Posted on 05/04/2005 10:48:30 AM PDT by betty boop
Autocatakinetics, Evolution, and the Law of Maximum Entropy Production
By Rod Swenson
An Excerpt:
Ecological science addresses the relations of living things to their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. There is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science of separating living things, and, in particular, humans from their environments. Beginning with Descartes’ dualistic world view, this tradition found its way into biology by way of Kant, and evolutionary theory through Darwin, and manifests itself in two main postulates of incommensurability, the incommensurability between psychology and physics (the “first postulate of incommensurability”), and between biology and physics (the “second postulate of incommensurability”).
The idea of the incommensurability between living things and their environments gained what seemed strong scientific backing with Boltzmann’s view of the second law of thermodynamics as a law of disorder according to which the transformation of disorder to order was said to be infinitely improbable. If this were true, and until very recently it has been taken to be so, then the whole of life and its evolution becomes one improbable event after another. The laws of physics, on this view, predict a world that should be becoming more disordered, while terrestrial evolution is characterized by active order production. The world, on this view, seemed to consist of two incommensurable, or opposing “rivers,” the river of physics which flowed down to disorder, and the river of biology, psychology, and culture, which “flowed up,” working, it seemed, to produce as much order as possible.
As a consequence of Boltzmann’s view of the second law, evolutionary theorists, right up to present times, have held onto the belief that “organic evolution was a negation of physical evolution,” and that biology and culture work somehow to “defy” the laws of physics (Dennett, 1995). With its definition of evolution as an exclusively biological process, Darwinism separates both biology and culture from their universal, or ecological, contexts, and advertises the Cartesian postulates of incommensurability at its core, postulates that are inimical to the idea of ecological science. An ecological science, by definition, assumes contextualization or embeddedness, and as its first line of business wants to know what the nature of it is. This requires a universal, or general theory of evolution which can uncover and explicate the relationship of the two otherwise incommensurable rivers, and put the active ordering of biological, and cultural systems, of terrestrial evolution as a time-asymmetric process, back into the world.
The law of maximum entropy production, when coupled with the balance equation of the second law, and the general facts of autocatakinetics [see below], provides the nomological basis for such a theory, and shows why, rather than living in a world where order production is infinitely improbable, we live in and are products of a world, in effect, that can be expected to produce as much order as it can. It shows how the two otherwise incommensurable rivers, physics on the one hand, and biology, psychology, and culture on the other, are part of the same universal process and how the fecundity principle, and the intentional dynamics it entails, are special cases of an active, end-directed world opportunistically filling dynamical dimensions of space-time as a consequence of universal law. The epistemic dimension, the urgency towards existence in Leibniz’s terms, characterizing the intentional dynamics of living things and expressed in the fecundity principle, and the process of evolution writ large as a single planetary process, is thus not only commensurable with first, or universal, principles, but a direct manifestation of them.
The view presented here thus provides a principled basis for putting living things, including humans, back in the world, and recognizing living things and their environments as single irreducible systems. It provides the basis for contextualizing the deep and difficult questions concerning the place of humans as both productions and producers of an active and dynamic process of terrestrial evolution, which as a consequence of the present globalization of culture is changing the face of the planet at a rate which seems to be without precedent over geological time. Of course, answers to questions such as these always lead to more questions, but such is the nature of the epistemic process we call life.
> They are primarily mathematicians and physicists looking to solve the “unphysical” questions of biological life.
Again you assume that "complex" = "magic."
Your view remains massively unsupported.
> assert that this entire effort outlined above will ultimately destroy the "randomness" pillar of evolution theory
Yes, we've heard this line of superstitious hopefulness before.
Simply glorious, Alamo-Girl. We and the whole creation groan and travail together.... We do not stand "outside" of nature. And also it seems to me that nature isn't "here" to do our bidding to serve our own selfish purposes, either.
Thank you for your beautiful post!
Cool post, Betty. Thanks
Which simply serves to illustrate the misapplication of the second law here. You can overcome the tendency to increased entropy any time you like - all it takes is energy. If that's "cheating", it's the same sort of "cheating" that goes on when your car gains a bit of energy and is able to overcome its tendency to roll downhill. Energy makes the world go round, in more ways than one.
A plant is a plant, and not simply a bag of chemicals, because energy from the sun is put to work overcoming the tendency to be nothing more than a bag of chemicals. Life exists for the same reason anything at all besides a plain hydrogen soup exists - energy makes organization possible. The same thing that allows rocks and stars to exist allows you to exist.
