ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Proto-Biosignatures and Planetary Geochemical Metabolism: A Thermodynamic Screening Model of Prebiotic Geochemical Organization.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Characterizing open-ended evolution through undecidability mechanisms in random Boolean networks.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- When effective anticancer therapies are, in fact, destabilizing the tumor's Group Phenotypic Composition.NPJ precision oncology · 2026Review
- Autocatalytic selection of gene functions in synthetic cells.Communications biology · 2026Article
- One Earth + One Health: An Agile, Evolutionary, System-of-Systems Convergence Paradigm.Environmental science & technology · 2026Review
- Selection for Function in Early Life: Implications for Early-Onset Pathologies.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Stringent selection on kinetics of condensation reactions: early steps in chemical evolution.Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP · 2026Article
- Organizational Principles of Biological Systems.Biology · 2026Review
- Selection for Function in Complex Distributed Pathological Systems.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Exploring tumorigenesis as a process of phenotypic state-space exploration and selective funneling.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2026Article
- Organic geochemical evidence for life in Archean rocks identified by pyrolysis-GC-MS and supervised machine learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Towards a Research Programme Aiming at Causes and Consequences of Reticulate Evolution.Biology · 2025Review
- Evolution of competitive systems in nature.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Origin of life: β-sheet amyloid conformers as the primordial functional polymers on the early Earth and their role in the emergence of complex dynamic networks.FEBS letters · 2025Review
- The chemical interaction between plants and the rhizosphere microbiome.Trends in plant science · 2025Review
- Evolutionary features in a minimal physical system: Diversity, selection, growth, inheritance, and adaptation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Vernalization of Winter Crops Increases Photosynthetic Energy Conversion Efficiency and Seed Yield.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Complexity myths and the misappropriation of evolutionary theory.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Death-ision: the link between cellular resilience and cancer resistance to treatments.Molecular cancer · 2025Review
- Biological Polymers: Evolution, Function, and Significance.Accounts of chemical research · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Physical laws-such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics-codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural systems across space and time. We propose that an additional, hitherto-unarticulated law is required to characterize familiar macroscopic phenomena of our complex, evolving universe. An important feature of the classical laws of physics is the conceptual equivalence of specific characteristics shared by an extensive, seemingly diverse body of natural phenomena. Identifying potential equivalencies among disparate phenomena-for example, falling apples and orbiting moons or hot objects and compressed springs-has been instrumental in advancing the scientific understanding of our world through the articulation of laws of nature. A pervasive wonder of the natural world is the evolution of varied systems, including stars, minerals, atmospheres, and life. These evolving systems appear to be conceptually equivalent in that they display three notable attributes: 1) They form from numerous components that have the potential to adopt combinatorially vast numbers of different configurations; 2) processes exist that generate numerous different configurations; and 3) configurations are preferentially selected based on function. We identify universal concepts of selection-static persistence, dynamic persistence, and novelty generation-that underpin function and drive systems to evolve through the exchange of information between the environment and the system. Accordingly, we propose a "law of increasing functional information": The functional information of a system will increase (i.e., the system will evolve) if many different configurations of the system undergo selection for one or more functions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.