In yesterday’s post, I already wrote about the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that life on Earth takes. Here is mathematician Stephen Wolfram about how they may have arisen.
The starting point is what we can call “ruliobiology”. We can think of ruliobiology as a metamodel of biology: an abstract framework not intended to provide a specific model of any particular biological system, but rather intended to capture the essence of certain core features of what’s fundamentally going on in biology. Ruliobiology is ultimately about what happens in systems based on simple rules subject to adaptive evolution.
[…]
Darwin seems to have imagined that there might be “laws of biology” analogous to laws of physics (like “the fixed law of gravity”) […] Traditional laws of physics tend to concern themselves with aspects of physical behavior that are computationally reducible, and that can be described, say, with mathematical formulas. Ruliobiology—and, I believe, biology—have computational irreducibility at their core. So, for example, whereas in physics one can discuss a phenomenon just as something happening “here and now”, in ruliobiology—and biology—there is an inevitable dependence on history, and on the computationally irreducible process that led us to here and now.
If I understand him correctly, Wolfram is essentially describing Assembly Theory, although he never uses that term. Here’s philosopher Johannes Jäger on Assembly Theory:
The kinds of objects that you actually can assemble are not only restricted by the rules of your universe, but also by the starting point and trajectory you actually chose to take […] You don’t have to deal with all possible combinations of building blocks, just the ones that are actually present in whatever “world” (a mix or “ensemble” of different objects) that you are simulating or observing.
