The
Christian right’s obsessive hatred of Darwin is a wonder to behold, but
it could someday be rivaled by the hatred of someone you’ve probably
never even heard of. Darwin earned their hatred because he explained the
evolution of life in a way that doesn’t require the hand of God. Darwin
didn’t exclude God, of course, though many creationists seem incapable
of grasping this point. But he didn’t require God, either, and that was
enough to drive some people mad.
Darwin
also didn’t have anything to say about how life got started in the
first place — which still leaves a mighty big role for God to play, for
those who are so inclined. But that could be about to change, and things
could get a whole lot worse for creationists because of Jeremy England,
a young
who’s proposed a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the
emergence of life was not accidental, but necessary. “[U]nder certain
conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute
associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an
early in 2014, that’s since been republished by Scientific American
and, more recently, by Business Insider. In essence, he’s saying, life
itself evolved out of simpler non-living systems.
The notion of an
evolutionary process broader than life itself is not entirely new.
Indeed, there’s evidence, recounted by Eric Havelock in “
,”
that it was held by the pre-Socratic natural philosophers, who also
first gave us the concept of the atom, among many other things. But
unlike them or other earlier precursors, England has a specific,
unifying, testable evolutionary mechanism in mind.
It
doesn’t mean we should expect life everywhere in the universe — lack of
a decent atmosphere or being too far from the sun still makes most of
our solar system inhospitable for life with or without England’s
perspective. But it does mean that “under certain conditions” where life
is
possible — as it is here on Earth, obviously — it is also quite
probable, if not, ultimately,
inevitable.
Indeed, life on Earth could well have developed multiple times
independently of each other, or all at once, or both. The first truly
living organism could have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of siblings,
all born not from a single physical parent, but from a physical system,
literally pregnant with the possibility of producing life. And similar
multiple births of life could have happened repeatedly at different
points in time.
That also means that Earth-like planets circling
other suns would have a much higher likelihood of carrying life as well.
We’re fortunate to have substantial oceans as well as an atmosphere —
the heat baths referred to above — but England’s theory suggests we
could get life with just one of them — and even with much smaller
versions, given enough time. Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake
for heresy in 1600, was perhaps the first to take Copernicanism to its
logical extension, speculating that stars were other suns, circled by
other worlds, populated by beings like ourselves. His extreme minority
view in his own time now looks better than ever, thanks to England.
If
England’s theory works out, it will obviously be an epochal scientific
advance. But on a lighter note, it will also be a fitting rebuke to
pseudo-scientific creationists, who have long mistakenly claimed that
thermodynamics
disproves evolution (
here, for example), the exact opposite of what England’s work is designed to show — that thermodynamics
drives
evolution, starting even before life itself first appears, with a
physics-based logic that applies equally to living and non-living
matter.
Most important in this regard is the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in any
closed process, there is an increase in the total
entropy
(roughly speaking, a measure of disorder). The increase in disorder is
the opposite of increasing order due to evolution, the creationists
reason, ergo —
a contradiction! Overlooking the crucial word
“closed,” of course. There are various equivalent ways of stating the
law, one of which is that energy cannot pass from a cooler to a warmer
body without extra work being done. Ginsberg’s theorem (as in poet Allen
Ginsberg) puts it like this: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You
can’t even get out of the game.” Although creationists have long
mistakenly believed that evolution is a violation of the Second Law,
actual scientists have not. For example, physicist Stephen G. Brush,
writing for the American Physical Society in 2000, in “
Creationism Versus Physical Science,”
noted: “As Ludwig Boltzmann noted more than a century ago,
thermodynamics correctly interpreted does not just allow Darwinian
evolution, it favors it.”
A simple explanation of this comes from
a document in the
thermodynamics FAQ
subsection of TalkOrigins Archive (the first and foremost online
repository of reliable information on the creation/evolution
controversy), which in part explains:
Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However,
they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun
provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato
plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should
anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can’t have more
usable energy still?
That passage goes right to the
heart of the matter. Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law
than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical
treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going
on can be found
here.
The driving flow of energy — whether from the sun or some other source — can give rise to what are known as
dissipative structures,
which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that
flows through them. Russian-born Belgian physical chemist
Ilya Prigogine
won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work developing the
concept. All living things are dissipative structures, as are many
non-living things as well — cyclones, hurricanes and tornados, for
example. Without explicitly using the term “dissipative structures,” the
passage above went on to invoke them thus:
Snowflakes,
sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning
are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none
require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial
system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to
find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is
supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous
in nature?
In a very real sense, Prigogine’s work
laid the foundations for what England is doing today, which is why it
might be overstated to credit England with
originating this theory, as several commentators at Quanta pointed out, noting other progenitors as well (
here,
here and
here,
among others). But already England appears to have assembled a
collection of analytical tools, along with a sophisticated
multidisciplinary theoretical approach, which promises to do much more
than simply propound a theory, but to generate a whole new research
agenda giving detailed meaning to that theoretical conjecture. And that
research agenda is already starting to produce results. (See his
research group home page
for more.) It’s the development of this sort of detailed body of
specific mutually interrelated results that will distinguish England’s
articulation of his theory from other earlier formulations that have not
yet been translated into successful theory-testing research agendas.
Above
all, as described on the home page mentioned above, England is involved
in knitting together the understanding of life and various stages of
life-like processes combining the perspectives of biology and physics:
Living
things are good at collecting information about their surroundings, and
at putting that information to use through the ways they interact with
their environment so as to survive and replicate themselves. Thus,
talking about biology inevitably leads to talking about decision,
purpose, and function.
At the same time, living things are also
made of atoms that, in and of themselves, have no particular function.
Rather, molecules and the atoms from which they are built exhibit
well-defined physical properties having to do with how they bounce off
of, stick to, and combine with each other across space and over time.
Making
sense of life at the molecular level is all about building a bridge
between these two different ways of looking at the world.
If that sounds intriguing, you might enjoy this
hour-long presentation of his work (with splashes of local Swedish color) — especially (but not only) if you’re a science nerd.
Whether
or not England’s theory proves out in the end, he’s already doing quite
a lot to build that bridge between worldviews and inspire others to
make similar efforts. Science is not just about making new discoveries,
but about seeing the world in new ways — which then makes new
discoveries almost inevitable. And England has already succeeded in
that. As the Quanta article explained:
England’s
theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his
interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a
class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven.
But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in
the lab.
“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara
Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an
experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens,
I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very
much worth the investigation.”
Creationists often
cast themselves as humble servants of God, and paint scientists as
arrogant, know-it-all rebels against him. But, unsurprisingly, they’ve
got it all backwards, once again. England’s work reminds us that it’s
scientists’ willingness to admit our own ignorance and confront it head
on — rather than papering over it — that unlocks the great storehouse of
wonders we live in and gives us our most challenging, satisfying
quests.
Charles Darwin (Credit: Wikimedia/WDG Photo via Shutterstock/Salon)
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