An interdisciplinary team of researchers has put forward a new “law of nature” which dictates that complexity increases in the universe over time.
The proposed law is called the law of increasing functional information, or LIFI for short.
The team defined a system’s functional information as the smallest number of non-adapted changes to a system that would be needed to change it into something else.
The group says this law underlies biological evolution and could predict the prevalence of intelligent life in the universe, as well as helping to better understand diseases.
Critics have said that the proposal lacks any real predictive power, but others have welcomed it as part of a grand agenda for fundamental laws of nature.
The researchers say their proposal could be tested by searching for functional information signatures in extraterrestrial samples.
