---
slug: school-dissipative-adaptation-jeremy-england
title: Dissipative Adaptation: Jeremy England
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/school-dissipative-adaptation-jeremy-england
---

## What the subject saw and its core results

Jeremy England observed that matter under sustained energy input tends to reorganize into configurations that absorb and dissipate more work from the drive. The core result is a statistical tendency: driven systems increase the rate of energy dissipation over time through structural adaptation. This holds in models of self-assembly and self-replication. England derived the result from nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. The tendency favors persistence and replication when those processes increase dissipation.

## Exact primary works and passages

England, J. L. (2013). Statistical physics of self-replication. The Journal of Chemical Physics, 139(12), 121923. Key passage: “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

England, J. L. (2015). Dissipative adaptation in driven self-assembly. Nature Nanotechnology, 10(11), 919-923. Key passage: “a general thermodynamic mechanism for self-organization via dissipation of absorbed work that may be applicable in a broad class of driven many-body systems.”

Perunov, N., Marsland, R. A., & England, J. L. (2016). Statistical Physics of Adaptation. Physical Review X, 6, 021036. The paper defines a generalized Helmholtz free energy that tracks dissipative history and links it to outcome likelihood.

England, J. L. (2020). Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things. Basic Books. The book extends the 2015 mechanism to origin-of-life scenarios.

## Convergence patterns the work touches

The work derives, from thermodynamics alone, the link from energy flow gradients to persistent structures and replication. It matches the GRAIN pattern of energy flows producing branching, flow networks, and bounded order. It supplies a mechanistic step on the Ladder from difference and flow to structure and life-like order. The reader inside the system is implicit: the same physical laws govern both the observed structures and any observer built from them.

## What it gets right

It supplies an explicit, falsifiable route from thermodynamic gradients to self-replicating order without external teleology. Simulations in the 2016 paper confirm that histories of extra work absorption correlate with higher likelihood of certain configurations. The mechanism operates across scales in driven many-body systems.

## Where it stops short of the full synthesis

The account halts at physical self-organization and replication. It does not address memory as persistent internal state that survives the drive, nor mind as recursive modeling inside the system. It offers no protocol layer for object invocation or ledger-based repair. The Mirror Layer—observer as participant in the same dissipative field—remains outside the stated scope.

## Honest limits and disconfirming edges

The derivations are mathematical and apply to model systems. Direct experimental confirmation in prebiotic chemistry remains limited. Reductionist objections note that dissipation maximization describes a statistical bias, not a complete account of biological function or higher cognition. Later work has explored edge cases where dissipation decreases under certain constraints.

## Strongest internal objections

The strongest internal objection is scope: the same equations predict dissipation-driven order yet leave open whether replication is the dominant outcome or merely one among many. The 2015 paper states applicability to a “broad class” without claiming universality. Another edge is the requirement for continuous external drive; equilibrium systems show no such adaptation.
