Biotropy: Why Life Isn’t a Miracle, Just Good Physics
Biotropy: Why Life Isn’t a Miracle, Just Good Physics
There’s a popular idea that life is a cosmic fluke, a lucky roll of the universal dice. That once, improbably, chemistry tripped over itself and woke up. I think that’s backwards.
Given the right conditions, matter doesn’t just allow life. It leans toward it.
I call that tendency biotropy.
The short version
When energy moves through matter steadily, some arrangements last longer than others. The ones that endure tend to replicate themselves, stay together, and repair themselves when damaged. If that sounds oddly like life, it’s because it is.
Energy in, order out
Pour energy into a messy environment, and you don’t always create more chaos. Sometimes, you get structure. Snowflakes. Convection cells. Whirlpools. None of these break the laws of physics. They’re what physics does when energy has somewhere to go.
Early Earth had countless ways for energy to flow—sunlight into oceans, chemistry through vents, electrical charge between droplets of mist. In that churn, some chemical networks began to channel energy more effectively than their neighbours. They didn’t think. They didn’t plan. They just persisted.
Persistence is the first virtue of life.
The magic trick that isn’t magic
At some point, certain reactions began to assist themselves. The reaction products made it more likely for the reaction to happen again. Chemists call this autocatalysis. I think of it as the universe discovering the power of positive feedback.
Once you have a loop that replicates itself, you have the foundation of biology.
Add a loose boundary, something that keeps useful bits nearby and rubbish drifting away, and you’ve taken another step. Add crude repair, ways to recover from disruption, and the step becomes a stride.
None of this requires intention. It requires flow, feedback, and time.
Life as a phase change
We’re used to thinking of life as a separate category. Dead matter on one side. Living matter on the other. But biotropy suggests life is more like a phase change. Ice to water. Water to vapour.
Cross a threshold of energy flow and constraint, and matter reorganises itself into something that produces, organises, and corrects itself. Stay below the threshold and nothing happens. Cross it, and suddenly the world is full of cells, forests, nervous systems, economies, and arguments on the internet.
Why this matters
Seeing life as biotropic accomplishes two important things.
First, it makes the emergence of life less mysterious and more inevitable. Not guaranteed everywhere, but expected when conditions line up.
Second, it scales effectively. The same logic applies upward. Cells form tissues. Tissues form organisms. Organisms form societies. At every level, systems capable of channelling energy into self-production, self-organisation, and self-correction tend to outlast those that cannot.
Life isn’t a rebellion against entropy. It’s a clever way of spending it slowly.
A final thought
If biotropy is real, then the question isn’t “Why is there life at all?” The better question is, “Why wouldn’t there be?”
When the universe sets the table with energy, time, and matter, life is what tends to show up for dinner.
And once it arrives, it rarely leaves quietly.