Episode
There's a New Law of Nature — And It Changes Everything We Know About Life. Michael Wong - #546
- Published
- Mar 23, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 4389
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Summary
Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Michael Wong recently discussed theory of evolution on TED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSrf7ErdHWA — in this conversation, we go deeper on the law of increasing functional information and what it means for life, complexity, and the future of science. 🔔 Subscribe for new episodes each week 🎧 Ad-free episodes on Patreon: patreon.com/drbriankeating INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE — where Nobel Prize winners, physicists, and bold thinkers explore the biggest questions in science. Is there a second arrow of time? Astrobiologist and planetary scientist Dr. Michael Wong joins Brian Keating to explore the law of increasing functional information — a proposed new law of nature that may explain how complexity evolves across minerals, biology, AI, and the cosmos. Dr. Michael Wong of the Carnegie Institution for Science has been working with a cross-disciplinary group of scientists — the "Missing Law Group" — to propose something bold: a new law of nature. Their law of increasing functional information argues that evolving systems, whether biological or not, tend toward greater complexity and function over time. In this conversation, Brian and Michael unpack what functional information actually means, how it differs from Shannon entropy, and why it may describe something fundamental about the universe we live in. From the formation of minerals in stellar atmospheres to the evolution of life on Earth, Michael walks through how this framework applies across planetary science, astrobiology, and even cancer research. Brian pushes on the hard questions — the Fermi paradox, the boundary conditions of the law, its relationship to the second law of thermodynamics, and whether it truly qualifies as a "law" at al…