Evolution’s Limits

Is Evolution Over? William Bialek, the Graduate Center’s Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics, argues that evolution has pushed living systems to operate at the limits of what the laws of physics allow. “There are many places,” Bialek says, “where organisms have been pushed to, basically, an endpoint of evolution.” In a lecture at the Graduate Center, Bialek said that “as long as the world you live in doesn’t change, you can’t do better than to count every photon or every molecule, but when it comes to vital functions it seems that things have been pushed as far as they can go.” Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics at Princeton, leads the Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences at CUNY Graduate Center. Listen Now >>