Emergent attractors and the law of maximum entropy production: Foundations to a theory of general evolution

Abstract By Boltzmann's widely accepted reduction of the second law to a stochastic collision function, transformations from an incoherent to a coherent state are ‘infinitely improbable’. Yet it is precisely the transformation of the incoherent into the coherent, the progressive emergence of new levels of macroscopic constraints, that has brought, and continues to bring, the visible universe into being. Whether in ecosystem succession, the emergence of hydrodynamic structures, morphogenesis, 4GY of bioevolution, cognitive and cultural evolution, or cosmic evolution as a whole of which all the rest are part, the observed behavior is the same: Spontaneous and successive symmetry‐breaking coupled with the progressive attraction of matter away from equilibrium to time‐independent limit sets through the selection of some highly reduced (coherent) subset of accessible microstates, M s , from some much larger initial (incoherent) set, M n . This immediately raises the question of where, given the known laws of physics, such progressive goal‐directed behavior can come from, viz., (i) what universality governs the instability (symmetry‐breaking) of the incoherent regime; and (ii) what extremum principle governs the selection of microstates on the attractor? It is shown that a law of maximum entropy production can be reached deductively from the second law of thermodynamics with an assumption of the ontological irreducibility of nonlinear behavior, and inductively from the study of simple physical systems where the usual explanatory mechanisms, e.g., genes, brains or other ‘maker’, are clearly absent and therefore cannot be invoked. This law is seen as the cornerstone to a theory of general evolution within which biological and cultural evolution are special cases. As a result, a great proportion of the behavior generally believed to be generic to either biological or cultural systems is shown instead to be generic to the physics of the expanding universe.