ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, Ruslana Chub
Whenever a living organism is good at something, there’s the understandable temptation to explain matters by invoking natural selection. The insight that organisms are more likely to pass on traits to offspring if those traits help with surviving and reproducing sheds light on many aspects of biological form and function, from quirks of anatomy down to the fine points of how proteins are assembled.
It is a little bit dangerous, though, to get in the habit of telling these stories about every bit of biology.
As I wrote in my new book, Every Life Is on Fire, recent theoretical progress warns against such a rush to judgment. What is becoming increasingly clear is that interacting collectives of “dumb” particles can evolve into specialized structures with fine-tuned relationships to their environment even in circumstances where there is no self-copying entity in the system to enable natural ...
