Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature

by Eric Chaisson

We are connected to distant space and time not only by our imaginations but also through a common cosmic heritage. Emerging now from modern science is a unified scenario of the cosmos, including ourselves as sentient beings, based on the time-honored concept of change. From galaxies to snowflakes, from stars and planets to life itself, we are beginning to identify an underlying ubiquitous pattern penetrating the fabric of all the natural sciences--a sweepingly encompassing view of the order and structure of every known class of object in our richly endowed universe.



This is the subject of Eric Chaisson's new book. In Cosmic Evolution Chaisson addresses some of the most basic issues we can contemplate: the origin of matter and the origin of life, and the ways matter, life, and radiation interact and change with time. Guided by notions of beauty and symmetry, by the search for simplicity and elegance, by the ambition to explain the widest range of phenomena with the fewest possible principles, Chaisson designs for us an expansive yet intricate model depicting the origin and evolution of all material structures. He shows us that neither new science nor appeals to nonscience are needed to understand the impressive hierarchy of the cosmic evolutionary story, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Physics, Evolution, Philosophy, Astronomy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Sud666 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Eric J. Chaisson is a brilliant man. Having completed his Masters and Doctorate work at Harvard, he teaches physics, astrophysics and astronomy at Harvard. His latest book- Cosmic Evolution, The Rise of Complexity in Nature is an amazing work. It is not an easy read, especially for those who avoided science during their undergraduate education. In fact, this is not a book for the people who do not like science or math. To quote Dr. Chaisson:

"...I have assumed an undergraduate knowledge of natural science, especially statistical and deterministic physics........The mathematical level includes integral calculus and differential equations, with a smattering of symbolism throughout..."

So this is not a book for the reader with a poor math/science background. As harsh as it may sound- this is as it should be. Science is not easy. Real science, not pop science. Galileo Galilei once said "The book of Nature is written in the language of mathematics". So is this book.

I also admire Dr. Chaisson for his unabashed atheism. Again a quote:

"...this is not a New Age book with mystical overtones however embraced or vulgarized by past scholars, nor one about the history and philosophy of antiquated views of Nature. It grants no speculation on the pseudo-science fringe about morphic fields or quantitative vitalism or interfering deities all mysteriously affecting the ways and means of evolution; nor do we entertain epistemological discussions about the limits of human knowledge or post-modernist opinions about the sociological implications of science writ large. This is a book about mainstream science, pure and simple, outlining the essence of an ongoing research program admittedly multidisciplinary in character and colored by the modern scientific method's unavoidable mix of short-term subjectivity and long-term objectivity."

This is a book about the science of Evolution. Evolution not only in the biology sense, but also evolution as change. From the formation of the universe to the creation of stellar masses and then eventually to planets and then life- this is a pattern of rising complexity. Dr. Chaisson takes us through the formative stages of the universe. Using the Arrow of Time he shows us how the Big Bang occurred and then the rise of different states of complexity.

The books starts with an introspective and quite interesting look at the nature of Change itself and how it relates to Cosmic Evolution. Then we are introduced to the three main sections of this book- Matter, Radiation and Life. These three sections are full of equations explaining everything from the Big Bang to thermodynamics, Equilibrium, Open systems to looking at the various states of Radiation and how eventually matter was formed. Taking sections from physics, biology and chemistry the author shows us the means, methods and consequences for evolution throughout the cosmic universe.

Dr. Chaisson mirrors my views on religion and takes great pains to point out (while never being disparaging or demeaning to religious people a la Dr. Dawkins) there is no anthropocentric agenda to this book. Human beings are not the culmination of the cosmic-evolutionary process. There is no arrow or line that leads from the creation of the universe to us as humans. The best part is his emphasis on the Copernican Principle denying Sun, Earth and life any special status- in time, space or complexity.

So if you ever wanted a pure science explanation for life, the universe, pretty much anything having to do Cosmic evolution-this is the book for you. I truly enjoyed it, but I must point that I was always a good student and the math in this book wasn't overly taxing-though it did slow down my reading considerably. If you are not comfortable with science, math or just have no background in it-then this is a book where you can still read it, but will miss significant chunks of it. So if you have the math or the patience-then I can NOT recommend this book enough. A brilliant look at evolution and cosmic changes.

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Rewrite pending, Jan-2024]

As a grand evolutionary synthesis, this book by Chaisson does a fine job; a fine job that is, if your definition of "grand" excludes mind, consciousness, interiority, experience, and everything that is NOT matter, energy, space, and time (physics, chemistry, biology). Chaisson gives us an outstanding review of what's currently understood as the big picture of evolution in the realms of the natural sciences, a kind of updated version of similar books from 1980s systems theory such as Laszlo's Evolution: The Grand Synthesis and Jantsch's The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications. And as a physicist-astronomer, he can be forgiven for focusing solely on the third-person-objective-materialist aspects of human experience since, well, since that's what he's trained to do (focus here, ignore there).

