Evolution is pretty neat. Garnet has gotten me thinking about it, and my discussion here is similar to hers but takes a slightly different direction.
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Garnet’s professor points out that entropy is not strictly increasing here on Earth. Humans are a highly organized bunch of matter. We are so organized that we go around organizing all sorts of things besides our own bodies. Most of the history of our species has been the story of increasing ability to organize: societies, economies, technologies.
One of the biggest problems we’re facing right now is how to organize energy into more useful forms. This is contrary to its entropic tendency. We’ve spent about 150 years taking somewhat organized bits of energy contained in fossil fuels and converting them to less useful forms, namely heat to run turbines. But now that this is becoming a problem, we are spending more time focusing on how to take fairly disorganized energy like heat from the center of the Earth or light from the Sun and turn it into more useful electricity. Because Earth isn’t a closed system, the letter of the second law of thermodynamics is still upheld when we increase order by using the Sun’s energy (by generating electricity or simply by eating food that ultimately came from the Sun), but it is hard to say that we follow the law in its spirit.
The interesting problem I see here is that we humans demand organization, but the odds are stacked against us. We’ve done pretty well organizing ourselves so far, so can we buck the cosmological trend? The universe may try to spread its energy as far and wide as possible, but our survival depends on making sure we can collect enough of it in one place in a useful form. Since we have the Sun, that gives us a couple billion years, but it’s never too soon to start thinking.
Is there a force driving us to this highly organized model, as Garnet suggests there might be? Humans have carved out a niche as intelligent creatures who can constantly find new advantages, so it seems evolution has created order in its drive for a more effective animal. The "force" driving this order could just be an inherent property of life. It's entirely possible that some "force" created life that works this way, but it's probably not the best model this higher power could have created; life and evolution happen without much regard for the constraints we will eventually face, for the order we create comes at the price of the disorder we create in our environment. Now if God (for example) is pushing us towards the evolutionary outcome, He had better have a good idea that we will be able to sustain it, because it will be pretty poor planning if innovation ends up failing us and we can’t keep organizing. Intelligent designers, here’s your chance to discuss how this is all going to work out in the end.
Whatever the root cause, our organized intelligence seems to be one factor that allows us to make this organization happen. We are confronted with problems of disorganization and can clearly recognize that we need to act to reverse them. In fact, we do it without thinking; creating technology and procreating—two big ways we spread our style of organization—are pretty natural things for humans to do. Because we seem to be smart enough to know that we should reverse entropy, perhaps we have reached a tipping point where order begets further order.
Or perhaps it applies to all plants and animals: while working at NASA, James Lovelock proposed that the ability to reduce entropy is a characteristic of life in general. Maybe we're not as special as we want to think, and we just happen to be good at what we do through random chance making it that way. Something had to get us as far as any tipping point we may have hit.
I’m too new to this topic to draw any conclusions, and I’ve touched on several different topics anyway. If you have had thoughts, have read someone else’s, or have met someone who’d like to talk about it, let us know. Share a link or write something. This is why we have the internet.
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On a different note, here is an excellent example of the sort of organization we can create and what it may allow us to do:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080305.html
I include this mainly because it’s cool and might spark your imagination. Did you know the space station was this established? We can do this now.
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2 comments:
Hey Sarah (and anybody else reading this :D). I had a quick thought on your interesting posts re: entropy. At one point you say:
"It's entirely possible that some "force" created life that works this way, but it's probably not the best model this higher power could have created; life and evolution happen without much regard for the constraints we will eventually face, for the order we create comes at the price of the disorder we create in our environment. Now if God (for example) is pushing us towards the evolutionary outcome, He had better have a good idea that we will be able to sustain it, because it will be pretty poor planning if innovation ends up failing us and we can’t keep organizing."
I'm still on the fence regarding whether or not some force (deistic or otherwise) created all there is by putting a specific system in order. It's true that the deistic model helps explain things back a little further than we're capable of. We're too constrained by a view of the world that depends on causes and effects -- nothing comes to be unless it is caused to be by some other force, entity or occurrence. We're here, on earth, because of the big bang, but what of the big bang? What made it happen? Complex gravitational and subatomic forces, but where did the matter that they acted on come from? The deistic model explains this away by saying "from something bigger than us and our model of the world," but I think we're more capable, as a species, of grasping clues towards answering the very deep question of "where did we come from?" than we realize. And the answer to this question might be provide clues to the more integral question of "why are we here?"
I hope the thought experiment yields some awesome views on this that aren't constrained by the logic of cause and effect. The causes of things in an entropic system are disorderly and, often, random (like the location of electrons). That may be our first clue...?
But regarding whether God (for example) has a good idea of how to sustain an evolutionary model, I think we need to understand the evolution of societies and the human species as a social entity as well as the evolution of other systems. Our flaws are the sources of our epiphanies, and allow us to place such incredible weight on the knowledge we gain from our mistakes. If slavery had been any less horrific a crime against humanity, would we value the equality of all people's lives as seriously? If the torture we, as humans, had put each other through during the dark ages had been any less gruesome, would we, as a species, speak out so vociferously against unnecessary cruelty? Part of the system, it seems, is that societies, and individuals, make massive mistakes. On some level, societies are like kids -- they seem to need to learn to hard way to really internalize certain (bigger than) life lessons. You have to wonder, would we, as a *species* (not just individuals), be able to truly appreciate the importance of our environment and its health without suffering serious consequences (at least psychologically) as a result of screwing, or threatening to screw, it up?
Perhaps the grand "plan" in store for us is one in which we take one step backwards and two steps for. We have to see where we've been to plot a course for where we're going, and that can seem disorderly, chaotic, and unsustainable, but ultimately, it may be the only way to arrive at the species-wide lessons needed to ensure the sustainability of what we learn. We enforce equality, speak out against cruelty, and will ultimately protect the environment more consistently precisely because we learned these lessons in a painful, seemingly chaotic and random way.
The bad news is that in our process to understand "the world" rit large, we have, in our history, killed off entire groups of people (Native Americans, for example) who had a clearer understanding of, and may have arrived nearer to an end-point of, this social evolution. Perhaps we occasionally take 100 steps back to start the 1 step back, 2 steps forward process up all over again, only to go further once we learn the lessons of those long gone.
Anyway, those are the thoughts your post sparked on my end -- I hope they contribute in some way and I'd really love to hear and learn from your response...! Take care :D
This is the kind of thought I was hoping someone would have. I'm glad you've examined what I was saying just there, because that discussion of evolutionary planning was a piece that really needed some examining. I like your perspective on the 1vs2vs100 steps issue. That's a good way to frame it, but the issue I was thinking of is the irreversibility of some things we do. If there is no mysterious power that's compelling us to do the things we do, we could end up taking so many steps back that we won't get the opportunity to learn from the mistake. 20 years ago people might have used nuclear war as an example of this, and these days we are worrying more and more about environmental problems.
I don't mean to turn this particular discussion into one only about environmental sustainability. There's plenty of that going on elsewhere with other methods of analysis. Sean, thanks for bringing up the idea that any force driving our pattern of organization and disorganization may have taken good account of the disorganization side. That's useful to consider, and you're probably right that we are sometimes too focused on cause and effect. If there's a god (or something), there's no reason it would need to follow the laws we're used to. This is a point that comes up often enough that I probably should have thought about it, but this is why we are sharing ideas.
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