Evolution and Entropy
Colleagues,
The certainty of the Second Law of Thermodynamics seems to be well rooted in our experiences and psyches. Given that I had to take thermodynamics a few times, I had it thoroughly installed in my brain. Further, my view of cars in Michigan serves to convince me that rust wins and the Second Law is in full force.
How is it then that evolution can occur given the predominance of this law of decreasing order?
Put another way: Evolution is not a process of expressing pre-existing information but is a process by which new information comes to exist in the first place.
Please, educate me in just how evolution can operate and not violate the Second Law.
Thanks,
Joey
P.S. I know that the Second Law is just as valid and even more prevalent in open systems as in closed systems - so save the blogosphere this "open system" argument.
P.P.S. Also, don't tell me Prigogine solved this in 1977. Prigogine himself states that his work on "dissipative structures" cannot explain the formation of biological structures.
Joey, it would appear that you need to go take a few more courses...
The problem is, of course, that energy is not information. Therefore, evolution does not conflict with the second law of thermodynamics — it is orthogonal to it.
If we look at the entity called Joey, we would conclude that he is impossible by the second law of thermodynamics. After all, the sequence of highly improbable events which produced that particular piece of genetics CAN'T happen — it would require all parents and their parents, ad infinitum, to have been feeling frisky at just the right time and with just the right sperm winning the race. Compound that with the fact that all of those breeders needed to make it to breeding age without dying of illness or injury, joining the celibate priesthood or being eaten and we would quickly conclude that Joey is just a figment of my imagination.
Another way to phrase this would be:
Shit happens.
If it happens in the negative direction, people call it an act of god (substituting wrath if it happened to somebody you didn't like) and if it happens in the positive direction, it is a miracle and held up as an icon for the faithful.
If Joey takes another few courses and they sink in and other miracles occur, he has a chance of being judged as happening in the positive direction.
Ahhh,
So glad to have you back - vitriol and all. . .
I was hoping this topic would get you back with us.
Thanks for the below-the-belt stuff too
js
One web author claims that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the mechanisms by which it operates, i.e. mutation and natural selection, do not, by themselves, violate the second law as overall chemical processes.
My problem with this argument is that it does not explain the appearance of the genome and its inherently small entropy/high information content. This is not to mention the complexity of even the smallest organism/genome and that mutation/selection frequencies don't get us to today's complexity levels.
I am still looking for an explanation of the reason for the appearance of the DNA/RNA molecule that contains such a remarkably large information content - and while simultaneously not violating the Second Law.
Joey - why do you think the second law is violated in evolution? The universe is not in equilibrium (yet), and maybe never will be.
You might as well say that tornadoes are against the second law, as they are things with high self-organization that simply crop up from time to time. by themselves they would violate the 2nd law, but they're not isolated, so they can happen. they feed off the disequilibrium between the sun (5000K) and the cold of empty space (3K).
pmm