Newton offered a mechanistic view of reality, in which the natural world unfolds from present to future in a deterministic fashion. Quantum mechanics does the same—but with a roll of the dice. This worldview has become nearly synonymous with science itself, influencing not only science but also the arts and humanities. Drawing on the work of a group of renegade biologists—as well as my own—I will argue that this paradigm is inadequate to describe life, cognition, society, and much of nature. I will focus on living systems as the pièce de résistance of the argument, incorporating mathematical and philosophical considerations where necessary. A key conclusion is that organisms are not merely special kinds of physical systems; rather, they are physical plus something else. This “something else” is not magic or vitalism, but what Erwin Schrödinger called a “new physics”—a science we are only beginning to sketch.

Pedro Márquez-Zacarías is a Purépecha biologist from México, where he studied Biomedical Sciences at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 2022, he completed a Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech and is now an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.

This lecture will also be live streamed.  See details below.