betty: let me know if you can see the graphic!
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.
Sheesh ... how soon we evolve into, pin the medal on me and the hell with you, types. ;)
I'm so busted. How was I to know the originator would be reading this thread?
Let that be a lesson to you.
I'm still trying to figure out how I got that in before you, when I wasn't even alive when you joined FR. Perhaps it just evolved.
Just another unexplained mystery of life, I guess. ;)
No problem. Thought the same thing myself for a time.
There are more energy sources in the universe than just our sun. Go outside some clear night and look up.
> Would you therefore think that there is no evolution on
let's say Titan? There is almost no energy from sunlight
there.
"Almost no" =/ "no"
> If one considers
the whole universe as a closed system well that's not
fair, cuz the closed system should tend to higher
entropy.
And to all evidence, the universe IS tendng towards higher entropy. A small island of increased order here and there doesn't change that.
That's gospel truth for you know who.
I completely agree with you - that was my point - evolution does not seem to be dependent upon our sun. But I'm still curious as to how its existence comports with the Second Law, when evolution itself seems to purposefully work in the opposite manner.
> I'm still curious as to how its existence comports with the Second Law, when evolution itself seems to purposefully work in the opposite manner.
1: There is no "purposefulness" apparent in evolution. Mutations appear to be quite random, and what survives being simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
2: Since simple compounds are commonly seen to form more complex compounds regularly in non-biological nature (hydrogen and oxygen forming water, say, or carbon and hydrogen forming any of a number of hydrocarbons from methane on up), it is difficult to see how you come to the conclusion that evolution is somehow in opposition to thermodynamics.
This rises from a misunderstanding of the Second Law. This is due to the need to simply it for the layman. Check out this site for a good explanation.
It raised a point I hadn't ever considered - I'd be interested to hear your thoughts: How does the instinct for self-preservation comport with the Second Law?PMFJI, but my reading of the 2LoT implies that all living things must eat. This is because we must do physical work to keep chaos at bay within our bodies. But all physical work requires energy. The 2LoT says that you get usable energy by tapping into the natural tendency of energy to flow from a concentrated to a dissipated state. So we eat things that are made up of organic chemicals, and then our metabolism releases the energy in these chemicals in such a way that we can tap into the flow of energy as they're transformed into what we call "waste" products.
There's also a theory that since living things need to produce this flow of energy to survive, we are more effective promoters of the universe's drive towards total entropy than nonliving things, and so the 2LoT actually encourages life to exist.
Very basic argument: If the universe tends to become disorderly on its own (entropy), then how can one explain evolution, which is supposedly a naturally occuring tendency towards order.I guess one could argue that living things exhibit more order than nonliving things, but why do you assume that humans, modern cats, modern cattle, modern bacteria, etc. are more ordered than, say, the organisms from the dinosaur age?
Anyway, even assuming the total amount of order represented by today's biota is higher than ancient biota, the answer is that all living things gotta eat. As long as organisms are able to tap into the flow of energy from low-entropy forms to high-entropy forms, then life can flourish. This is true whether we end up scoring their development as "evolution" or "de-evolution".
I dunno. Insofar as most scientists tend towards the reductionist - psychology is biology, biology is chemistry, chemistry is in turn ultimately physics - I'm having trouble seeing said incommensurability as much more than a convenient strawman. Folks with a bent for mysticism tend to make those distinctions, in my experience, not materialists, and the author here does not exactly challenge my belief on that score ;)
And yet if i am not mistaken, the article at the link you provide was written by Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus (Chemistry), Occidental College, Los Angeles. He is deeply involved with the mission and goals of the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society.
It seems the more "complicated" version of the second law -- the one for specialists, not laymen -- is getting a critical look these days. Here's an abstract from an article by Prof. Lambert and Evguenii I. Kozliak, entitled "'Order-to-Disorder' for Entropy Change? Consider the numbers!" (from The Chemical Educator (an online journal), 1 (2005), pp 24-25):
"Defining entropy increase as a change from order to disorder is misleading at best and incorrect at worst. Although Boltzmann described it this way in 1898, he did so innocently in the sense that he had never calculated the numerical values of W using DS = kB ln (W/W0) (because this equation was not stated, kB was not known, and W0 was undeterminable before 1900-1912). Prior publications have demonstrated that the word "disorder" is misleading in describing entropy change. In this paper, convincing evidence in provided that no starting system above ca. 1 K can be said to be orderly so far as the distribution of its energy (the fundamental determinant of entropy) is concerned. This is supported by a simple calculation showing that any system with 'a practical state of zero entropy" has an incomprehensibly large number of microstates.'"
