This is the best summary I could come up with:
Now 164 years later, nine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.
Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist - such as cellular mutation - that generate many different configurations.
In stars, for instance, just two elements - hydrogen and helium - were the main ingredients in the first stellar generation following the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe.
That first generation of stars, in the thermonuclear fusion caldrons at their cores, forged about 20 heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that were blasted into space when they exploded at the end of their life cycles.
On Earth, living organisms acquired greater complexity including the pivotal moment when multicellular life originated.
"The significance of formulating such a law is that it provides a new perspective on why the diverse systems that make up the cosmos evolve the way they do, and may allow predictions about how unfamiliar systems - like the organic chemistry on Saturn's moon Titan - develop over time," added co-author Jonathan Lunine, chair of Cornell University's astronomy department, referencing a world being scrutinized for possible extraterrestrial life.
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