So, have you decided whether you are a monist or a dualist?
"I yam what I yam." - P. Eye, patriot, sailor, philosopher.
;^)
OK.
Quoting from the text:
Boltzmann’s view of the second law of thermodynamics as a law of disorder according to which the transformation of disorder to order was said to be infinitely improbable. If this were true, and until very recently it has been taken to be so, then the whole of life and its evolution becomes one improbable event after another. The laws of physics, on this view, predict a world that should be becoming more disordered, while terrestrial evolution is characterized by active order production.
I read this passage as meaning that the evolution of life, from disorder to order is impossible (infinitely improbable), under the auspices of the laws of physics and Darwin evolution. Therefore, the only mechanism that would allow order from disorder, against the entropy gradient, is implicily divine intervention.
In my view, evolution is a feedBACK system, you make a change and then find out whether it works.
Who, exactly is doing the "finding out?" And how, exactly, are they able to intelligently/rationally/logically make a change based on this feedback?
The way I read this passage was that, on the Boltzmannian view, the evolution of life from disorder to order is impossible (or "infinitely improbable"). That is, Boltzmann's interpretation of the second law based on a mechanistic, "billiard ball universe" is not a good model for explaining evolution.
Swenson has said nothing about divine intervention here.
BTW, Sir Isaac Newton, I gather, thought that his mechanistic, billiard-ball model of the universe inevitably would lead to such disorder that God would be required to step in to "set things right" again. But this created quite a scandal in his day; for people objected to the idea of divine creation as being less than "perfect," and for God to step back into the picture to "make things right" would be to confess that God himself is not "perfect being." For a perfect creator must create a perfect world.
I personally do not share this view; but there it is.
Thanks, Tribune7!
The point is, Swenson is wagging his finger at three extraordinarily doctrinaire Darwinists (and rigid materialists) here. It is they who need to hear your explanation (which I think is very good FWIW) -- not Swenson or me. :^)
In the Newtonian mechanistic worldview, space and time are distinct and absolute.29 In Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905), the distinction between space and time dissolves: there is only a new unity, four-dimensional space-time, and the observer's perception of ``space'' and ``time'' depends on her state of motion.30 In Hermann Minkowski's famous words (1908):
Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.31
Nevertheless, the underlying geometry of Minkowskian space-time remains absolute.32
It is in Einstein's general theory of relativity (1915) that the radical conceptual break occurs: the space-time geometry becomes contingent and dynamical, encoding in itself the gravitational field. Mathematically, Einstein breaks with the tradition dating back to Euclid (and which is inflicted on high-school students even today!), and employs instead the non-Euclidean geometry developed by Riemann. Einstein's equations are highly nonlinear, which is why traditionally-trained mathematicians find them so difficult to solve.33 Newton's gravitational theory corresponds to the crude (and conceptually misleading) truncation of Einstein's equations in which the nonlinearity is simply ignored. Einstein's general relativity therefore subsumes all the putative successes of Newton's theory, while going beyond Newton to predict radically new phenomena that arise directly from the nonlinearity: the bending of starlight by the sun, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, and the gravitational collapse of stars into black holes.
General relativity is so weird that some of its consequences -- deduced by impeccable mathematics, and increasingly confirmed by astrophysical observation -- read like science fiction. Black holes are by now well known, and wormholes are beginning to make the charts. Perhaps less familiar is Gödel's construction of an Einstein space-time admitting closed timelike curves: that is, a universe in which it is possible to travel into one's own past!34
Thus, general relativity forces upon us radically new and counterintuitive notions of space, time and causality35 36 37 38; so it is not surprising that it has had a profound impact not only on the natural sciences but also on philosophy, literary criticism, and the human sciences. For example, in a celebrated symposium three decades ago on Les Langages Critiques et les Sciences de l'Homme, Jean Hyppolite raised an incisive question about Jacques Derrida's theory of structure and sign in scientific discourse:
When I take, for example, the structure of certain algebraic constructions [ensembles], where is the center? Is the center the knowledge of general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege within the ensemble? ... With Einstein, for example, we see the end of a kind of privilege of empiric evidence. And in that connection we see a constant appear, a constant which is a combination of space-time, which does not belong to any of the experimenters who live the experience, but which, in a way, dominates the whole construct; and this notion of the constant -- is this the center?39
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something -- of a center starting from which an observer could master the field -- but the very concept of the game ...40
In mathematical terms, Derrida's observation relates to the invariance of the Einstein field equation under nonlinear space-time diffeomorphisms (self-mappings of the space-time manifold which are infinitely differentiable but not necessarily analytic). The key point is that this invariance group ``acts transitively'': this means that any space-time point, if it exists at all, can be transformed into any other. In this way the infinite-dimensional invariance group erodes the distinction between observer and observed; the of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.
