Of course it does, we study Cosmic Evolution (Eric Chaisson’s book), Galactic Evolution, Stellar Evolution, and Planetary Evolution. Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?

Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe itself are all Complex Systems. Complexity Science studies all of them. It also studies Life, but there’s a vital difference between living things and the abiotic universe. Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?

The difference is the role of information. The universe and its galaxies, stars, and planets are all rich in abstract immaterial information, which needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated (or to be observed). Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?

All the objects in the universe are concrete material information structures, composed of matter and energy components, from the quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons present at the origin, through the atoms, molecules, and macromolecules that could not be stable until the universe cooled to the current surface temperature of the Sun (about 6000K), 400,000 years after the origin. Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?

Non-living objects like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and galaxies are passive information structures. They are entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. They are reducible to physical causes. They are not acting. They are acted upon. Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?

Living things, you and I, are active dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And the top-down communication of biological information controls those flows! The communication of information between living things gives rise to social structures. The awareness of information in the environment culminates in human consciousness. The storage of information outside the minds of humans is the sum of all shareable knowledge.

Now the fundamental laws of thermodynamics apply to both living and non-living systems. To increase the complexity of a system it must generate or incorporate new information - negative entropy. Erwin Schrödinger famously argued in his 1944 article What Is Life? that life “feeds on negative entropy.”

I like to call this Schrödinger's Rule: No Growth Without A Negentropy Source. Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was the Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.

But Schrödinger did not know how the Sun came to be such a source. That’s a problem for cosmology. Arthur Stanley Eddington suggested in 1934 that the expansion of the universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1927, could allow local reductions in the entropy, but only if the global entropy elsewhere was increased even more to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.

I like to call this Eddington's Law: No Negentropy Production Without a Global Entropy Increase

David Layzer developed this idea in his 1989 book Cosmogenesis. He showed that the maximum possible entropy of the expanding universe increases much faster than the actual entropy increase. Disorder (entropy) and order (negative entropy) are simultaneously increasing in the universe. I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s book to create this picture of his Growth of information.

See also Laplace's Demon and the Kelvin-Helmholtz "Heat Death"

Schrödinger in 1944 also explained how genetic information could be stored in the atomic structure of a long molecule or "periodic crystal." That molecule was found to be DNA just nine years later by James Watson and Francis Crick. Just three years before information in the genetic code was discovered, Claude Shannon formalized the theory of communication of information, describing digital "bits" of information as 1's and 0's (or the yes and no answers to questions). Shannon said that the amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages. With eight possible messages, Shannon says one actual message communicates three bits of information (2³ = 8).

If there is only one possible message, there is no new information. This corresponds to the determinist's view that there is only one possible future. Both that future and the entire past were completely pre-determined from the beginning of time, and the total information in the universe is a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, mistakenly believe.

I call this Shannon's Principle: No New Information Without Possibilities

Again inspired by Arthur Stanley Eddington, who suggested in 1928 that Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could put a “chink” in determinism, Layzer and I debated about free will.

In the 1970’s I came up with a “two-stage model” of free will, the first stage alternative possibilities, the second stage adequately determined decisions or choices. Researching the literature for years. I’ve now identified many philosophers and scientists who proposed the same two-stage model, well before me and after me.

See informationphilosopher.com/freedom/two-stage_models.html

I’ve since extended this two-stage model of first possibilities, then actualities to all the processes in the universe that create new information and information structures. I call it the cosmic creation process. It starts with Eddington and Layzer’s insight into the growth of order in the universe.

See informationphilosopher.com/introduction/creation.

The cosmic creation process also describes Darwinian evolution. Consider Ernst Mayr, in his 1988 book Toward a New Philosophy of Biology.

Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.

Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 159

We now have three processes that need two stages or steps to create something new - The creation of the universe itself, the creation of life, and human free will. We can now add a fourth process that is essential to the advance of knowledge. This process is what Albert Einstein called “free creations of the human mind.”

Finally, The Cosmic Creation Process and Complex Adaptive Systems

Now all complex adaptive systems are obviously creative. And the self-organizing autopoetic description of Umberto Maturana and Francesco Varela obviously describes them perfectly. But the “self” in a Benard cell is not communicating information to its component atoms. It has no thoughts, no intention, no goals, no purpose.

A Benard cell is a passive information structure, reducible to its components. True, it is a dissipative structure, at the edge of chaos, as Ilya Prigogine saw, but it is not alive. And finally true, the autocatalytic process is top-down causation controlling or constraining lower level processes. But they are not alive.

These abiotic “self-organizing” systems are the same cosmic creation process that existed before life appeared in the universe.

I’ll describe how the cosmic creation process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. I’ll also compare the process to complexity science, to complex systems, and to complex adaptive systems.

I’ll show how this two-stage creative process helps to explain three great problems in philosophy and science. If there is time, I’ll add a fourth (Einstein) and mention two more new ideas.

1. The problem of free will and determinism.
2. Shannon’s communication of information.
3. Darwin’s theory of natural selection
4. A biological model of the mind as an Experience Recorder and Reproducer and the problem of learned representation in AI
5. The “weird” problem of quantum entanglement, which creates two “bits” of information instantly at widely separated locations

All my work is available on my website informationphilosopher.com

My personal story is here - informationphilosopher.com/about

And the ERR model is here informationphilosopher.com/mind/err/

Entanglement is discussed here - informationphilosopher.com/entanglement/common_cause/