If you want a book that defines "grand evolutionary synthesis" there's no better place to go than the books of Ken Wilber (despite their shortcomings), a synthetic genius who takes all of what Chaisson presents and couples it with the co-evolution of interiority, mind, and consciousness (see his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution). Wilber's synthesis is vast and brings together huge areas of human knowledge that have hitherto been separate such as western developmental psychology, eastern nondual philosophy, postmodern intersubjective perspectives, complex systems theory, states of consciousness research, and more. Wilber's work however has suffered from charges of teleology, over-emphasis on hierarchical levels, reliance on a contemporary version of the Great Chain model, and a lot of writing not grounded in careful research, referencing, and scholarship. But so much of Wilber's work is hugely valuable, if only his distinction of the difference between "cosmos" and "Kosmos", the former being what Chaisson is talking about, i.e., the material cosmos only, and the latter, Kosmos, what Wilber writes about which includes four interrelated, interdependent aspects of evolution: the objective organism, the subjective mind, the interobjective environment, and the intersubjective culture.

Probably the best and most careful work on synthesizing the interior/mind and exterior/matter aspects of evolution is the work by the embodied mind cognitive science folks who are also incorporating complex systems theory into their work such as Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Andy Clark, Alva Noe, Alicia Juaerro, Daniel Hutto, Shawn Gallagher, Terrance Deacon, and many others (see my Embodied Cognition listopia list for more ). Thompson's book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind is an outstanding contribution to a view that can truly be called "grand synthesis," a view that incorporates subjective phenomenological first-person experience with objective third-person knowledge of biological systems organization.

For a (slightly technical) romp through the materialist version of the evolutionary grand synthesis, Chaisson delivers admirably. But for those of us who can't ignore interiority, consciousness, and first-person perspectives in our view of grand synthesis I suggest digging into the literature on embodied mind cognitive science, particularly the enactive approach pioneered in the Varela-Thompson-Rosch's The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Cosmic Evolution, Chaisson presents the idea that energy flows are essential aspects of evolutionary processes from the beginning. While Chaisson starts with the Big Bang and moves forward from universe, to galaxies and stars, the sun, other planets, and the Earth, he focuses on energy, the interplay of energy with matter, and the rise of complexity. He starts with a fairly dense introduction on thermodynamics, proceeds to a chapter on matter, a second on energy, and finally to a chapter of life. He concludes with a summary of the previous discussion and commonly asked questions. Throughout, Chaisson develops the idea of energy flows with respect to increasing complexity and entropy. His introduction has a bare minimum of mathematics and is somewhat intense for those unfamiliar with thermodynamics; yet, his treatment is quite readable. He lays the ground work well for the subsequent chapters.

My only criticism is that in writing about organic evolution, perhaps it would have been better to engage natural selection as selecting not just fitness - but differential reproduction and survival, which is what biologists mean by fitness. It also might have benefited his argument to have included genetic drift as a mechanism of organic evolution as well. Inclusion of genetic drift would allow a fuller discussion of chance or randomness (genetic drift processes) with natural selection (which is not random).

The book includes a list of symbols and numerical constants, a glossary, notes to his text (by page), a works cited section. further reading section, an index, and finally a short autobiographical note.

Perhaps not the best book to start reading about cosmology but an excellent thought provoking book nevertheless. Highly recommended.

[Zak J · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was a great read, although I found it a bit redundant. If written for an audience from a non-physics background, it is rough going in the middle of the book particularly and will refer to many unfamiliar concepts. If, however, written for a physics audience, it could have been shorter.

That aside, it's a wonderful model. Although his concept of "complexity" isn't very rigorous as mainly relies on the assumption, "it's clear that A is more complex than B" without any way of quantifying the amount of complexity, it doesn't detract much from the main point. For the Creationist who irresponsibly claim that the self-organization of molecules to organisms is contrary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, this book provides a rebuttal.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eric Chaisson's book Cosmic Evolution takes a grand look at the nature of change in our universe. It proposes a universal theory of change, whereby Darwin's theory of natural selection is expanded to encompass all of physical change. Despite the woo-woo sounding title, the book takes a relatively rigorous look at how physical laws influence change over time, and it provides a helpful framework for considering Darwinian process taking place beyond biology.

The book is centered around a discussion of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that any given system will trend towards a state of higher entropy, or disorder, over time. Taken at a glance, this law seems to conflict with our everyday experience. We seem to be living in a world where things get more ordered with time: life has gone from single-celled organisms to the complex array of plants and animals that cover the earth today; our cities are continually getting bigger and more organized; and our societies have become exponentially more peaceful than those of our stone-age ancestors. This apparent contradiction is resolved, however, by noting that while local events can become more ordered--for example by natural selection--this order comes are the expense of an equivalent amount of disorder being created globally. So while the laptop I'm typing on right now is highly ordered, this order comes at the expense of all the energy it took to mine the minerals and create the electricity that power it--the net effect being a slight increase in disorder. This principle has some interesting, and somewhat frightening, implications for our civilization. While technology many advance and our cities may grow, this growth will always come at the expense of an increase in disorder in the universe at large.

