  All living things exhibit adaptations that enable them to survive and
reproduce in the natural environment that they inhabit. From a biological
standpoint, it has long been understood that adaptation comes from natural
selection, whereby maladapted individuals do not pass their traits effectively
to future generations. However, we may also consider the phenomenon of
adaptation from the standpoint of physics, and ask whether it is possible to
delineate what the difference is in terms of physical properties between
something that is well-adapted to its surrounding environment, and something
that is not. In this work, we undertake to address this question from a
theoretical standpoint. Building on past fundamental results in
far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics, we demonstrate a generalization of
the Helmholtz free energy for the finite-time stochastic evolution of driven
Newtonian matter. By analyzing this expression term by term, we are able to
argue for a general tendency in driven many-particle systems towards
self-organization into states formed through exceptionally reliable absorption
and dissipation of work energy from the surrounding environment. Subsequently,
we illustrate the mechanism of this general tendency towards physical
adaptation by analyzing the process of random hopping in driven energy
landscapes.
