HRG

In an open system, increase of entropy is not the condition for spontaneously occuring process: it it is decrease of free energy or enthalpy.
But a lot of new DNA sequences must have appeared along the way. I don't think you claim that the whole human, bee or salmon genome was already present in the ur-eukaryote.
First you have to give a quantitative definition of "information" and show that this quantity is conserved (or at least cannot increase).

Second, you have to show that this - yet to be defined - quantity is necessary to "properly capture, harness, and direct the energy towards increasing order". I have never seen those - or similar - words appear in an actual text on thermodynamics, but they fa'sure make great rhetorics!

You will have problems explaining a hurricane; it is a more ordered state than just warm air over a region of warm water, but needs no "information" to arise.
You forgot the binding energy of the polymer bonds. "Lower entropy" is not a mantra.
A catalyst cannot shift thermodynamic equilibrium in a chemical reaction; it can only speed it up.
Again: "lower entropy" is not the universal mantra. The entropy of 2 oxygen atoms is higher than the one of 1 oxygen molecule; yet oxygen does not dissociate at room temperatures. It's the free energy F = U - TS (or free enthalpy G = U + pV - TS) which is relevant.
IIRC, Wachtershausen has found them, but I may be wrong.
Estimates of 1 replicase in 10^17 sequences can be found in Ian Musgrave's article ("Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics and Abiogenesis Probability Calculations") at <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org." target="_blank">www.talkorigins.org.</a>

&lt;snip&gt;
Regards,
HRG.

[ August 07, 2002: Message edited by: HRG ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

Near enough that I don’t need to look it up

Possibly, but it’s not really what Dawkins was getting at...

Not at all, and I think you’re misunderstanding Dawkins. His point is that any arrangement of parts can be seen, retrospectively, as statistically very improbable (not sure what you mean by ‘statistically highly ordered’). The particular arrangement of metamorphic rocks, granite and clays, silts and carbonates that comprise Mount Everest, for instance. Any particular arrangement of parts is, with hindsight, improbable. (Don’t remember which mountain he cited, but that’s his analogy not mine.)

However, there are many ways of arranging the rock components of Everest such that it would still be Mount Everest. With living things, there are far more ways of arranging the bits such that the result would not be alive. A dead mouse is still a highly ordered set of chemicals, but a few, crucial, bits have changed. There are many ways of being highly ordered -- just look at crystals, snowflakes etc -- but only a few are ordered in a way that gives them an additional property, that of replication (and the ability to influence the surroundings to make this happen).

I take it that you’re familiar with Dawkins’s chapters ‘Making tracks through animal space’ and ‘Accumulating small change’ in TBW? Selection is non-random and cumulative precisely because it lets through to the next round only certain arrangements, and only certain changes to those arrangements -- the ones that work, and those that work a little better. Once the ‘work’ is under way -- once there is replication -- the rest, in an open system, is inevitable.

It is not that living things are ‘highly ordered’ per se, it is that they are ‘highly ordered’ in a particular way, a way that performs certain functions which we call ‘living’.

Oolon

scigirl

changing topic for one minute...

If you have an acoustic Gibson, it might have been made <a href="http://montana.gibson.com/" target="_blank">here in Bozeman, Montana!</a>

/changes topic back to complex physics stuff. . .

scigirl

[ August 07, 2002: Message edited by: scigirl ]</p>

HRG

Entropy counts the number of microstates which make up one specific macrostate; thus every different macrostate has its own entropy value.

However, the Dawkins quote talks about macrostates themselves: only a few macrostates are "alive".

Thus I would say that from the PoV of entropy, a freshly dead hamster has the same entropy as an alive one.

Regards,
HRG.

DNAunion

DNAunion: Two points before starting.

I am having to attempt multiple times different ways to get my posts to be made. I keep getting a weird error saying that I have a parenthesis in an HTML tag, even after I have gone through and checked, and even removed all tags. And when I delete tags and post again, I get halted by a "flood control" error, so I have to wait a minute and a half before I can resubmit my edited post. I don't know what the deal is, but it is really annoying.

