Thermodynamics of Evolution and the Origin of Life

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 modeling the grand potential as a function of the biological temperature and evolutionary potential. We demonstrate how this phenomenological approach can be used to study the "ideal mutation" model of evolution and its generalizations. Finally, we show that, within this thermodynamics framework, major transitions in evolution, such as the transition from an ensemble of molecules to an ensemble of organisms, that is, the origin of life, can be modeled as a special case of bona fide physical phase transitions that are associated with the emergence of a new type of grand canonical ensemble and the corresponding new level of description