Entropy and the Origin of Life

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, states that the universe moves from order to disorder.  To the initiate, this would seem to contradict a common observation:  that life systems in general and humans in particular move from a disordered state to an ordered state.  Life seems to move in opposition to entropy.  If the universe moves towards disorder, how, then, does life evolve? These are questions that early researchers in thermodynamics, such as Schrödinger and Prigogine, asked themselves.

In fact, we can see order spontaneously created from disorder around us all the time.  When water starts to go down the drain in the tub, for example, you will see a little whirlpool (vortex in physics-speak) form around the drain.  

Order spontaneously created from Disorder.

Or when a heated solution moves from mere conduction heat transfer to heat transfer through convection cells.  Or when you flick a super-saturated solution of copper sulphate in water and the whole test-tube freezes as the copper sulphate crystallizes. In each case, when faced with a large energy gradient, an organized structure (vortex, convection cell, crystal lattice) spontaneously formed.  So spontaneous organization is not peculiar to life.

What is required in each case is the energy gradient (potential energy from the height of the water in the case of the vortex, heat in the case of the convection cell and concentration in the case of the copper sulphate solution).  The system "wants" to maintain its equilibrium, and the most efficient way it can do this is by organizing itself to dissipate the energy gradient and return to equilibrium.  Order can only appear from disorder if there is an energy gradient to exploit.

In complexity theory, these are known as self-organizing dissipative structures.  "Dissipative" because they "seek" to dissipate the energy gradient and return the system to equilibrium.  These organized systems that spontaneously appear are, in fact, low entropy.  However they only decrease entropy locally, and only in order to more efficiently increase entropy globally.

Moving up in scale, the planet Earth is subject to a huge energy gradient, namely the massive influx of energy from the sun. Recall that exergy is a measure of the quality of energy, the availability of that energy to do something useful.  The energy gradient, or Exergy, is basically a measure of distance of a system from equilibrium.  At equilibrium, exergy is zero. The system (Earth) receives a exergy from the sun in the form of electromagnetic radiation (mainly heat and light).  The system responds in a way to dissipate that exergy, to move it towards zero (equilibrium). 

So taken on their own, humans and other life forms are indeed a reversal in the tendency towards increased entropy.  However, taken within the context of the system as a whole (Earth-Sun system) we are actually increasing the rate of the entropy.  From a thermodynamic perspective, we are self-organized dissipative structures seeking to dissipate the exergy from the sun.

The late Waterloo professor James Kay wrote extensively about non-equilibrium thermodynamics and self-organizing systems.  He cites studies where an overflying aircraft with thermal multispectral analysis capability measures the "canopy temperature" of different ecosystems, including an astroturf field, a mowed lawn, a farmers field, and a complex rainforest ecosystem.  The surface temperature of the rainforest ecosystem was the coolest, indicating that the most complex ecosystem was also the most efficient at using the incoming solar exergy.  The astroturf was the warmest, because there are no life systems (such as photosynthesis) to effectively use the incoming solar radiation.  The rainforest, conversely, had a rich array of life systems to effectively use all the incoming solar energy.

A human being, I have heard said, is an organism that takes perfectly good food and manufactures it into crap.  That is one way we increase entropy.  We also must keep the furnaces of our bodies going, so we constantly generate about as much heat as a 100 W light bulb. On a social level we increase the disorder of the environment around us in order to increase order of our societies.  We take low-entropy bound carbon in oil and release it as very high-entropy gaseous oxidized carbon, for example. We know from the Second Law of Thermodynamics that the amount of disorder we create in the environment is greater than the amount of order we reap (thus, globally, entropy increases).

It’s a great theory and make s a lot of intuitive sense. 

However, I was left wondering:  the energy gradient due to the sun on the planet Mercury is far greater than that of Earth, yet as far as we know, there is no life on Mercury, no super-high level of self-organizing dissipating systems. Same with Venus.  So why only Earth? 

