Summary for science educators

Recognizing New Kinds of Life: Teaching Layered Complexity and Selection Beyond the Organism (adapted from ChatGPT)

Modern science education is increasingly tasked with helping students understand not just living organisms, but also how complexity arises in systems of life. A promising approach extends physicist Jim Sethna’s idea of identifying broken symmetries and order parameters—tools used to recognize new “phases” of matter—to the way life organizes itself across multiple layers of complexity.

This perspective emphasizes “in/out” boundaries—such as the membrane of a cell, the skin of a body, the boundary of a family, or the edge of a culture. Each boundary breaks a symmetry and enables the emergence of a new layer of life: cells become organisms, organisms form gene-pools, and minds participate in idea-pools. These layers don’t just stack—they evolve. And in some cases, they evolve as distinct physical lifeforms that undergo natural selection.

This framework proposes that gene-pools (the shared DNA among a family or species) and idea-pools (the shared ideas and norms within a culture) behave as real, emergent lifeforms. Like organisms, they reproduce, evolve, and compete. For instance, eusocial animal colonies (like ants or bees) may best be understood not as individuals cooperating, but as “superorganisms” whose real unit of selection is the gene-pool. Similarly, a culture or ideology may persist and spread—sometimes even at the expense of the individuals who carry it.