What if the laws of physics are not fixed, but constantly evolving?

Biochemist Timothy Jackson argues that contrary to our assumptions that reality is governed by fixed laws, fundamental reality is a lawless flux, a chaos of unpredictable change. What needs explaining is not chaos but the stability and order that emerge from it.

Darwin’s central insight, Jackson suggests, was to show how such order might emerge, via natural selection: a principle which can explain, but never predict, the patterns that make up the world.

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We tend to think of reality as made up of things, governed by fixed laws that determine how they change over time. But biochemist Timothy Jackson argues that this is back to front: fundamental reality is a lawless flux, a chaos of unpredictable change, and what needs explaining is not chaos but the stability and order that emerge from it. The “laws” of physics are not eternal truths but descriptions of patterns that have persisted long enough to look permanent. Darwin’s central insight, Jackson suggests, was to show how such order might emerge, via natural selection—a principle which can explain, but never predict, the patterns that make up the world.

From physicalism to “biologism”

From panpsychism to “Platonic Space,” assertions that we need to move “beyond physics” are increasingly common among scientists and philosophers. Whilst it’s nothing new for different sciences to be associated with distinct worldviews, current conversations seem to be more explicitly metaphysical than has traditionally been the case among scientists. It seems that the disavowal of metaphysics as a meaningful pursuit hasn’t really expunged it from modern science, so much as hidden it. The common-parlance term for the dominant—and largely tacit —metaphysics of modern science is “physicalism,” and it is this that so many are arguing we need to move beyond.