The article discusses a revolutionary idea proposed by a group of researchers, led by Robert Hazen and Michael Wong, suggesting that complexity in all entities, including nonliving ones, increases over time. This concept parallels the second law of thermodynamics and implies that biological evolution is not unique but rather a specific instance of a broader universal principle. If supported, this proposition could shift our understanding of intelligent life, suggesting it may be more widespread in the universe despite the challenges posed by Fermi's paradox.
A new proposal by an interdisciplinary team of researchers challenges that bleak conclusion. They have proposed nothing less than a new law of nature, according to which the complexity of entities in the universe increases over time with an inexorability comparable to the second law of thermodynamics—the law that dictates an inevitable rise in entropy, a measure of disorder.
In this new view, biological evolution appears not as a unique process that gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of matter—living organisms. Instead, evolution is a special (and perhaps inevitable) case of a more general principle that governs the universe.
This hypothesis, formulated by the mineralogist Robert Hazen and the astrobiologist Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, along with a team of others, has provoked intense debate. Some researchers have welcomed the idea as part of a grand narrative.
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