To understand the nature of change at a universal level, you first have to consider how the world was created and how it has changed over time. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, the universe was created during a big bang event, after which all the energy in the universe started to rapidly expand. The exact geometry and fate of our universe is still a mystery, but we do know that the universe could evolve in one of several possible ways. Our universe could keep expanding infinitely into the future, or we could live in a universe where gravitational forces will eventually overtake that expansion and our universe will collapse in on itself. Existential mysteries aside, this explanation provides a scaffold for us to understand how our universe started changing beginning in the earliest microseconds of its existence all the way to our current point in time.

In the beginning, there was no matter--only incredibly hot and dense radiation. After the universe started expanding, however, some of that radiation began to convert into matter, first as sub-atomic particles, which were briefly born and then destroyed in the intense heat, and later as more durable stuctures such as elements and molecules as the universe cooled. This transition from radiation to matter was thus the most important example of evolution in the early universe, if not of all time. While it might seem like were are living in a world made entirely of matter, we are in fact living in a world everywhere permeated by cosmic background radiation left over from the time when the universe was entirely made of radiation.

Entropy in a system must always increase, but at the same time negative entropy--so-called negentropy--can also increase. How is this possible? According to cosmologists like Chaisson, it is possible because this universal expansion allows the maximum possible entropy in a system to increase over time. In the beginning everything was dense and uniform. The flow of energy involved in expansion caused temperature gradients to form between various parts of the early universe, which were the earliest signs of order. Expansion caused matter to become clumpier, and this set off the chain of events that resulted in galaxies and life and all of the sources of order we see around ourselves in the universe.

This expansion also creased flows of energy, which Chaisson concludes are the ultimate drivers of evolution. These flows, which he calls free energy rate density, are what sustain organized complexity. They are also quantifiable, and for each rung in the evolutionary ladder you can see a trend towards greater energy throughput. Chaisson provides a few back-of-the-napkin calculations illustrating this point, and it seems to have some merit, but it seems like further study is necessary before reducing all evolution down to this one constant. Nevertheless this book is a great example of cross-disciplinary big-picture thinking, and worth a read as long as you aren't afraid of math equations.

[Ronald Diehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wherein the author proposes the energy rate density (the flow of units of energy per unit of time per unit of mass) of physical systems as a universal yardstick for complexity. The various stages of cosmic evolution (radiation to matter to galaxies to stars to planets to organic compounds to life to culture to be continued) are thus observed as exhibiting a tendency toward increasing energy rate densities.



Why? Because competition for environmental free energy exerts something akin to selection pressure on physical structures, and structures that are most able to utilize free energy will out-propagate other structures. In this light, Chaisson casts biological evolution as something of a special case of a more general, if not yet fully developed, thermodynamic-physical evolution.

The work is technical enough that I feel I’m not able to fully scrutinize it, but its apparent brilliance is striking.

[Cengiz Aytun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Büyük Tarih fikrinin önemli astofizikçi şahsiyetlerinden biri Eric Chaisson.
Kozmik evrim esasen evrenin tarihine bir bütünlük kazandırma çabası.
Evrende her ne kadar termodinamik kanunları geçerli olsa da lokal karmaşık yapılar da ortaya çıkıyor. Her aşamada yapılar daha da karmaşıklaşıyorlar.
Particulate->galactic->stellar->chemical->biological->cultural.
Bu karmaşıklaşmanın göstergesi ise birim maddenin "energy rate density" kullanılıyor. ERD: birim kütleden, birim zamanda geçen enerji miktarı. Evrensel evrim sürecinde safhalar ilerdedikçe daha çok enerji kullanılıyor. Astrofizikçi olmasam da büyük ölçüde keyifle ve hızlıca okuduğum bir kitap oldu.

[Rhys Lindmark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book on cosmic evolution before big history was hip.

Very math & physics focused.

Good overview of energy rate density as a measure of complexity, though doesn't cross-apply to humanity as much as I'd like.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...Energy rate density usefully links many disciplines and its physical meaning is clear: the amount of energy passing through a given system per unit time per unit mass."

"Thus, complexity grows as more intricately ordered systems emerge, in turn, throughout natural history, much as their surrounding environments are ravaged with rising entropy."

like 'guns, germs and steel' for the universe ... and like guns, germs and steel, the details were often interesting and often repeated. Annoyingly, energy rate density stuff above -- the piece that tied much of the book together, really -- felt hand-wavy. Would've appreciated more detail on the calculations - or at least methodology - to claim that human brain energy density rates are a "hundred thousand times the rate of a star."

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vindicates Herbert Spencer’s law of progress: the evolution of everything from homogeneity to heterogeneity, or simplicity to complexity, over time. This doesn’t violate entropy, the increase of disorder over time, since entropy applies to an isolated system so locally complexity may increase at the expense of increasing overall disorder elsewhere by maintaining a flow of free and used energy in and out. The early dense radiation of the universe decreased with expansion so matter could form and maintain itself and develop into stars, planets, and life. A basis for an evolutionary self-contained universe.

[Nick Gogerty · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Great read, that explains why thermodynamics, complexity and evolution are all linked. The unifying theme of energy throughput and gradients explains the universe, planets, life and technos emerging. Pretty cool"

[Mark Moon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Five-star content, three-star presentation. Free energy rate density is clearly a very useful concept.

[Damon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book.