicting the Newtonian paradigm of fixed initial conditions?

Key findings

• The biosphere's configuration space may grow via combinatorial innovation at a rate that exceeds standard permutational counting, enabling super-combinatorial expansion.
• The TAP equation solutions demonstrate that biological state space can grow explosively, suggesting a mechanism for rapid emergence of complexity.
• Biological systems may contribute more to the Universe's information content than black holes or vacuum energy, challenging the dominance of gravitational entropy.
• The concept of 'creative potential' (Q) reveals that in evolving-law cosmologies, the Universe can generate new information over time, with Q^EL ≫ 1.
• The existence of life does not impose a cost on initial conditions because the states it generates did not exist at the Big Bang—thus, the problem of initial conditions is not worsened.
• Biological information is not merely physical but relies on embedded, repeatable, and remembered systems (e.g., genomes, cultural transmission), which sustain innovation beyond single events.