Biocosmology: Biology from a cosmological perspective

Marina Cortês, Stuart A. Kauffman, Andrew R. Liddle, Lee Smolin

The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We discuss whether and how cosmology and physics must be modified to be able to address certain questions which arise at their intersection with biology. We show that a universe that contains life, in the form it has on Earth, is in a certain sense radically non-ergodic, in that the vast majority of possible organisms will never be realized. We argue from this that complete explanations in cosmology require a mixture of reductionist and functional explanations.

Comments: 28 pages

Subjects: History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph); Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)

Cite as: arXiv:2204.09379 [physics.hist-ph] (or arXiv:2204.09379v1 [physics.hist-ph] for this version)

From: Andrew R. Liddle

[v1] Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:45:47 UTC (28 KB)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09379

Astrobiology