ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Thermodynamics of evolution and the origin of life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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32 citing papers in PubMed.
- Geometric Learning Dynamics.Biological cybernetics · 2026Article
- How Does Genetic Information Enable Life?Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Polyacid Solutions as an Analogue of a Neural Network.Polymers · 2026Article
- Can the Timing of the Origin of Life Be Inferred from Trends in the Growth of Organismal Complexity?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Origin of Life and Cellular Systems: A Continuum from Prebiotic Chemistry to Biodiversity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Bifurcations and phase transitions in the origins of life.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Dataset-Learning Duality and Emergent Criticality.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Thermodynamic consistency of autocatalytic cycles.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Maximum Entropy Production Principle of Thermodynamics for the Birth and Evolution of Life.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Neural network properties of hydrophilic polymers as a key for development of the general theory of evolution.Royal Society open science · 2025Review
- Biothermodynamics of Hemoglobin and Red Blood Cells: Analysis of Structure and Evolution of Hemoglobin and Red Blood Cells, Based on Molecular and Empirical Formulas, Biosynthesis Reactions, and Thermodynamic Properties of Formation and Biosynthesis.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Principles of Molecular Evolution: Concepts from Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics for the Multilevel Theory of Learning.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Principles of Molecular Evolution: Concepts from Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics for the Multilevel Theory of Learning.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Complexity and entropy of natural patterns.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Quasi-Equilibrium States and Phase Transitions in Biological Evolution.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The GARD Prebiotic Reproduction Model Described in Order and Complexity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Evolution at the Origins of Life?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Life should be redefined: Any molecule with the ability to self-replicate should be considered life.F1000Research · 2024Article
- Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
We outline a phenomenological theory of evolution and origin of life by combining the formalism of classical thermodynamics with a statistical description of learning. The maximum entropy principle constrained by the requirement for minimization of the loss function is employed to derive a canonical ensemble of organisms (population), the corresponding partition function (macroscopic counterpart of fitness), and free energy (macroscopic counterpart of additive fitness). We further define the biological counterparts of temperature (evolutionary temperature) as the measure of stochasticity of the evolutionary process and of chemical potential (evolutionary potential) as the amount of evolutionary work required to add a new trainable variable (such as an additional gene) to the evolving system. We then develop a phenomenological approach to the description of evolution, which involves modeling the grand potential as a function of the evolutionary temperature and evolutionary potential. We demonstrate how this phenomenological approach can be used to study the "ideal mutation" model of evolution and its generalizations. Finally, we show that, within this thermodynamics framework, major transitions in evolution, such as the transition from an ensemble of molecules to an ensemble of organisms, that is, the origin of life, can be modeled as a special case of bona fide physical phase transitions that are associated with the emergence of a new type of grand canonical ensemble and the corresponding new level of description.
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