Alan D. Sokal
"It is not even wrong." - Wolfgang Pauli
"And how, exactly, are they able to intelligently/rationally/logically make a change based on this feedback?"
If the change doesn't work, the creature dies. That is negative feedback at it's least subtle and is undeniable. But I think there are some feedforward processes possible as well.
I assert that this entire effort outlined above will ultimately destroy the "randomness"pillar of evolution theory: M + NS > Species.
Actually A-G, I think the theory of evolution is better expressed as M - NS. Natural selection can only take things away (unto death) not add anything! Is this correct?
A DNA gene five amino acids long is a self-replicating molecule. In the absense of greater competition, such as woudl ahve been the case on the primodrial Earth more than a billion years ago, this tiny molecular precursor to life would have been busy consuming and copying itself, and occasionally makign errors and adding to itself.
Exactly how would a DNA gene be able to self-replicate? Where would the materials for replication come from in the primordial scenario?
Also, does it replicate other independent genes, or do they just get added to the already existing DNA molecule?
Also, how was the original DNA gene created in your primordial scenario?
What good is a DNA of any length without a cell? And what, in your scenario, created the cell for the DNA?
A plant is a plant, and not simply a bag of chemicals, because energy from the sun is put to work overcoming the tendency to be nothing more than a bag of chemicals. Life exists for the same reason anything at all besides a plain hydrogen soup exists - energy makes organization possible. The same thing that allows rocks and stars to exist allows you to exist.
I agree with you general 'that engergy makes organization possible.' But is it not so that the more refined and more "complex" the order, the more energy must be very specifically and intentionally directed?
If energy is all that is needed, then shouldn't Mercury and Venus be tropical paradises? Afterall, they both get a LOT MORE engergy from Mr. Sun than we do...
If the change doesn't work, the creature dies. That is negative feedback at it's least subtle and is undeniable.
Well, for us it is! But as they say, dead men tell no tales...
It's not so much a matter of how it's directed as what sort of organization you're looking for. A snowflake represents a reduction in entropy over liquid water, but there aren't any snowflakes on Mercury - not because the energy isn't "directed" properly, but because there's just too much of it around to be conducive to snowflakes.
The sorts of chemicals that make up life on earth tend not to work in the absence of liquid water as a universal solvent - if there's too much energy around to have liquid water, it won't do its thing. This doesn't mean that life is flat-out impossible at 700 degrees or whatever, but it certainly wouldn't be life as we know it. Energy is a necessary component for self-organizing systems, but that's not all there is to it - other conditions have to be in place. And in fact, in the sense that crystalline mineral deposits probably exist on Mercury and Venus, there's a certain amount of self-organization and entropy reduction there too - just not the sort we're interested in.
LOLOL RightWhale! Thanks for clearing that up. :^)
> Where would the materials for replication come from in the primordial scenario?
Lab tests have shown that production of amino acids and even complex proteins is almost trivially easy given the conditions of the early Earth (a carbon dioxide, methane, hydrogen and nitrogen atmosphere, a conculsion reached by astronomical examination of the rest of the universe). Consequently, over time, the early oceans, lakes and tide pools quite literally would have been the "primordial soup," filled with these precursors for life. It would only take ONE very short self-replicating DNA chain to start off the whole process in that environment. Life would literally explode; and for many millions of years there would be relatively little competition, almost no predation, given that the little buggers would be swimmign in food. But once they started to clear out their environment... that is when evolution would really kick in.
> does it replicate other independent genes, or do they just get added to the already existing DNA molecule?
Probably both.
> how was the original DNA gene created in your primordial scenario
Once the right amino acids were created in the right concentrations, they seem to link up pretty much on their own. Fill a swimming pool with Legos and stir, some of them will link up.
> What good is a DNA of any length without a cell?
That question is meaningless. What good is a rock? What good is salt water? What good is ethane?
> And what, in your scenario, created the cell for the DNA?
I presume you mean the cell membrane? Look up the Fox experiments. A straightforward extension of the Miller experiments produced cell-sized hollow spherical protein shells. These are prefectly functional cell membranes, and match up with microfossils.
What about dust devils in Tasmania?
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