Dada (/ˈdɑːdɑː/) or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centers in Zürich, Switzerland at the Cabaret Voltaire (circa 1916); New York Dada began circa 1915,[1] and after 1920 Dada flourished in Paris. Developed in reaction to World War I, the Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalist society, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works.[2][3][4] The art of the movement spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical left.[5]

The overall increase in entropy seems to be encouraged by local reversals of entropy, think of it as turbulence in otherwise laminar flow. The total overall entropy, or disorder, in the universe is actually increased by little local pockets of complexity–for example, a small plant may be much more complex than the soil, sunlight, water and atmospheric gas which makes it possible, but that same plant breaks down its surroundings for its own benefit. In other words, the total amount of disorder is increased by the plant’s existence.

This is not a new idea, I remember conversations like this being thrown about when I was a student, although it appears somebody is trying to formalize it now.

But the question is not whether there is something in the thermodynamics that makes life possible, or even necessary. As I mention, life is probably pretty common in the universe. The question is whether sentient life is common enough that it it is likely to stumble onto its sentient neighbors.

Of course, it may very well be that technological civilizations may wind up contributing enormously to the increase in entropy around them. Like the example of our plant, a technical civilization may induce much more chaos and decay in its surroundings than any complexity it may contribute.

The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe. England said this restructuring effect, which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation, fosters the growth of complex structures, including living things. The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014, but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

Since then, England, a 35-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been testing aspects of his idea in computer simulations. The two most significant of these studies were published this month — the more striking result in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the other in Physical Review Letters (PRL). The outcomes of both computer experiments appear to back England’s general thesis about dissipation-driven adaptation, though the implications for real life remain speculative.

“This is obviously a pioneering study,” Michael Lässig, a statistical physicist and quantitative biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, said of the PNAS paper written by England and an MIT postdoctoral fellow, Jordan Horowitz. It’s “a case study about a given set of rules on a relatively small system, so it’s maybe a bit early to say whether it generalizes,” Lässig said. “But the obvious interest is to ask what this means for life.”