Schrödinger hypothesized that self-organizing dissipative systems only happen within a "window of vitality."  Too little exergy and there is not enough of a gradient to drive the creation of a self-organizing dissipative system.  Too much energy and the system is overcome and becomes chaotic.  But nobody has been able to develop, to my knowledge, any of the science around what the limits of the window of vitality are. 

Until then, the theory of life as a self-organizing dissipative system remains and enticing idea, but it is missing a crucial link.

You Are Free to Think What You Will of This

We have, in Canada, enshrined in our Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Charter, among other things, guarantees any person in Canada certain fundamental freedoms including: freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. 

Canada, unlike the US, also has a limitations clause (Section 1), that these freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."  For instance, inciting hatred against identifiable groups or publishing child pornography are not protected by these fundamental freedoms.

I must admit to be a little puzzled at Freedom of Thought.  What would Canada look like if that particular fundamental freedom were removed?  After all the state has no idea what someone is thinking and no definitive way to find out.

As there is and never has been any state power over thought, why include it as a freedom?  Even North Korea, which controls every facet of its peoples' lives, cannot know or control what those people are thinking.  Sure the serfs prostrate themselves before Kim Jon Il's portraits, but how do the rulers know that the guy in the seventeenth row, fifth one in, isn't thinking, while groveling, "Geez, what a douchebag."

How would they possibly regulate thought anyway?  Without Freedom of Thought, I suppose they could constitutionally pass a law making it illegal to imagine a colander.  Wouldn't that be interesting.  Were they imagining a future where the imagination could be read, and safeguarding against that?  Were the writers of the Charter mindful of Orwell's of "Thoughtcrime" in his cautionary tale 1984?  What were they thinking?

I also note that the Canadian Constitution contains no right to life itself. Interesting.   The founding ideals of the American Declaration of Independence are the rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  (Just the pursuit of happiness; apparently actual happiness is unconstitutional.)  Compare that to steadfast, boring old Canada's ultimate ideals of "peace order and good governance."  Interesting.

In a related note does anyone know the difference between a right and a freedom?  I was once told that a freedom guarantees that the state will not interfere (so if you say you don't like the current government, they will not, for example, arrest you), whereas a right is a guarantee the state will interfere (so the state will actively intervene against others threatening your freedom of expression).

This seemed to make intuitive sense to me, however I ran into some folks who were offended by that interpretation because it defined rights and freedoms in reference to the State.  Fundamental rights and freedoms, they argued, arose not from the State but from being human. This is expressed in the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."  Beautifully written. 

So, this view holds, despite the fact that a given state does not grant human rights (such as in Syria, where the security forces have turned on their own citizens to horrific effect), those people still have these fundamental rights and freedoms.  A fat lot of good it does them; a right won't stop a bullet.

If a person is born with these rights--if they are, in fact, unalienable--then where are they?  I can see a baby's nose and her cute little toes. I can hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth.  But in which toe can I find the right to freedom of conscience?  What instrument can I use to find the gene that expresses her freedom of belief?

The idea that we are born with these rights is essentially metaphysical.  A human right, by this definition, is not rational, but metaphysical.  A freedom is not empirical, but ineffable. 

More importantly, who put that freedom there?  Where did it come from?  Societal mores and ethics change incredibly over time and space--every virtue was once vice and vice versa.  Yet these Human Rights are specific, unyielding, and absolute.  (NB Brad H--note the use of the Oxford comma!)  To my mind then, you can't say that every human is born with human rights without positing the existence of an Absolute Good, which is tantamount to God.  Perhaps that is why ,in its preamble, the Constitution of Canada recognizes the supremacy of God.  It's an inexorable precursor to an unalienable human right.

The Darwinian approach to rights is different.  In this model rights started out as good ideas, which grew to habits, and evolved to tradition, and then were codified in law and ultimately became morals.   The idea here is that morals are "good" because civilizations that adopted these morals were more successful than civilizations that did not.  There is, for example, a commandment that says "Thou shalt not kill."  My brother is a bit of a biblical scholar and he informed me that a more accurate translation would be "Thou shalt not murder."  Every high-functioning civilization I can think of makes allowances to kill--war being the classic example. 

