Thermodynamics of Evolution and the Origin of Life
Vitaly Vanchurin, Yuri I. Wolf, Eugene V. Koonin, Mikhail I., Katsnelson

TL;DR
This paper develops a thermodynamic framework for evolution and the origin of life, modeling biological processes as phase transitions using principles of classical thermodynamics and statistical learning.
Contribution
It introduces a phenomenological thermodynamics-based model of evolution, linking concepts like entropy, temperature, and potential to biological evolution and major transitions.
Findings
Models evolution as a thermodynamic process with phase transitions.
Defines biological temperature and evolutionary potential as key parameters.
Describes the origin of life as a phase transition in this thermodynamic framework.
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 (biological 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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
