DNAunion

DNAunion: Yes, that is my point. Make a complete list of all the individual constituents of a living system (such as a bacterium) and determine –without regard to living vs. non-living - how many different ways those constituents could possibly be arranged. Life would be found in only an extremely extremely extremely extremely ... small subset of that “omega”.

DNAunion: I have been avoiding introducing other terms (such as specified complexity and organization), even when they should have been used. I guess now I have to bring them in. Life is not just a state of order, or even of high order; it is also a state of organization.

Something that is organized is in a “higher state” of arrangement than something that is merely ordered. Organization implies multiple interdependent parts, each serving a specific function, operating together as a whole.

*****************************
"Organize: To arrange elements into a whole of interdependent parts.” (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)
*****************************

Further information on the word ‘organize’ can be found in Webster's by looking up the word order.

*****************************
“Order: … ORDER, ARRANGE, MARSHAL, ORGANIZE, SYSTEMATIZE, METHODIZE mean to put persons or things into their proper places in relation to each other. … ORGANIZE implies arranging so that the whole aggregate works as a unit with each element having a proper function." (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)
*****************************

Leaves in a pile, books lined up on a shelf, the atoms in a crystal, the shape of snowflakes, etc. are all ordered, but not organized. On the other hand, the multiple interdependent parts - each serving a specific function, operating together as a whole - of a cell, like those of a car’s internal combustion engine, are not only ordered, but also organized.

DNAunion: I’m not talking about evolution, remember? I am talking about the origin of life. In fact, I already explicitly state that the second law does not pose any real problems for evolution because both sufficient energy and sufficient information are present in cells.

DNAunion: That’s an opinion I can easily accept and yet still ask how life originated.

DNAunion: Better terms than just the “highly ordered” I was using include “specified complexity” and “organization”. It has been demonstrated that order can be created from chaos in many ways. But neither the type of organization nor the degree of specified complexity inherent in living systems has been shown to be a result of those same processes.

[ August 08, 2002: Message edited by: DNAunion ]</p>

HRG

However, the thermodynamic instability of gases under gravitation will not predict where stars will form.
The idea of "sufficient cause" should have gone out with Aristotelian physics. The well-known butterfly effect of chaos theory refutes it.
It is also not "sufficient" - whatever that means - to make Jupiter move in an approximately elliptic orbit. Your point ?
But you have just said that no information is needed to produce a hurricane. Why do you make an exception for life ?
Maybe so; but mutation plus natural selection is a mechanism for generating "specified complexity" (although I doubt that an independent specification, i.e. which is different from "what we see", is possible).
Why do you think that it doesn't ? I can easily come up with a specification for hurricanes.
In your opinion.

In any case, you have not shown that information is a conserved quantity - which makes any question like "where does the information come from" irrelevant.

HRG.

Peter Soderqvist

TO SYNAESTHESIA

Soderqvist1: I would say that life is the river, which streams uphill, and the rest of the universe streams normally downhill, hence they are the opposites of each other, but both obey the second law of thermodynamics! I will also add that, life not only removes heat from the body as you have said, but it also preserves the thermal difference between the organism, and the environment. For instance, a human being must protect his body temperature of 37 Celsius, from the environment's "too hot" or "too cold" impact on the organisms, and it is called tropism, and the organism is dead, when it has reached thermal equilibrium with its environment, let's say 20 Celsius, hence thermodynamic equilibrium, or maximum entropy!

But the organism's ability to do so is only temporary, but genes ability to exert such phenotypic effect is potential immortal as long as the fabric of genes has ordered energy (oxygen, water, and food), to draw upon, and its output of its waste products, and for the sake of illustration; Our fabric of genes are
approximately 4 billion years old, and are still going strong!

This is the mathematical formula for the universe's downhill (disorder) behaviour; entropy = k logD, and this is what life is doing; negentropy; k log(I/D), since I/D (inverse of disorder), is the minus logarithm of D, and thus I/D is the measure of order!

