By Paul Rosenberg / Salon January 3, 2015
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 MIT professor 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 article
in Quanta magazine 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 “The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics,” 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.
Quanta fleshed things out a bit more like this:
From the standpoint of physics, there is one
essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon
atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their
environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old
assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a
mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula,
based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by
an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by
a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure
itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that
under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute
associated with life.
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. Legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov put it like
this: “You can’t win. You can’t break even. You can’t 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 andhere, 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.