The calculation was done by K. L. Pitzer in Thermodynamics (3rd edition, McGraw-Hill, 1995. It showed "that any molar system even at temperatures as cold as 1 K has about 1026,000,000,000,000,000,000 different microstates. This is not 'order' or 'orderly!'"
Perhaps the focus on the predicted behavior of macrostates -- althugh i am sure this is practically useful in many technical applications -- is just to look at the "tip of the iceberg." In the end, the microstates "rule." (So to speak.)
Or so it seems to this layman, FWIW.
Thanks for writing, Paradox!
Ms. betty boop
That is precisely the point I thought I had made in my earlier post. To wit:
Boltzman made the observation about the second law that the disorder increased. However, this was an observation. The cause was an increase in statistical probablility. Moreover, as an observation, implicit was the boundary conditions of the original deriviation. This has been perpetually misinterpreted by by many without a physics education, including this author, to mean that the second law was cuased by a necessary increase in disorder.
Quite the wiseguy for a Jarhead :)
LOL
Hi mlc9852! I’ll take a stab at the problem – but this will be in “layman’s terms” as rendered by a layman. I can’t do it otherwise. I will try to be as brief as possible, and so will have to generalize. If questions are still not clear, or if someone thinks I have “overgeneralized,” then that will be further grist for the mill, IMO. I hope people will not be shy about participating in this discussion.
For openers, Swenson is putting his argument into an ecological perspective. He feels there are good reasons for doing this, both in terms of the second law of thermodynamics, and in terms of developing a larger, more comprehensive concept of “evolution” than Darwinist theory provides. (Unlike Darwin, he does not see that evolution is confined to biological species ONLY, but as a process extending to the entire Universe – his “evolution of a Population of One.” In a nutshell, “Big Bang” cosmology supports his view: Anything that “begins,” “evolves.” And that would certainly include such things as human knowledge, culture, and society.)
RE: the second law: all natural processes are governed by it. [In general, this law deals with changes in energy states -- transformations of energy from one type to another: thermal, electromagnetic, gravitational, sound, etc.] Systems subject to the second law – that is all systems in nature -- have a “source” and a “sink.” In the case of living systems (unlike in non-living or inorganic systems), the “source” is endothermic (as jennyp seems most usefully to have suggested; i.e., metabolism) -- sui generis energy produced according to the physico-chemical laws given the initial and boundary conditions. The “sink” is the environment, which may be extrapolated to the Universe. The second law says that energy flows move from the source to the sink in a “spreading out” process unless inhibited from doing so by another natural cause or process.
Thus Swenson thinks it is incorrect to regard a living system as somehow “discrete” from its environment. He proposes an explanation for this unfruitful tendency: the so-called “Cartesian split,” a “dualistic worldview” that divides the natural sciences from the so-called humanities, and so falsifies the world of human experience because it divides living being into a stark “material” vs. “spiritual” dichotomy. The resulting supposition is that the natural sciences alone have the methods to make truthful statements about reality.
Descartes was a mathematician and philosopher of world-class genius and distinction. But I think were he alive today, he would deplore the so-called “mind-body” division that is usually attributed to him.
Anyhoot, Swenson says that Darwin wholly bought into the “Cartesian,” dualist understanding of reality: to the end that the emphasis he placed was on the body, on matter, on scientific technic itself; and not at all on the other side of the great epistemic divide – characterized by what the German language denotes as the “sciences of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften). This epistemic branch -- populated by philosophy, cosmology, psychology, sociology, ethics, theology, political science, anthropology, history and culture, etc. -- was largely eclipsed by his methods, not to mention his theory – which was the genius of the Naturwissenschaften side of the Cartesian split – the formal sciences, that is: mainly physics and chemistry.
Descartes lived in a wholly Newtonian universe, the billiard-ball model of material existence wherein discrete material bodies are forever flying around, impacting each other and thus mutually deranging the motions of their (near) neighbors -- such that the only reasonable consequence to be drawn from the exercise would be that the system of billiard balls would reach a point of total disorder, randomness, chaos, sooner rather than later – such that the achievement of the state of thermodynamic equilibrium would be reached as efficiently and timely as possible. I gather this was Boltzmann’s view of things.