However, a society cannot function if people can kill each other arbitrarily, without consent from the state.  So the prohibition against murder makes a society, from a Darwinian perspective, more fit to survive.  I would argue (without having the time to research this extensively) that contemporary states that that assert fundamental human rights are more successful, in terms of both peace, order and good governance and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Historian Will Durant agrees:

The development of external danger and competition unified the members of a group into some measure of fellow-feeling (sympathy), group-feeling (kindness), sociability, and mutual aid; those simple virtues... were really social necessities for group survival; and the strange paradox appeared that the very violence of competition and strife among societies was the cause of cooperation and peace within; it was war, or the possibility of war, that make morality, as it made morale. ...In the light of this biological approach it becomes sufficiently obvious that the natural and inevitable basis and definition of morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole

Nietzsche made a differentiation between the two types of good.  There's good=successful, as in being a "good hockey player," and there's good=virtuous as in being a "good man."  The Darwinian model says that rights and freedoms are good in the former sense; the Absolute Good model, in the latter sense. 

This is exemplified in the doves versus hawk game in fundamental games theory.  A dove will never fight for food and a hawk will always fight for food.  The perfect civilization would be all doves, but it is unstable; a single hawk would wreak havoc.  John Lennon could have sung "Imagine being able to perpetuate indefinitely the unstable solution of an all-dove society."  Hard to rhyme I guess.  The optimal solution is a some mixture of hawks and doves based on the boundary conditions.

In the Darwinian model, the precursor to human rights is the effective rule of law (law, being essentially, codified morality).  And I also note that the other ideal, besides the supremacy of God, to which the Constitution of Canada commits itself in its preamble is "the rule of law."  They covered both bases--the Absolute Good model and the Darwinian model!  Maybe those drafters of the Constitution are more clever than I give them credit for.  But I still have my questions about Freedom of Thought.  You're free to think what you will of that.

And the White House Burned Burned Burned (But the Americans Won't Admit It)

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

   -- Michael Scott, The Office

Canada is celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812 this year. All year.  In 1812, the United States declared war on Britain for various stated reasons, none of which included conquering Canada.  Then they promptly tried to conquer Canada (or what was then known as Upper and Lower Canada, to be specific).  The British forces, allied Indian tribes and Canadian militia repelled several attacks by the US. Ten American armies invaded Canada.  Ten armies were sent home.

Read all about it on Wikipedia.  The article itself insists that the war was a tie or that all sides (except the Indians) won. It’s quite a little rah-rah piece if you’re an American, waxing poetic about great feats of the nascent American navy against those nasty British.  The idea that the US would invade Canada for reasons as base as US expansionism is dismissed.  Americans?  Expand?  Fie!  The Americans had no interest in Canada at all, and were quite surprised to find themselves there!  Sure Thomas Jefferson said that conquerig Canada was a mere matter of marching--but he was talking about a game of Risk.  And I'm sure that if one of the reasons the US declared war was to snatch Canada while Britain was busy with Napolean, then the politicians at the time would have said so.

The Talk page that accompanies every Wikipedia article forbids any more discussion about who won the war.  Not that that stops anyone; it's practically the only topic of conversation, and even when not being discussed directly is not far below the surface influencing everything.  Mostly filled with outraged blustering Canadians and gormless Americans shocked--shocked--that anyone would accuse them of bias.

One outraged commentator insists that Wikipedia “is not a popularity contest.”  Really?  I beg to differ.  That is exactly what Wikipedia is.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the first step to recovery is acceptance. Acceptance that, yes,  Wikipedia is a popularity contest.  Anyone (in principle) can change an article, so it stands to reason that, given equal zeal, the side with the greater numbers will eventually see the article they want to see. 

And just about every wiki commentator swears up and down that he is not biased, and is just taking time out of his busy day as a Perfectly Objective Observer to correct bias he sees.  Hogswash and Codswallop!  We’re all biased.  I’m biased.  Do you think, if I were a Nepalese Buddhist monk, I’d be cruising the “Talk” page of the War of 1812 Wikipedia entry?  I wouldn't be getting snippy right now if my (biased) Canadian nationalist sensibilities were not offended. The very fact that I am reading the piece at all means that I have some interest in the subject.  


