2022/04/20 by Marina Cortês, Stuart Kauffman, Cortês, Marina +5
Earth and Planetary Sciences · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.09379
openalex publication_date 2022/04/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.