Thread:User talk:Armondikov/Chemistry meets Universal Darwinism/reply

The issue with trying to bridge the gap between chemistry and biology that way is pretty much the same reason that memes can't follow a strict Darwinian evolution; the systems are far too volatile. As Darwinian evolution simply falls out of "descent with modification" there's no way you can apply that to a chemical system unless you're talking about autocatalysis, which while I think is a great idea for the "beginning of life", is a minute sub-set of chemical interactions. Certainly, reducing biological evolution to chemistry simply ignores a ton of emergent properties that are required for descent and modification to even make sense. This is like trying to ask whether a single atom, taken in isolation, is a solid, liquid or gas. You're talking about properties that simply don't make sense at that scale.

Either Pigliucci is explaining this remarkably badly, or Pross isn't actually saying particularly interesting. There's a trade-off between thermodynamic and kinetic stability, yes? And?