Yes, we’re all biased.  But that's not the problem. The problem is when we refuse to admit as much.

Wikipedia is a great place to learn about a Taylor series expansion or what a pancreas does.  But head on over to controversial social, cultural or political topics and there's a roiling thunderstorm underneath that clean Wikipedia front, a subterranean world populated by folks with sensitivities as delicate as a desert orchid, and the zeal of a Jehovah Witness on speed.

And so, behind the scenes a the War of 1812 page, the arguments go on and on and on and on.  And this is some relatively obscure war from 200 years ago.  You should see the pages regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those articles are clenched up tighter than Rick Santorum’s buttcheeks at a Gay Parade, and it’s a real bunfight over in  the Talk pages.

But you have to remember that this is the Era of the Internet; we live in a post-objective world and Rule 1 in the Post-Objective World is:

Not  a bad definition really.  I don’t think philosophers have managed all that much better as far as a workable definition of truth goes.  After all, we say that a  psychotic is suffering “delusions” based solely on the fact that he is experiencing a reality that is not shared by the consensus.  Conversely, if nine out of ten people tell you that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings, then the truth is that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings. And the War of 1812 was a tie.

I've submitted an edit to the War of 1812 page (it, like most popular Wikipedia pages is locked, and you have to submit to some anonymous person somewhere to make a change) mentioning the results of a recent poll (where Canadians rate victory in the War of 1812 second only to universal health care as defining their national identity), and also pointing out that Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie released a popular song in Canada called "The White House Burned (The War of 1812)" that pokes fun at Amercian sensitivity on the outcome of the war.  We'll fly that one up the flagpole and see who salutes, so to speak.

I’ll let you know how it goes:

Here’s the refrain the song:

And the white house burned, burned, burned.

But the Americans won't admit it,

It burned, burned, burned.

While the president ran and cried,

It burned, burned, burned.

And things were very historical,

And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies (Wah-Wah-Wah)

In the war of 1812.

Anyways just in case you thought Wikipedia was bad, check out Cracked.com Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model  just for lulz.


Edit:  For clarification, I'm not suggesting that Canadians (or Upper Canada militia) burned Washington.  My understanding is that the British Navy burned Washington, and there were probably as many Upper Canada militiamen involved as there were impressed American seamen, i.e. not many.  I'm sure Three Dead Trolls knows this too.

Welcome to Afghanistan

OK, first off today, folks, it's "bated breath," not "baited breath" ... As in phrases such as "I await your response with bated breath."  It's a shortened form of "abate," which means to lessen or lower.  Like so many other words, it's first use can be traced to Shakespeare.  Normally I'm not that much of a stickler for these things.  It's just that every time I read "baited breath" the picture I get is "I've just eaten a bunch of nightcrawlers, so my breath may not be the freshest."

It's the coldest winter here in 15 year.  Most nights get down somewhere between -10 and -20 deg C, and it only warms up to snow.  We've got easily a foot in the last 36 hours and it's still coming down hard.The bad news is that at least 24 children have frozen to death in the refuge camps around Kabul.  Deforestation is a big environmental challenge here, and wood for fires is a rare commodity, made all the rarer by a spike in demand due to the cold.   I read one heart-breaking story about a baby who died, and the mother related that they have lost eight of their nine children to disease and cold.  One ten-year old girl left.  Welcome to Afghanistan.

Not quite dressed for the weather

However, this record snowfall means no drought this year. The snowpack in the mountains should ensure a good spring and early summer run-off.

Kabul used t be a green city, famous for its orchards, just a few decades ago.  I gather the main culprit was the Soviets who cut down the trees to deny insurgents cover (shades of Agent Orange).  There was a tree-planting aid coming in by I'm told that one of the higher-ups was selling the trees and they never got planted.

In a similar story, I lugged two duffle bags full of soccer stuff and girls' toiletries for the local orphanage here, but I'm told we can't give stuff to them any more because the lady running the place would take all the stuff back from the girls and sell it.  Even the blankets they needed to stay warm at night.  Welcome to Afghanistan.

