{"id":12779,"date":"2016-05-11T09:01:16","date_gmt":"2016-05-11T16:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12779"},"modified":"2016-05-11T09:01:16","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T16:01:16","slug":"big-picture-part-four-complexity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/11\/big-picture-part-four-complexity\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Picture Part Four: Complexity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/bigpicture\/\">The Big Picture<\/a><em> &#8212; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/08\/big-picture-part-one-cosmos\/\">Cosmos<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/09\/big-picture-part-two-understanding\/\">Understanding<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/10\/big-picture-part-three-essence\/\">Essence<\/a>, Complexity, Thinking, Caring.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Chapters in Part Four, <strong>Complexity<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"p3\">28. The Universe in a Cup of Coffee<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">29. Light and Life<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">30. Funneling Energy<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">31. Spontaneous Organization<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">32. The Origin and Purpose of Life<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">33. Evolution\u2019s Bootstraps<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">34. Searching Through the Landscape<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">35. Emergent Purpose<\/li>\n<li class=\"p3\">36. Are We the Point?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One of the most annoying arguments a scientist can hear is that &#8220;evolution (or the origin of life) <a href=\"http:\/\/curious.astro.cornell.edu\/about-us\/136-physics\/general-physics\/thermodynamics\/816-does-evolution-contradict-the-second-law-of-thermodynamics-intermediate\">violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics<\/a>.&#8221; The idea is basically that the Second Law says things become more disorganized over time, but the appearance of life represents increased organization, so what do you have to say about that, Dr. Smarty-Pants?<\/p>\n<p>This is a very bad argument, since the Second Law only says that entropy increases in closed systems, not open ones. (Otherwise refrigerators would be impossible, since the entropy of a can of Diet Coke goes down when you cool it.) The Earth&#8217;s biosphere is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/07\/evolution-and-the-second-law\/\">obviously an open system<\/a> &#8212; we get low-entropy photons from the Sun, and radiate high-entropy photons back to the universe &#8212; so there is manifestly no contradiction between the Second Law and the appearance of complex structures.<\/p>\n<p>As right and true as that response is, it doesn&#8217;t quite address the question of why complex structures actually do come into being. Sure, they <em>can<\/em> come into being without violating the Second Law, but that doesn&#8217;t quite explain why they actually do. In Complexity, the fourth part of <em>The Big Picture<\/em>, I talk about why it&#8217;s very natural for such a thing to happen. This covers the evolution of complexity in general, as well as specific questions about the origin of life and Darwinian natural selection. When it comes to abiogenesis, there&#8217;s a lot we don&#8217;t know, but good reason to be optimistic about near-term progress.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In 2000, Gretchen Fr\u00fch-Green, on a ship in the mid-Atlantic Ocean as part of an expedition led by marine geologist Deborah Kelley, stumbled across a collection of ghostly white towers in the video feed from a robotic camera near the ocean floor deep below. Fortunately they had with them a submersible vessel named Alvin, and Kelley set out to explore the structure up close. Further investigation showed that it was just the kind of alkaline vent formation that Russell had anticipated. Two thousand miles east of South Carolina, not far from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the Lost City hydrothermal vent field is at least 30,000 years old, and may be just the first known example of a very common type of geological formation. There\u2019s a lot we don\u2019t know about the ocean floor.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lost_City_Hydrothermal_Field\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-12831\" src=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/lost-city.jpg\" alt=\"Lost City\" width=\"600\" height=\"322\" srcset=\"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/lost-city.jpg 600w, https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/lost-city-300x161.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The chemistry in vents like those at Lost City is rich, and driven by the sort of gradients that could reasonably prefigure life\u2019s metabolic pathways. Reactions familiar from laboratory experiments have been able to produce a number of amino acids, sugars, and other compounds that are needed to ultimately assemble RNA. In the minds of the metabolism-first contingent, the power source provided by disequilibria must come first; the chemistry leading to life will eventually piggyback upon it.<\/p>\n<p>Albert Szent-Gy\u00f6rgyi, a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for the discovery of Vitamin C, once offered the opinion that \u201cLife is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest.\u201d That\u2019s a good summary of the metabolism-first view. There is free energy locked up in certain chemical configurations, and life is one way it can be released. One compelling aspect of the picture is that it\u2019s not simply working backwards from \u201cwe know there\u2019s life, how did it start?\u201d Instead, its suggesting that life is the solution to a problem: \u201cwe have some free energy, how do we liberate it?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Planetary scientists have speculated that hydrothermal vents similar to Lost City, might be abundant on Jupiter\u2019s moon Europa or Saturn\u2019s moon Enceladus. Future exploration of the Solar System might be able to put this picture to a different kind of test.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A tricky part of this discussion is figuring out when it&#8217;s okay to say that a certain naturally-evolved organism or characteristic has a &#8220;purpose.&#8221; Evolution itself has no purpose, but according to poetic naturalism it&#8217;s perfectly okay to ascribe purposes to specific things or processes, as long as that kind of description actually provides a useful way of talking about the higher-level emergent behavior.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of a series of quick posts on the six sections of my book The Big Picture &#8212; Cosmos, Understanding, Essence, Complexity, Thinking, Caring. Chapters in Part Four, Complexity: 28. The Universe in a Cup of Coffee 29. Light and Life 30. Funneling Energy 31. Spontaneous Organization 32. The Origin and Purpose of Life 33. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-picture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12779"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12833,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12779\/revisions\/12833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}