Thermodynamics and Life

Jeremy England of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hypothesizes that Darwinian evolution may be a special case of "dissipation-driven adaptation of matter".  The idea is a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics and seems to imply that under the right circumstances the emergence of life may be inevitable.

What I get out of his talk is that complex structures emerge from systems that adapt to external forces by forming resonant responses which allow for greater dissipation of energy and thus higher entropy than other systems.  It seems like physical laws "compel" matter to optimize the production of entropy.

For me, this ties into Caleb Scharf's arguments against "rare Earth" and how, while our place in the Universe has some unique aspects, we are not exceptional.  Scharf says we need to acknowledge that the Copernican Principle is both right and wrong.  The exact circumstances of the Earth may be quite unusual, but is likely to be only one pathway to complex life.  It's somehow comforting to imagine that the origin and evolution of life is a logical consequence of universal physics.