Posted 23 June 2003 - 12:34 PM
Hi Kevin,
The first article you gave gets two things right. One, evolution alone is not sufficient to produce life. Evolution is just the mechanism, the ordering law (which is in development now in physics and biology) provides the state space of possibility on which selection acts. The fundamental constants of our Universe seem to be tuned for formation of complex, highly ordered structures. Two, energy is being converted into information and stored locally everywhere in the Universe you look.
The article gets everything else completely wrong. The 2nd Law does not preclude evolution, but is one of the driving forces behind selection - unnecessary info being erased is the energy requiring step of organization. Pre-coding is not necessary, complex order will arise from any sufficiently diverse system whose components have enough connectivity. These type of structures then drive themselves forward, incorporating even more information and increasing their ability to self-connect. Order is very much a spontaneous part of the Universe: Four forces -> fundamental particles -> electrons, neutrinos, quarks -> protons, neutrons -> atoms -> 1st gen. stars -> higher order atoms -> planetary bodies -> molecular diversity -> life (bio. evolution, multiple steps skipped here)-> conciousness
Heat death was conceived of in the late 1800's, but it is a direct decendant of the Newtonian picture of an equilibrium universe. Quantum theory, relativity, and complex and emergent systems theory has completely overturned this picture of the Universe. Things are actually becoming less homogeneous, with time (more and more local sources of organization), and it is still not clear that there is a fixed amount of energy in the Universe (i.e. it may not be a closed system) This gets into some pretty wild and woolly cosmology that I am not completely comfortable with yet though.
The crystal article (actually a summary of the Cairns-Smith ideas on origins of life) is right on target. As we know now - life as naked replicator in open water is kind of silly - even as small a body of water as a tidal pool. You do need a surface to act on to concetrate enough molecules to get the information denstiy and level of interaction required to create a functioning whole. Cairns-Smith proposes clays as the possible surface for interaction. One of the most exciting ideas along this track is the concept that life arose in deep sea thermal vents, which have iron-nickel chemistry (which are great chemical catalysts) with lots of little pockets roughly the same size as bacterial cells and the pockets have extremely high molecular diversity. The idea is that these pockets acted as the protected environment in which pre-membrane biochemistry formed coherent molecular systems. Their is strong evidence for something like this happening because the two most primitive forms of life, the simple Prokaryotes and the Archaea, have internal biochemistries which suggest a common evolutionary ancestor, but their membrane structures are so different that it is likely that their different lipid coats arose in seperate evolutionary events. If this is true, the basic biochemistry of life comes first before formation of a protected chemical environment (the membrane) and it clears up a lot of the nasty timing issues involved in origin of life theory.
I'm literally writing a book on this stuff (information theory at multiple scales) I have a huge stack of research yet to do to complete it, but my thoughts are definitely crystalizing (pun intended). Can't discuss much this week, because I'm trying to get a bunch of writing done before Transvision - a couple of articles on mind uploading and the ethics of neural implantation - but I would be happy to continue the discussion after next Tuesday when I get back.
Best,
Peter
