This book is written for a broad audience of scientifically sophisticated readers who are interested in learning what science can teach us about the origin of life. Author Jeremy England is an accomplished physicist who, after years of high-level research, became an ordained Orthodox Rabbi. His main goal is to explain his theory of dissipation-driven adaptation. A small part of the book is used to explain his view of linkages between science and Hebrew scripture. I mention this for completeness, but my focus in this review is on the book's substantial scientific content. Although the ideas are complex, the presentation is primarily qualitative, avoiding equations and making main points with words and drawings. England refers to concepts of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and biology, but no detailed knowledge of these is needed.

When quantum theory came to the fore in the 20th century, it was natural for physicists to begin to explore the physics of living things. Is physics sufficient to describe life? Niels Bohr thought the answer was no, while Erwin Schrödinger was more sanguine. Jeremy England quotes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “… the borders of my language are the borders of my world,” which I interpret to connote that our understanding of life and its origin is limited, at least in part, by language differences between physics, chemistry, and molecular biology. The very definition of life would likely require highly specific language choices.

Although there is no such universally accepted definition of life, some common features are familiar. There is self-replication, e.g., mitosis, the cell division that produces two daughter cells with the same number and kind of chromosomes as the parent. Also, living organisms, often have characteristic geometrical shapes, such as a flower's petals or a human heart. Things that are alive also continually make needed repairs as cells become damaged, have sensory perception, and respond to their environmental conditions. Proteins, which are large folded-chain molecules that contain nitrogen-bearing amino acids and peptides, are ubiquitous in living things. The smallest proteins contain dozens of amino acids, while the largest contain tens of thousands. Examples range from hemoglobin in blood and proteins in foods to molecular motors that facilitate important cellular processes. Some assemblies serve as templates for their own replication, which speeds up as more of the same assemblies are produced, an example of positive feedback. Misfolded “prions” induce misfolding of nearby proteins, resulting in serious neurological disorders. Specific folding patterns for proteins are essential to life.

In these times of the COVID-19 virus, England's discussion of viruses is particularly relevant. Viruses are “not quite alive” entities that live off nutrients provided by the cells in which they attach themselves. Most important, viruses self-replicate only when inside a living host cell, using RNA molecular templates. The copies of the virus diffuse to and infect other host cells, which results in further replication. England points out that self-replication is a good example of positive feedback (“when, a feature, quality, or characteristic in a system accelerates the rate of its own increase”). A familiar non-living example of positive feedback is fire, i.e., a small fire generates a larger fire.

Combustion of a piece of wood generates heat energy transfer and leads to a lower energy of the products of combustion. Energy conservation demands that any exothermic reaction must lead to products with chemical bonding energies lower than that of the reactant molecules; i.e., the products are more tightly bound than that of the reactants. England uses the analogy of a ball moving downhill in a potential well to describe the energetics of combustion. To conserve energy, such a downhill process is accompanied by a heat process that spreads energy to the molecules that comprise the environment. This spreading is the essence of a dissipative process. A result in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics is that the ratio of the probability of a process proceeding in a given direction to the probability of the time-reversed process grows exponentially with the heat energy dissipated to the surroundings by the original process. This shows a directionality in time that we can associate with dissipative processes in living things, e.g., growth, self-repair, and aging.

Jeremy England identifies three central ideas related to life forms. The first is collective behavior, i.e., behavior of large numbers of molecules. The second is irreversible reshaping by external driving forces, and the third is shape-dependent energy absorption, a kind of resonance, in which a living thing has become tuned to its environment. Over long, evolutionary time periods, molecular species explore many different reactions, working their way energetically to stable energy valleys. England views evolution to result in systems that have adapted to their external driving source. If such adaptation can be shown to have led to life forms, dissipation-driven adaptation would provide a physics-based explanation of Darwinian natural selection. England describes such adaptation this way:

We start with an inert lump of particles stuck in one shape, and we begin to subject it to a patterned driving of some kind—oscillation of a particular frequency, for example, or stimulation of some subset of chemical components. The energy flowing from the driving force powers an exploration of the space of possible configurations where the matter makes little local moves that change how its constituent parts are assembled relative to each other. If the interactions among the particles give rise to enough novelty through combinations of collective physical properties, then each small rearrangement can lead to changes in how the external drive energy gets absorbed, both in terms of how much energy flows and in terms of the kinds of motion the energy flow activates. As time passes, the system visits more and more states, and eventually it encounters an opportunity to settle into one that is exceptionally good at allowing the matter to stay in the same shape despite the constant physical insults it sustains from the external drive.

As an analogy, England discusses the effects of wind, which can be mild and steady or strong and gusty, producing small or large effects. Similarly, over eons after the Big Bang, the energy-driving of matter on Earth enabled formation of many chemical compounds, presumably with dissipation-driven adaptation occurring. As the evolution proceeded, heat processes irreversibly dissipated energy to the environment. This sampling of many different paths led to systems that persist in their environments. Indeed, an important aspect of dissipation-driven adaptation is that over time, systems settle into favorable shapes and structures, and stop evolving as they continue to be driven in the way they evolved. An interesting example of this type of adaptation occurs in non-living systems with spectral hole burning. This is when a system is driven vigorously at a given laser frequency, after which its tendency to oscillate at that frequency is diminished.

Although England's principle of dissipation-driven adaptation suggests how life might have evolved from non-living matter, it is (so far) not clear if this is the way DNA, RNA and living cells actually did evolve. More research is needed to settle this, so we must stay tuned. The material I've described comprises the first seven chapters of Every Life on Fire. The final Chapter 8 gives a brief summary of the science covered, and then transitions to England's views on spiritual aspects of life, which I found to distract from the physics.

England's book contains many important ideas, and his principle of dissipation-driven adaptation is an excellent tool for understanding how physical systems can evolve. I believe Every Life on Fire offers physics teachers and students much food for thought. For teachers, it could lead to enrichment of their teaching of energy and thermodynamics. For students, it might stimulate an interest in biophysics and evolutionary biology. England provides many citations to relevant physics publications for those who wish to dig deeper. I learned new ideas from this book that have reshaped my view of how life might have evolved.

Harvey S. Leff is Emeritus Professor of Physics, California State Polytechnic University and Visiting Scholar, Reed College. He recently published Energy and Entropy: A Dynamic Duo (CRC Press, 2020) and co-edited, with Andrew F. Rex, Maxwell's Demon 2: Entropy, Classical and Quantum Information, Computing (CRC Press, 2002).