Jeremy England

Jeremy England is an American physicist who uses statistical physics arguments to explain the spontaneous emergence of life, and consequently, the modern synthesis of evolution.

England terms this process dissipation-driven adaptation.

England was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in a college town in New Hampshire.

His mother was the daughter of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors, while his father was a non-observant Lutheran.

He was raised Jewish but did not seriously study Judaism and the Torah until he attended graduate school at Oxford University.

He now considers himself an Orthodox Jew who has been inspired by Zionist ideology.

He has previously written on The Stanford Review contesting Palestinians' right to the land occupied by Israel since 1948, wishing them "well in finding homes outside the Land of Israel".

England earned a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from Harvard in 2003.

After being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, he studied at St. John's College, Oxford, from 2003 until 2005.

England was selected as a Rhodes Scholar and Hertz fellow in 2003.

He earned his Ph.D. in physics at Stanford in 2009 under Vijay S. Pande, where he was supported by a Hertz Fellowship.

In 2011, he joined MIT as an assistant professor of physics; subsequently, he was associate professor of physics from 2017 until 2019.

In 2012, he was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for his scientific achievements.

In 2021, he was given the Irwin Oppenheim Award by the American Physical Society alongside Sumantra Sarkar.

Forbes.com seems to have lost most of the content on his profile and lists a broken link to the 2012 30-under-30 in Science.

However, neither the 2012 nor the 2018 official listing pages on Forbes.com list England.

The Hertz Foundation profile mentions the 2018 Forbes 30-under-30.

In 2019, he left MIT to join GlaxoSmithKline as a senior director in artificial intelligence and machine learning; he was promoted to vice president in 2023.

He was a principal research scientist at Georgia Tech from 2020 until 2023, when he joined Bar-Ilan University as a visiting professor of physics.

England has developed a hypothesis of the physics of the origins of life, based on a mechanism which he calls dissipation-driven adaptation.

The hypothesis holds that random groups of molecules can self-organize to more reliably absorb and dissipate heat from the environment, and that such self-organizing systems are an inherent part of the physical world.

Pulitzer Prize–winning science historian Edward J. Larson said that if England can demonstrate his hypothesis to be true, "he could be the next Darwin."

A fictionalized version of England and his theory are featured in the novel Origin by Dan Brown.

England, who is an Orthodox Jew and ordained rabbi, has written that he strongly rejects Brown's depiction of him as being a scientist who is unconcerned with spiritual matters.