Since I don't have a computer at home anymore, and since school is now out except for their library which is open during the day, I am having to copy to disk at one place, go to another place and put the files on the hard drive, generate a reply, copy the result back to disk, go back to the original place, put the disk in, copy the text and then paste it. Since unlike me people do not place their handle before all of their statements, it may be that I start accidentally attributing statements to the wrong people. Sorry if that occurs.

Came back to edit many of my posts. I incorreclty put OOLON when it was HRG.


DNAunion: Incorrect. A decrease in enthalpy does not determine whether or not a process is spontaneous.

It is the combination of enthalpy and entropy - together - that determine the change in free energy and therefore whether or not a process is thermodynamically spontaneous (negative = exergonic = spontaneous; 0 = equilibrium; positive = endergonic = non-spontaneous).

Entropy has a TENDENCY to increase, and if an increase in entropy is associated with a process then that process will TEND to occur. A process that has a decrease in enthalpy associated with it will likewise TEND to occur. Tendency and behavior are different things. The behavior of the system depends upon both the change in entropy and the change in enthalpy. If entropy increases and enthalpy decreases, then the change in free energy MUST be negative, and so the process is thermodynamically spontaneous. If entropy decreases and enthalpy increases, then the change in free energy MUST be positive, and so the process is not thermodynamically spontaneous. But if entropy and enthalpy do not “cooperate”, then we cannot tell whether or not the process is exergonic or endergonic without examining the magnitude of the changes in entropy and enthalpy. If a process would result in an increase in the system’s entropy, but the enthalpy of the system would increase, then it is possible that the change in enthalpy would drive the change in free energy up enough to be positive. Enthalpy can overcome the entropic tendency, and vice versa. However, even if a process does involve a decrease in entropy and does occur, TOTAL entropy has still increased (the entropy of the surroundings increases to a degree greater than the decrease in entropy of the system itself).

So we both misspoke. I should have said, " That is, going from disordered nonliving matter to a highly ordered living cell represents a large decrease in entropy, and thus, will TEND TO not occur by itself spontaneously.”


DNAunion: What? Do you really think I was suggesting that the genome of a human of fish or whatever popped into existence as a whole unit, all at once? I said nothing of the sort.

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

DNAunion

DNAunion: Whether or not information is or is not conserved has nothing to do with what I am saying.

As far as a quantitative definition of information, I don’t feel I have to give one. At this point I will be vague and simply say that it would be analogous to the DNA in extant organisms; being what “instructs” the available matter and energy such that they perform work that is – or at least heads towards - biologically relevant function.

Don’t get caught up on my use of the word “instruct”. This does not imply intelligence (there is information in the banks of a river because they “instruct” the river which way to flow - but that kind of information is not sufficient to perform the tasks I listed. The question is, was there sufficient information present before there was a genome?).

DNAunion: We aren’t talking about pure thermodynamics here – we are talking about bioenergetics (or more precisely, the origin of bioenergetics).

And in biology, there IS information that instructs cells how to “properly capture, harness, and direct energy towards increasing order”. For example, remember how I stated, “The information coding for the photosynthetic method of energy capture/harnessing, …”? That information is the DNA I referred to earlier, as well as the structures that the DNA encodes (such as the photosynthetic machinery, FoF1-ATP synthases, glycolytic enzymes, etc.).

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

DNAunion

DNAunion: No problem at all, for three reasons.

First, contrary to what you imply, I did not say that order cannot arise without information. A star is a more ordered state that the free gasses from which it arose, and that order forms by nothing more than the act of gravitational attraction between the molecules (actually, some people would probably hold that there is information involved here, but even if there is, I am willing to ignore it).

Second, you seem to have forgotten that what is needed is not just a cause, but a SUFFICIENT cause. 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. Whatever "information" might be needed to produce a hurricane is utterly insufficient to produce life. Comparing hurricanes to life is in many cases like comparing apples and oranges.

Third, I intentionally did not get too detailed to begin with. Concepts other than just order are involved. As Leslie Orgel – who has been a leader in origin of life research for many decades - stated back in the 1970s, all living systems posses specified complexity, but neither collections of random polymers nor crystals do (the former is complex but too disordered/random, and the latter is highly ordered by not complex). A hurricane does not possess specified complexity and so does not face the same hurdles for spontaneous formation as life does. The kind of order that arises in the formation of a hurricane – being so different from the kind that would be associated with the formation of life from non-life - poses no problems for my argument.

