One of creationism’s arguments against evolution, and for the direct intervention of a deity, is that living things are considered by them to be “negentropic.” They violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by their very existence, and so divine sparks must be involved. This is not a valid criticism of biology or evolution. The real problem is that we’ve been looking at the Second Law incorrectly.
Remember the classical version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one that is commonly taught? It uses various examples, like the one that says if a force (or another demon, Maxwell’s Demon if I remember) holds all of the oxygen and nitrogen molecules in one corner of a room and then releases them the molecules will spontaneously disperse. They will drift about until they are more or less equally mixed throughout the room, moving to a patternless state of equilibrium. The cause of this spontaneous behavior is the Second Law, and the molecules diffuse throughout the room toward a random state of mixing because they must. Molecules at equilibrium move at random; the behavior of each is independent of the others. Ludwig Boltzmann, who first noticed this regularity a couple of centuries ago, was drawn to the unavoidable, depressing conclusion that the universe is winding down, dissipating its energy until it reaches a state of random equilibrium. This idea was not received with pleasure as it logically leads to a messy and meaningless end of existence. Poor Boltzmann hanged himself and western science came to accept this dismal law, though it was incompletely described.
In the 1970s this all changed (though these changes hardly seem to have made their way to any textbooks that I’m aware of). The chemist Ilya Prigogine pointed out that something else is going on here. The action of the Second Law is not so simple; what occurs depends on initial conditions. If energy is added to the room, say in the form of heat, the molecules move more quickly as they warm up, but something else also happens. The behavior of the molecules becomes less random. The molecules form a larger, organized pattern, moving upwards, outwards and downwards in circular convection currents. There is no way to describe the convection current exclusively in terms of the molecular structures of nitrogen and oxygen because a different level of organization, an emergent structure, has been generated. The behavior does not arise from the molecules themselves, but from the relationship among the molecules and the energy introduced into the system.
Similarly, ocean waves are emergent structures that cannot be described in terms of their component water and salt molecules. Hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes and cyclones are also highly organized, energized, partly unpredictable, non-living, emergent structures. In these cases the energy input comes from the winds created by the differential heating of the Earth by the Sun.
Many chemical systems also express demonstrable emergent properties, and in 1977 Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his observations and theoretical conclusions. He expanded our understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics by pointing out that it may be the driving force underlying the spontaneous appearance of patterns in nature. He argued that self-organization (that is, emergence) is a common phenomenon in many chemical systems under certain conditions where there is more energy entering a system than leaving it. More details can be found in Prigogine & Stengers 198x book, “Order out of Chaos.”
A few biologists (Brooks & Wiley, Jack Maze, and the other guy who tended to have the whole thing backward…) were interested in Prigogine’s ideas, and also in related concepts, such as Information Theory (developed during World War II), Chaos Theory and the formation of partly repeated patterns found in fractals and made popular by Mandelbrot (ref?). Adding to the mix were ideas about hierarchical organization (especially in biology, Salthe…ref) and Semiotics, ideas related to Information Theory, about how systems communicate meaning or information to themselves and to each other, and how this related to theories of time (Matsuno…ref). Lots more on this in later chapters…
To me, the most important aspect of all of this is Prigogine’s work on the expansion of the Second Law because it gives us an ultimate driving force, an explicit causality to view as an explanan within the Covering Law Model. My interpretation of Prigogine’s central points may be wrong (in which case, I’m re-interpreting them), but I think he has offered the primary missing piece at the core of biology. Order, that is some sort of non-random pattern, forms spontaneously when energy flows through a system (or is captured by it, as is the case with living systems). Given only the original version, self-organization of anything seems to defy the Second Law, which says that all things spontaneously go to equal mixing, to equilibrium, expressing maximum entropy. When there is a flow of energy into a system, something changes and entropy is now dissipated in a different way. Entropy is not expressed as randomness, but as novelty, as surprise, as something unpredictable, even whimsical. In both of these actions of the Second Law, the idea of non-determinism applies – pieces of self-organized systems are predictable to some degree, but are always accompanied by surprise. The components of a system at equilibrium are random and patternless, so there’s no telling where a given molecule might be at any particular moment.
This expanded version of the Second Law describes the general behavior of many phenomena - order can be spontaneously generated to create an organized system, while “chaos” is the expression of novelty, the entropy that allows the organization to manifest itself. This is also related to Information Theory and one example that captivated me as a student is from a book called “Grammatical Man” by Jeremy Campbell (1984? Ref.). Campbell, discussing language and information, makes some thoughtful observations. Language is very rigid (highly ordered) in some ways – English, for example, has a set alphabet, a finite (though constantly evolving) store of words, and rules of grammar. Without these constraints our attempts to communicate fail – there is noise (lots of entropy dissipated), but no meaning, no information. Within these constraints, language becomes not only organized and capable of expressing meaning, but capable of expressing infinite, unpredictable meaning. Entropy is expressed with each new phrase or sentence through the element of surprise. A repeated phrase is fully predictable, but it is a monotone, expressing no novelty, so no new information. Language is, as Campbell says, “Partly predictable and partly unpredictable.” Rather than a contradiction or even a paradox, this is yin and yang, the two contrasting parts that make the whole. The explanans in the Covering Law Model include any bunch of molecules affected by an energy source plus the Second Law. The explanandum is the organization now expressed by the molecules because of the interaction of the explanans.
In order for language to evolve, biological systems had to exist first, of course. But language, so familiar to us humans, makes a good example of an organized system that arose from a biological source and dissipates entropy not as a meaningless, random mixing or as heat loss, but as something not fully expected. Energy inputs (food, in our case; photons, in the case of plants) drive a living system until, at some point, the energy-capturing capabilities weaken and the system begins to lose cohesiveness. It moves toward equilibrium and eventually dies. Death can be defined as a system at equilibrium – all the molecules move again toward random mixing. The Second Law brings decay, but it also drives the generation of form without the system ever being “negentropic.”