I is the abbreviation of inverse, and D is abbreviation of Disorder, and minus the logarithm of D, is order (I/D). Thus the proteins in a beef are in a state of order (I/D), but they ordinary melting through logD, into free amino acids in the stomach into state D, and the amino acids syntheses back again through log(I/D) into proteins, for instance haemoglobins in our blood, hence order – disorder – order, this order can also be defined in this context as concentrated, and disorder as scattered!


Erwin Schrodinger whole book (Noble Prize winner 1933 Science of Physics, and one of the founding fathers of bioenergetics), What is Life?<a href="http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:4S8J9netQgwC:home.att.net/~p.caimi/Life.doc+%22entropy+%3D+K+log+D%22+%2B+%22Schrodin ger%22&hl=en" target="_blank">http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:4S8J9netQgwC:home. att.n et/~p.caimi/Life.doc+%22entropy+%3D+K+log+D%22+%2B+%22Schrodin ger%22&hl=en</a>

We can also define D (disorder) as W (ways)

[ August 13, 2002: Message edited by: Peter Soderqvist ]</p>

DNAunion

DNAunion: No it doesn’t. If you don’t like my off-the-top-of-my-head choice of words, that’s one thing. But my argument is rock solid. Let me try to state it more "correctly".

Energy is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for cellular life to arise from non-living matter. Information too is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for this to occur.

And for information, let me restate that “Having information and having sufficient information are very different ideas. There is information in this response of mine to you, but it is not sufficient to produce life from non-life.”

DNAunion: Do you know what the phrase “comparing apples and oranges” means?

(Even if you didn’t, the rest of my reply to your “hurricane rebuttal” made the distinction between life and hurricanes clear).

DNAunion: Even if that is so, you have to have competition between multiple replicating entities before you can have natural selection. NS might be able to be applied to the evolution of the first cell from the first self-replicator, but it can’t explain where the self-replicator itself came from.

DNAunion: Look back a bit and see what Orgel said about specified complexity.

Using terms loosely, sure, one can “come up with a 'specification'” for a crystal, or a pool of random polymers, or a hurricane (or a snowflake, or the shoreline's shape, or the shape of a cloud, etc). But none of them possess specified complexity when using the terms appropriately.

DNAunion: Wow, what a great comeback!

DNAunion: Uhm... I already explained to you that I have no burden of showing that information is conserved (nor that it isn’t). Whether or not it is conserved is irrelevant to the argument I have presented.

DNAunion: You again fail to comprehend the difference between simply “information” and “sufficient information”.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Reaching thermal equilibrium with the environment does not equate to death.

I already posted material here that many organisms can, out in nature, freeze solid and remain that way for extended periods, and are fully living upon being thawed.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Proteins do not melt in the stomach through log D. Thermodynamics only says what can and can't happen; it doesn't say something that CAN happen WILL actually happen: it might not, or it might occur so slowly as to be imperceptible. That is where catalysts come into play, and in biology, those catalysts are tyically proteins called enzymes.

And most protein digestion occurs in the small intestine, not the stomach.

And amino acids don't "syntheses" back into proteins. Amino acids just "float around" (once removed from the digestive tract, transported through the bloodstream, and imported into a cell) and are helpless to convert themselves back into proteins. It takes a whole slew of other molecules, such as tRNA, rRNA and proteins combined into a ribosome, etc. for protein synthesis to occur.

And the proteins in a cooked beef (I assume you are not talking about "steak tar-tar") may still be ordered to some degree, but their high level of order has been disrupted during the death and cooking stages. Proteins tend to denature at high temperatures such as those used for cooking.

