Evo Devo Scholar Talk

The entropy law, the second law of thermodynamics, isn't like all the other physical laws, Eddington said. For one thing, it isn't time reversible like Newton's laws. For another, it has qualities unlike any other physical quantity, it feels more like beauty or harmony.
Maybe it's something like good and evil, I thought.

I asked all my professors a question, "if the universe began in a state of thermal equilibrium, maximum entropy, how can we have so much information in the world today?"

Only two professors took me seriously. One was David Layzer. He spent the rest of his life on the problem. I've been reading philosophy and physics for seventy years to explain it.

Of course it does. We study Cosmic Evolution (Eric Chaisson’s book), including
Galactic Evolution, Stellar Evolution, and Planetary Evolution.

Now Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe itself are all Complex Systems.
Complexity Science studies all of them.

Since Georgi's satellite meeting on complexity science last week in Siena, where I had hoped to meet Paul Davies, I've drafted a brief history of complex systems showing how Davies turned the Santa Fe Institute toward theology and teleology.

Of course Life is also a complex system, but I want to discuss a vital difference between living things and the abiotic universe.

The universe and its galaxies, stars, and planets are all rich in abstract immaterial information. This immaterial information needs matter to be embodied and energy
to be communicated, for scientists to observe and to measure that information!

All the objects in the universe are concrete material information structures, composed of matter and energy components, from the quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons present at the origin, through the atoms, molecules, and macromolecules that could not be stable until the universe cooled to the current surface temperature of the Sun (around 6000K),
about 380 thousand years after the origin of the universe.

Non-living objects like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and galaxies are passive information structures. They are entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. They are reducible to physical causes. They are not acting. They are acted upon.

But living things, you and I, are active dynamic growing information structures, we are forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it's the top-down communication
of biological information that controls those flows!

Now the fundamental laws of thermodynamics apply to both living and non-living systems.
The second law says that entropy (disorder) must always increase, suggesting a "heat death" for the universe.

It also suggests the universe began with a vast amount of information, since increasing entropy has been decreasing information since the origin and there's so much left today.

But I'll show how the universe began with a bare minimum of information.
And I'll explain how it avoids that "heat death."

He imagined an intelligent demon who knows the positions and the velocities of every particle in the universe and the demon knows the forces on all those particles.
The demon could then know the entire past and the future of the universe.

In that case, information would be a constant of nature (plotted as the blue line below).
My MIT colleague Seth Lloyd thinks information is a conserved constant, like the conservation laws for mass and energy. He also thinks the universe is a computer!

However, midway through the 19th century, Lord Kelvin realized that the then just discovered second law of thermodynamics requires that information can not be constant. It would be being destroyed as the entropy irreversibly increases.

The physicist Hermann Helmholtz described this as the "heat death" of the universe.

Now Kelvin’s claim of a "heat death" would be correct if the universe were a closed system.
But it's not closed. The universe is open and infinite. We'll see how an open universe can actually create negative entropy locally to avoid thermal equilibrium.

In his famous 1944 article "What Is Life?," Erwin Schrödinger famously argued that life “feeds on negative entropy.”

Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.

But Schrödinger didn't know how the Sun came to be such a source of negative entropy.

That’s a problem for cosmology. We need to explain how a universe beginning in thermal equilibrium with maximum entropy (total disorder) can create a spherically symmetric star sending a stream of negative entropy to Earth.

Arthur Stanley Eddington was the great scientist who proved Albert Einstein's general relativity claim that space is curved at a 1919 eclipse expedition (making Einstein famous).

Eddington suggested in 1934 that the universe expansion, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1927, might create new "phase-space" cells faster than the particles can randomly fill those cells and maximize the entropy.

Note that the universe could allow local reductions in the entropy, what I called "pockets" of negative entropy, but only if the global entropy elsewhere is increased even more to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.

In his 1989 book Cosmogenesis, my Harvard mentor David Layzer developed Eddington's idea. Layzer showed that the maximum possible entropy of the expanding universe increases much faster than the actual entropy increases. Disorder (entropy) and order (negative entropy) are simultaneously increasing in the universe.

I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s book to create this picture of his Growth of Information.

Between the actual entropy and the maximum possible entropy you can see there's plenty of room for galaxies, stars, and planets to form.

Notice that the universe didn't have a lot of information at the origin. It also didn't have the same information that it has today, as Laplace and my MIT colleague Seth Lloyd believe. Lloyd also believes the universe is a computer!

The expansion of the universe creates new space, which means there are many more possible "phase-space" cells where particles can actually be distributed.

I decided to call this the Cosmic Creation Process, based on Eddington and Layzer’s insight into the growth of order in the universe.

My Cosmic Creation Process is the first of four examples of random possibilities being created that can lead to new information in the universe.

The others are

Claude Shannon's communication of information
the freedom of the human will
and Darwinian evolution.

I call these all "two-stage models." First possibilities, then a new actuality.

In the first stage new possibilities randomly appear.

In the second stage one possibility becomes actual.

In his famous 1944 article "What Is Life", Erwin Schrödinger also explained how genetic information could be stored in the atomic structure of a long molecule or "aperiodic crystal." That molecule was found to be DNA just nine years later by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

Just three years before information in the genetic code was discovered, Claude Shannon formulated his theory of the communication of information, describing digital "bits" of information as 1's and 0's (or yes and no answers to questions). Shannon said that the amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages. With eight possible messages, one actual message communicates three bits of information (2³ = 8).

If there is only one possible message, there is no new information. This corresponds to the deterministic view that there is only one possible future!. Both that future and the entire past are completely pre-determined from the beginning of time, and the total information in the universe is a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, believe.

In the 1970’s I came up with my “two-stage model” of free will, in the first stage alternative possibilities randomly come to mind, in the second stage the agent makes adequately determined decisions or choices.

Over the years I debated the problem of free will with the libertarian philosopher Robert Kane and the determinist/compatibilist philosopher Daniel Dennett. Time permitting in the discussion, I'll tell you more about them.

In the 1990's I extended my two-stage model of first possibilities, then actualities to all the processes in the universe that create all new information and information structures. This obviously included Darwinian evolution. Here is the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr describing the two-step process.

Now all complex adaptive systems are obviously creative. And the self-organizing autopoetic description of Umberto Maturana and Francesco Varela obviously describes them perfectly. But the “self” in a Benard cell is not communicating information to its component atoms.
It has no thoughts, no intention, no goals, no purpose.

A Benard cell is a passive information structure, reducible to its components. True, it is a dissipative structure, at the edge of chaos, as Ilya Prigogine saw, but it is not alive. And finally also true, the autocatalytic process is top-down causation controlling or constraining lower level processes. These top-down forces are purely physical. Benard cells are not alive.

The only place in the universe where life is known to exist is our biosphere, first named by the Austrian chemist Edward Seuss in the nineteenth century as the interface of the lithosphere and lower atmosphere.

If there exists an entity which has provided us with everything, to which we should be thankful, even reverential, it is surely the biosphere, which is our home in the universe.

I described how the cosmic creation process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. And I showed how the universe avoids a "heat death," without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

I claimed this two-stage creative process helps to explain three great problems in philosophy and science.

I've made four more original contributions to science that might be of interest.