5. Complexity assured
Professor Ian Stewart, a mathematician at the University of Warwick, and reproductive biologist Dr Jack Cohen have joined forces to figure out what life might be like if it has evolved on other planets. What they’ve found is that natural selection inevitably throws up a diverse and complex arrangement of living entities.

Because natural selection, the engine of evolution, essentially fits life to its environment, one might expect that a single lifeform would come to dominate its home planet as the single best fit. But Ian Stewart has discovered a mathematical law that states otherwise. The diversity engine is best described by analogy to a pendulum.

A swinging pendulum can suddenly switch from one pattern of swing to a totally different one without apparent interference or warning. What’s going on is that invisible stresses have built up in the system causing rapid change. Similarly, evolution jogs along in the same way for a while, and then passes some threshold that causes it to change state. These state changes are the source of diversity in life, in a pendulum swing, or in just about any system.

What this actually means is that anywhere that life evolves, it will diverge into a complex ecosystem, not unlike our own. ‘These phenomena are universals, they are things that are going to happen anywhere they can happen,’ explains Ian Stewart. The diversity engine is an inevitable drive towards complexity that has other startling implications for alien lifeforms, since, says Stewart, ‘some of them, surely, are going to go right through to intelligent creatures and very intelligent creatures.’

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