Peter Soderqvist

TO DNA UNION

Soderqvist1: Have you never heard about algorithms?
The first replicator came from an algorithmic process in the sea, and natural selection was the physicochemical environment! This is the theory of the selfish gene by Richard Dawkins! Your allegation that NS cannot explain the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is false, because you have no references, to accredited biology about it! Maybe you can refer to some lone wolf about your ideas, but to say that Science of biology have no valid theory about how natural selection has made it, is simply false

Soderqvist1: My representation is non-commutative!
I mean that organisms like all other combustion machines ending up at thermo dynamical equilibrium when the machine has no more energy to draw upon. In short, a dead body doesn't eat anymore, and your commutative allegation that a frozen animal can get warm again, has nothing to do with my representation!

Soderqvist1: I think you have Boltzmann 's statistical mechanics (s = k log w) mixed up with bioenergetics! Apples are not oranges!
However, What have your "it might not, or it might occur so slowly as to be imperceptible." interpretation to do with digesting acids impacts on food? Furthermore, where is your evidence that k log(I/D) is invalid? This is my valid reference to Erwin Schrodinger!

Erwin Schrodinger: What is life, chapter 6: I have mentioned this technical definition simply in order to remove entropy from the atmosphere of hazy mystery that frequently veils it. Much more important for us here is the bearing on the statistical concept of order and disorder, a connection that was revealed by the investigations of Boltzmann and Gibbs in statistical physics. This too is an exact quantitative connection, and is expressed by entropy = k log D, Where k is the so-called Boltzmann constant (= 3.2983 . 10-24 cal./C), and D a quantitative measure of the atomistic disorder of the body in question. To give an exact explanation of this quantity D in brief non-technical terms is Well-nigh impossible.

The disorder it indicates is partly that of heat motion, partly that which consists in different kinds of atoms or molecules being mixed at random, instead of being neatly separated, e.g. the sugar and water molecules in the example quoted above. Boltzmann 's equation is well illustrated by that example. The gradual 'spreading out' of the sugar over all the water available increases the disorder D, and hence (since the logarithm of D increases with D) the entropy.

It is also pretty clear that any supply of heat increases the turmoil of heat motion, that is to say, increases D and thus increases the entropy; it is particularly clear that this should be so when you melt a crystal, since you thereby destroy the neat and permanent arrangement of the atoms or molecules and turn the crystal lattice into a continually changing random distribution. An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as the part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again to without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)

ORGANIZATION MAINTAINED BY EXTRACTING 'ORDER' FROM THE ENVIRONMENT
How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermo dynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level. If D is a measure of disorder, its reciprocal, l/D, can be regarded as a direct measure of order. Since the logarithm of l/D is just minus the logarithm of D, we can write Boltzmann 's equation thus: -(entropy) = k log (l/D). Hence the awkward expression 'negative entropy' can be he replaced by a better one: entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order.

Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of he orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists continually sucking orderliness from its environment. This conclusion is less paradoxical than it appears at first sight. Rather could it be blamed for triviality. Indeed, in the case of higher animals we know the kind of orderliness they feed upon well enough, viz. the extremely well-ordered state of matter in more or less complicated organic compounds, which serve them as foodstuffs. After utilizing it they return it in a very much degraded form -not entirely degraded, however, for plants can still make use of it. (These, of course, have their most power supply of ‘negative entropy’ the sunlight)
<a href="http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:4S8J9netQgwC:home.att.net/~p.caimi/Life.doc+%22entropy+%3D+K+log+D%22+%2B+%22Schrodin ger%22&hl=en" target="_blank">http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:4S8J9netQgwC:home.att.n et/~p.caimi/Life.doc+%22entropy+%3D+K+log+D%22+%2B+%22Schrodin ger%22&hl=en</a>

Soderqvist1: The word stomach is a generalized term, and intestine is thus included in it, that is daily language you know! What do you mean with that my general statement about that Genes are potential immortal as long as the fabric of genes has ordered energy (oxygen, water, food) to draw upon, is not compatible with your more detailed explanation? Where is your evidence that log(I/D) is not correct formula for general protein synthesizing? And if you find some specific formula for protein synthesizing, can you show me how my general formula don't fit in?