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

DNAunion

DNAunion: Here we go again, let me remove my parenthesis in the HTML tag that isn't there!

Okay, didn't work. Let me try again.

Still didn't work. Here is the actual error text.

"Sorry, we do not permit this HTML tag: Parenthesis in HTML tag"

Sorry, but I don't have any Parentheses in any HTML tags.


DNAunion: First of all, I explicitly stated entropic TENDENCY. Tendency and behavior can be different, so I was not relying on a "lower entropy mantra".

Second, I can support my statements: here are two quotes.

*********************************
"Many biological reactions lead to an increase in order, and thus a decrease in entropy... An obvious example is the reaction that links amino acids together to form a protein. A solution of protein molecules has a lower entropy than does a solution of the same amino acids unlinked, because the free movement of any amino acid in a protein is restricted when it is bound in a long chain. For the linking reaction to proceed, a compensatory decrease in free energy must occur elsewhere in the system, as is discussed in Chapter 4.” (Harvey Lodish, Arnold Berk, S. Lawrence Zipursky, Paul Matsudaira, David Baltimore, & James Darnell, Molecular Cell Biology: Fourth Edition, W. H. Freeman & Co., 2000, p37)
*********************************

*********************************
"This is a general reaction describing the dehydration-condensation of, for instance, proteins from amino acids, polysaccharides from sugars, and nucleic acids from mononucleotides (whose constituents are pentoses, bases, and phosphates). These biosynthetic reactions result in a decrease in entropy. For example, when amino acids are linked to produce a peptide, they lose much of their freedom of movement in the solution. The formation of a peptide, a rather rigid and ordered molecule, imposes restrictions on the free movements of its building blocks. These restrictions are associated with an increase in the order of the system or a decrease in entropy. Thus, condensation of building blocks into biopolymers is not a spontaneous process. Dehydration-condensation is endergonic – that is, it goes against the spontaneous direction that in the aqueous environment of the cell, is hydrolysis of the biolpolymers.” (Noam Lahav, Biogenesis: Theories of Life’s Origins, Oxford University Press, 1999, p90)
*********************************

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

DNAunion

DNAunion: Uhm, I didn’t say a catalyst could change the point at which thermodynamic equilibrium occurs (you sure stuffed a lot of words into my mouth – think you could stop?).

The mineral catalysts (such as montmorillonite) position the monomers favorably helping them bond. Since the mineral surface speeds up the process of polymerization, without the mineral surface being permanently altered in the process, montmorillonite (and other such minerals) are true catalysts.

But they do more - they also protect the bonds that have been formed from hydrolysis.

The net result is that with the mineral catalysts polymerization exceeds decomposition and you get oligonucleotides. Take away the mineral catalyst and you don’t.

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

DNAunion

DNAunion: I strongly believe you are wrong. In fact, I know you are if we consider material up through and including May 18 2001. That is the issue of Science in which researchers reported creating the closest thing to a replicase - they made a 190-mer that could copy 14 bases of another RNA molecule.

I realize you made your claim tentatively and did not state it as fact, but still, you have the burden of proof on this issue – in the absence of material supporting your statement, my position prevails by default.


DNAunion: But he’s guessing and probably wrong - his article is old and needs to be updated.

A while back, Leslie Orgel – as I stated before, a leader in origin of life research for many decades - estimated that it would take 10^20 UNIQUE sequences 40-monomers long in order to find 1 RNA replicase. Musgrave is already underestimating the probability by 3 orders of magnitude. But there's more.

Orgel’s estimate was based on a mere 40-mer (he reasoned that anything shorter than this would be incapable of forming enough structural complexity to be able to function as an RNA replicase). But this now appears to have been a gross underestimate itself.

As I alluded to in remarks above, in 2001 scientists created the closest thing to an RNA replicase yet, with their work being reported in the journal Science. But their creation was about 190 monomers in length, and the researchers said that it might need to be even longer in order to function as a true replicase.

It appears that the pre-2001 estimates – such as Orgel’s and Musgrave’s – based on mere 40-mers (or similar) are way off.

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