Well, I'm given to understand that the situation will shortly be rectified and they're getting a new director in, so n the meantime I wait with bated breath.

How the Baby Boomers Ruined Everything for Gen X (But I'm Not Bitter)

As a young up-and-comer in the federal government in about '96, I was invited to a talk for generally more senior managers by Linda Duxbury.  Duxbury is an academic from Carleton who has made quite a name for herself in academic circles speaking about demographic changes in the workforce and such.  She's got the whole "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" thing happening and is quite an engaging speaker, if not particularly edifying.

In this particular talk, she would say that the pre-Baby Boomer generation--I forget what pet name she had for them--were set in their ways, and wanted everything to stay the same, because in their generation you were a company man.  The Baby Boomers--like Duxbury herself--were fun, inquisitive, interesting.

Then she moved on to Gen X--those she defined as born after 1964.  We  really fare too well in her analysis. I believe "bitter" was the adjective used.  She asked at one point "So what does Generation X want?"  It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, and she was just about to launch into her prepared answer when I piped up, "Not to be called bitter?"  I was one of only two or three Gen Xers in the room, the rest being Baby Boomers.  Duxbury jumped on the opportunity to portray my "outburst" as evidence that the Gen Xers are, indeed, bitter.  She had the perfect little argument really.  Any evidence against her argument was evidence for her argument.  It's like:

"You're in denial"

"No, I'm not"

"See!"

I still don't readily apply the word "bitter" to myself, but I would go so far as to say "rueful."  It's not that the Baby Boomers are bad, it's just that, as the demographic majority in a democracy, they’ve managed to fashion society to their liking through the decades. It's a tyranny of the majority, plain and simple.  You can't get mad at a mathematical reality.

Think of it. When the Boomers were kids, they had the 50s, which was all about family values.  In the early 60s you had bubblegum pop which ripened into the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll of the late 60s. The Boomers were young adults and in the exploratory stage they had an explosion of art the likes of which we have not seen since, they had a commitment to ideologies of peace and love.  And they had an insatiable curiosity that put a man on the moon (allegedly!).  The 80s turned into the "Me Decade" as Boomers, in their 30s now, put away childish things and focused on accumulation.  

With the advent of the third millennium, mortality hit the Boomers like a meringue pie in the face.  Change was now to be feared--thus this new wave of social conservatism.  Life was dangerous--thus the advent of mandatory safety and the nanny state.  And death was the new enemy--thus the explosion of life-extension and youth-preservation medicine.  The War on Cancer is, I think, a proxy War on Aging and Death.  (Especially if you research carcinogenesis and its similarities to the aging process and cell senescence.)

I was reminded of this when Newt Gingrich floated (no pun intended) the idea of a moon base, and was unanimously laughed off the stage.  No one laughed when Kennedy wanted to put a man on the moon.  Back then science was revered and the young, ideological Boomers were ready for any challenge.  But to present such an idea "in today's economy" was ludicrous, said the pundits. The cost of a moon base is estimated according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in 2007 would be about $35 billion, and about 7.5 gigabucks a year to keep it going.

But medical research funding in the US, according to this study is estimated at about $90 billion in 2008 (4.5% of total health care costs) in the US.  A good chunk of this was in research diseases that are more common in the last trimester of life (cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers). Add to that (let's be perfectly bloodless about this) the fact that life extension applies primarily to retired people who are no longer working and often drawing upon as opposed to contributing to the social safety nets, and your economic cost increases.  And add to that the fact that Old Age Security / Social Security are now openly admitted as being essentially pyramid schemes that will see the Boomers through to their dotage and then collapse, and the economics of life extension spending takes another hit.

So it's nothing to do with "economic reality" and everything to with "biological reality."  The naïve promise of the stars has been replaced by the biological imperative to stay alive, and is the new priority because of course, of the Boomer's majority demographic.

So no, I'm not bitter.  I just think we need to take all the Boomers, mulch them up, and shoot them into the atmosphere to stop global warming.