Soderqvist1: I know that heat has a destructive impact on matter, so what is your point? I will also add that a machine (organisms included) needs thermal difference to its environment in order to work properly. A car removes heat with its radiator, and your computer fan removes heat from your computer. An engine needs higher temperature than the environment, but not too much, because the engine is impotent when its temperature is on a similar level as the environment. Because heat goes from hot to cold! It is analogous with gas molecules; they have maximum entropy when they are evenly distributed in a system, and thermal difference is thus analogous with gas molecules in one corner, hence lower entropy!

Btw regarding your computer, it was Boltzmann who first linked information to negentropy!
Scroll down when you are there!

[ August 14, 2002: Message edited by: Peter Soderqvist ]</p>

Peter Soderqvist

TO DNA UNION

Soderqvist1: You have questions about information, and complexity!
I have some compilation of quotes, with good links to you about it!

The blind Watchmaker, Chapter 1 - Explaining the very Improbable by Richard Dawkins: The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
<a href="http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Books/blind.htm" target="_blank">http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Books/blind.htm</a>

Soderqvist1: This metaphor can be found in Richard Dawkins book River out of Eden.

Chapter 5 - The power and the archives
If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

One bit is defined as the amount of information needed to halve the receiver's prior uncertainty, however great that prior uncertainty was (mathematical readers will notice that the bit is, therefore, a logarithmic measure). By the way, Shannon's weighted average is the same formula as physicists have used, since the nineteenth century, for entropy. Mutation is not an increase in true information content, rather the reverse, for mutation, in the Shannon analogy, contributes to increasing the prior uncertainty. But now we come to natural selection, which reduces the "prior uncertainty" and therefore, in Shannon's sense, contributes information to the gene pool.

The Information Challenge by Richard Dawkins
<a href="http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm" target="_blank">http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/dawkins1.htm</a>

Soderqvist1: I have read three books by Richard Dawkins, and I must say that, I like Dawkins digital information technological approach!
<a href="http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/" target="_blank">http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/</a>

[ August 15, 2002: Message edited by: Peter Soderqvist ]</p>

DNAunion

DNAunion: Sounds a bit like “technical mumbo jumbo” to me. To demonstrate that it’s not, you need to:

1) Provide quotes (and their full references) from articles describing an actual prebiotically plausible experiment in which “an algorithmic process in the [modeled] sea” produced a genuine (self-)replicator.

2) Explain how natural selection (which is a process) can be a physicochemical environment.

3) Explain how Dawkins’ concept of selfish genes pertains to times prior to any (self-)replicators.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Is English your first or second language? Most of what you say makes sense, but frequently you make statements that, well, don’t make sense. Your inability to formulate proper statements/questions makes it difficult to communicate.

I have three replies to your not accepting my position on this.

1) You explain it. Please explain to us how natural selection could produce the first-ever self-replicator.

2) Ask the evolutionists. Okay all you evolutionists out there, which of the following two statements is (the more) correct?

a) DNAunion’s statement: “… you have to have competition between multiple replicating entities before you can have natural selection. NS might be able to be applied to the evolution of the first cell from the first self-replicator, but it can’t explain where the self-replicator itself came from.”

b) Soderqvuist1’s statement: “Your allegation that NS cannot explain the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is false…”

PS: I will quote elsewhere on the web any evolutionists who say that NS could produce a self-replicator. For example, when evolutionists are arguing against Creationists and are insisting that evolution and abiogenesis are two very separate processes, your quotes will be provided to counter them.

3) Counter the following quotes. Though I don’t intend to reread hundreds of articles and multiple books on abiogenesis to find support for my position, I will put a little effort into doing so.

By pure chance, here is something I came across today while reading an article.

DNAunion: The author in the following quote says it is OBVIOUS that Darwinian evolution (i.e., evolution through natural selection) ABSOLUTELY CANNOT explain how the first form of life (not a full cell, mind you) could have originated.

DNAunion: And here’s one that, when interpreted correctly, supports my position: without replication (and variation) there is no basis for natural selection.