Now, in a state of complete thermodynamic equilibrium, nothing can happen; and that for the reason that all energetic potentials in the system (and by extension to the Universe) have been exhausted, spent out. Thus the Universe “reaps” (or is restored to) the “state of nothingness” that obtained before it came into existence.
Here’s the question that preoccupies me on this point: Into what “sink” are these energies relentlessly, chaotically being dissipated, such that thermodynamic equilibrium is reached for the universal system? The “catch-all” phrase for this state of the system is “heat death.” Not for nothing (or so it seems to me) did the poet Robert Frost inquire whether the Universe would be extinguished “by fire or ice.”
Swenson lays two charges at Darwin’s doorstep: that his theory postulates two “incommensurables” – entities that can in no way be reconciled to each other; that is, they are virtually mutually exclusive. The two incommensurabilities are: (1) physics and biology; and (2) psychology (consciousness) and biology.
Regarding (1), biology cannot happen without the “cooperation of” the physico-chemical laws. Regarding point (2), Swenson derived his insights from the actual statements of “Darwinian epistemologists,” such as Levins, Lewontin, and Dennett, to the effect that biology somehow works to “defy” the laws of physics. (The law in question would be the second law.) But Swenson isn’t buying it.
Regarding point (2), it seems that all living systems in nature possess some form of consciousness, from simple sentience, through “awareness,” through self-awareness, through consciousness, to the full-blown selfconsciousness, which is mandatory for thought, for reason to operate in the first place.
So Swenson gets a tad exercised, because Darwin’s system not only does not accord with the universality of the second law; but it also denies a central fact of living beings: That they possess a form of consciousness, and thus have the capability – in varying degrees – to assess situations in which they are existentially involved; they possess a form of memory and thus have some capability of “learning” from their experiences; and so can modify their paths accordingly, such that they may persist in the living state – which theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer has defined as the achievement and maintenance over long timescales of the greatest distance possible from the onset of thermodynamic equilibrium.
Surprisingly, and seemingly paradoxically, the achievement of maximal entropy is the single greatest help to the problem of the persistence of biological organisms. But this will have to be a topic for another time, for I’m kinda spent right now…. For now, all we need is to think of entropy within living systems as signifying the virtually infinite field of possibilities that the Universe and any of its discrete yet participating organisms might yet evolve into.
Gosh, I probably got to wandering there a bit. And so have probably not answered your immediate concerns, mlc9852. If that be the case, I’m sorry; but thanks so much for staying with me so far. And thanks for writing!
Dear Jarhead, I very much appreciated your above remarks when first I read them. I pinged my last to you, not because I disagreed with you, but because i thought you might find my conversation interesting. (I was responding to another poster at the time. He has yet to give me Hell.... I can't wait. :^)
Hope springs eternal. Thanks for writing!
betty: let me know if you can see the graphic!
5. The incommensurability between biology and physics assumed by Darwinian theory provides no basis within the theory according to which epistemic or meaningful relations between living things and their environments can take place.
Well, this is the main sticking point for yours truly. If evolution is truly "natural" then there has to be some sort of very real and obvious connection to physics and natural laws.
I also like the fact that Swenson realizes that organisms can not be so easily seperated from their ennvironments, and yet evolutionary theory seems to completely ignore this basic fact. One could argue that the connection falls under the umbrella of "natural selection, " but then selection is a destructive force only, and does not explain the symboitic relationship between organisms and their environments.
Really, evolution doesn't even explain why there even has to be evolution. jennyp speaks of the biological niches that need to be filled, but if your an organism surviving quite nicely in your little niche, there is no way it can know or discover a new niche that it now needs to evolve to occupy. In evolutionary theory, the only way it can happen is for an organism to accidently breed offspring that just happen to fill the new niche. Such a thing is within the realm of probabilty, and I think such things have been observed with very simple single-celled organisms, but then their simplicity is their virtue. It's quite another thing for a mouse to adopt to flying in order to catch tasty little insects.
All of Swenson's points are excellent and unassailable. I've seen some posters going after the low-hanging fruit of entropy, but really it's not a big deal in his argument, and could even be left out.
But the best little soundbite from this article is the one you quoted:
The autocatakinesis of living things, in contrast, is maintained with respect to non-local potentials discontinuously located in space-time to which they are not permanently connected.”
Just a fancy way of saying that outside forces have been at work in our biological world, beyond those of observable phenomena. And yet the effect of these unobservable forces can be observed, much like we can see a tree moving in the wind, but cannot see the wind itself.
The door for Intelligent Design is not only open, but is necessary to explain what we're observing!
Great article betty!
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