The Physics of Evolution

This book provides an introduction to the significant role of physics in evolution, based on the ideas of matter and energy resource flow, organism self-copying, and ecological change. The text employs these ideas to create quantitative models for important evolutionary processes.

Many fields of science and engineering have come up against the problem of complex design¿when details become so numerous that computer power alone cannot make progress. Nature solved the complex-design problem using evolution, yet how it did so has been a mystery. Both laboratory experiments and computer-simulation attempts eventually stopped evolving. Something more than Darwin¿s ideas of heredity, variation, and selection was needed.

The solution is that there is a fourth element to evolution: ecological change. When a new variation is selected, this can change the ecology, and the new ecology can create new opportunities for even more new variations to be selected. Through this endless cyc