Biologists need to think about their field in a radical new way: life is an emergent phenomenon that occurs in systems that are far out of equilibrium, and it’s a branch of condensed matter physics, not chemistry, say physicists Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese at the University of Illinois.

“Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena,” they add. “Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly evolution occurs, and its coupling to ecology have not been satisfactorily addressed and formulated. The lack of widespread appreciation for, and understanding of, the evolutionary process has arguably retarded the development of biology as a science, with disastrous consequences for its applications to medicine, ecology and the global environment.”

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4125: Life Is Physics: Evolution As A Collective Phenomenon Far From Equilibrium