Does Complexity Grow Where Failure Is Cheap? An Untested Big-History Idea

As an illustration, not a research result: health gains over decades often seem to come from trying many small changes, dropping what fails without drama, and keeping what works. Our research desk proposes that the same pattern runs through the whole history of the universe.

Big History, the field that tells the story from the Big Bang to modern society, leans heavily on energy. Astrophysicist Eric Chaisson measured how much energy flows through each gram of a structure each second. In his work, the Milky Way scores about 0.5 erg per second per gram, the Sun about 2, plants about 900, and modern technological society about half a million. Complexity tracks energy flow.

The desk argues that energy is necessary but not sufficient. A new level of complexity appears where a failed attempt is cheap, where the pieces of failure are recycled into the next try, and where tries repeat faster than conditions change. Energy sets the ceiling. Survivable failure decides who reaches it.

Its prediction: at a fixed energy budget, the setting that allows more cheap, recycled attempts will reach higher complexity. It gives this a 40% chance.

The best support comes from origin-of-life chemistry. Building chains such as peptides and RNA in water is uphill, because water breaks the bonds. A 2016 model by McMaster University physicist Paul Higgs showed why wet-dry cycles help. In the dry phase, bonds form. In the wet phase, some break and the pieces move. Each new dry phase builds on the rearranged fragments, and average chain length rises over many cycles. Higgs presented this mainly as support for an RNA world, with long RNAs as the focus and peptides as an extension.

That is almost exactly the desk's mechanism: failure, recycling, repetition. A 2023 experiment from the University of Wisconsin found that cycling conditions shifted products toward longer peptides. A 2025 review of prebiotic peptide synthesis exists, but we could not check its contents, so we do not rely on it. We found no retraction or reversal of the Higgs 2016 or 2023 papers as of October 2026.

The desk's proposed test pits a steady warm vessel against a wet-dry cycled one with equal energy. It honestly flags the problem. Cycling also concentrates the ingredients as water evaporates, so a win could come from concentration, not from cheap failure. A clean test needs a third vessel that concentrates without breaking bonds. This is where the argument is weakest: the one good test has not been run.

• The early universe. Nuclei formed once, everywhere, with no trial and error. The desk admits this threshold does not fit. • Stars. Exploding stars recycle material, but a star does not try and fail. Only half the mechanism applies. • Farming. The desk cites fallback food supplies in the Fertile Crescent. That fits, but it is one reading among several competing explanations for where agriculture began. • Modern economies. Competing European states let one failure not halt the next experiment. Coal also drove the change. The two causes are hard to separate.

Taken as a rule of thumb rather than a law, the idea is useful. In medicine, systems that make error cheap and visible improve. Morbidity and mortality conferences, near-miss reporting and fast iterative trials all work this way. Systems that punish every failure tend to hide them.

The same logic may hold for a personal health plan, though this is an analogy from the hypothesis, not a tested result. Expensive, all-or-nothing programs may fail once and stop, while small, reversible experiments, tracked honestly, may add up.

• Change one habit at a time for two to four weeks, and write down a clear measure before you start. • Choose experiments you can reverse easily, such as meal timing, sleep schedule or training volume. • Keep what helps, drop what does not, and expect most tries to fail.

• A three-vessel prebiotic experiment that separates concentration from cycling. • Whether the desk adds a measurable definition of complexity, such as maximum chain length or product diversity, before testing. • Studies of health systems that compare outcomes with how errors are reported and learned from.

Does Complexity Grow Where Failure Is Cheap? An Untested Big-History Idea The Whale Is Not a Preview of Human Lifespan. We Are Already the Bigger Outlier