understanding entropy

I found this interesting article on entropy and thought to share it.Erwin Schrdinger said, in his essay What is Life?:
This mysterious thing that is so important to life ("energy") is really a fugitive from the gambling casino.How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing, and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The Greek word (metaballein) means change or exchange. Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is no doubt, exchange of material. (E.g. the German word for metabolism is Stoffwechsel.) That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd. Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, etc, is as good as any other of its kind; what could be gained by exchanging them? For a while in the past our curiosity was silenced by being told that we feed upon energy. In some very advanced country (I don't remember whether it was Germany or the U.S.A. or both) you could find menu cards in restaurants indicating, in addition to the price, the energy content of every dish. Needless to say, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help.What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happeningcall it what you will: in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase in entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropyor as you might say, produces positive entropyand thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropywhich is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help but produce while alive.Any comments?

Is 'maximum entropy' equivalent to death, or is death
a predicted state of biological systems ... that is the
result of deterministic biological processing (natural
demise that is)?The problem to my mind with the quoted essay is that there
is a discussion of material-material exchange and of
energy-energy exchange, but not of material-energy exchange.Organism consume material for two reasons:i) to obtain 'building blocks' for the chemicals that their cells
need to build to do their jobs.ii) to obtain the energy required to perform these basic chemical
factory tasks.I don't think cells can be considered to lack order at any time
... even a cancer cell is highly ordered -- it's just the
wrong cell for the job.

sidelined writes:

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Any comments?

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Uh, yeah.It's bogus. It's close, but it's bogus.A body that is just dead pretty much has the same entropy content as it did that fraction of an instant before it died. Therefore, it isn't entropy that caused the death.Death is not caused by entropy. Death is caused by chemistry. When the chemical reactions that are associated with life no longer happen, different chemical reactions start taking place. Those new chemical reactions are not conducive to continuing to allow the organism to survive, so it shifts from what we call "alive" to what we call "dead."The reason why you eat, drink, and breathe is because your body takes the reagents present in the food, water, and air and uses them in chemical reactions that continue to drive the system. In the process, it creates other chemicals that are excreted and that is why you defecate, urinate, and exhale. In order to keep the process going, you need to keep bringing in new material to stoke the chemical reactions and replace any lossage from the excretion since those systems are not perfect. Not only do we lose things that we ought to have kept (all that water in urination!) but also we keep some things that we should probably get rid of (fats that collect on the walls of our arteries). It is when the body is no longer capable of adjusting around the glop in the way that the chemical reactions stop.For example, one thing that a human body requires to continue living is heat. And human bodies generate their own heat. Among the many chemical reactions that take place inside you, heat is liberated and your body regulates itself to maintain a fairly constant temperature. A body that just died is at the same temperature that it was just a fraction of an instant before, so the cause of death is not a loss of heat. But once the body dies, it stops producing heat.In the end, life and death have nothing to do with entropy. Oh, entropy is an important part of chemistry and all chemical reactions need to take place in accordance with the second law of thermo, but it isn't like food is "negative entropy." After all, a person who is alive could eat you. So if you are filled with "positive entropy," why is it that somebody else sees you as "negative entropy"?No, life and death are about chemical reactions. When those chemical reactions no longer take place, then life stops.------------------
Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!

I think we should also keep in mind that death is thought to be genetically controlled. Genetic alterations in mice and fruit flies have substantially extended their life spans. Death prevents gene pool stagnation by increasing the need for reproduction in order to keep the species as a whole alive. Topoisomerases are a very good example of an internal clock, clipping DNA at the terminal ends during each mitotic event.As far as entropy and life, the 2nd law of thermo obviously does not invalidate negative entropy events when energy is available. A good non-biotic example is hydroelectric power. If it weren't for the sun's heat evaporating water there wouldn't be rain, and hence no rivers flowing from higher elevations to generate electricity in dams. This is the same for our bodies; plants harness energetic photons from the sun using water and carbon dioxide (elevated rivers) and our bodies combine these carbohydrates with oxygen to produce ATP (generators in the dam). This is simplistic, but it's a point a lot of creationists miss.Just another two cents, if you opened all the refrigerators in the world the average temperature would go up, well very very slightly anyway.

It is good to see that people on this page are not intimidated by the author of this articles expertise in the field of physics and that they can put forth good arguements to explore the veracity of the article. Let us see if further arguements will be forthcoming.[This message has been edited by sidelined, 10-17-2003]

The human body is born with everything intact which causes it to live and grow and a brain to guide it towards survival and growth. Imo, entropy has nothing to do with this process which is controlled and propagated by built in mechanisms and maintained by intelligence of the person and others who cause it to do what it needs to do to keep on living and growing.I guess this is why creationists talk less about entropy than evolutionists. With intelligent design and a creator, entropy plays less in the explanation of how things came to be in the universe.[This message has been edited by buzsaw, 10-17-2003]

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Imo, entropy has nothing to do with this process

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Actually, entropy is critically involved in every single chemical reaction on earth, including those that occur in the human body. A reaction will not occur if it violates thermodynamics.

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I guess this is why creationists talk less about entropy than evolutionists.

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Actually, thermodynamics has virtually nothing to do with evolution (apart from allowing chemistry itself to function). It bothers us to death when creationists try and drag it in as if it is somehow related - that's why this thread was started.------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

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I guess this is why creationists talk less about entropy than evolutionists.

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Umm...where have you been?As far as the C-vs-E debate goes, the only people who purposely bring entropy into the picture are creationists, with their flawed understanding of the 2nd Law. Until someone developed an emotional need to manufacture logical objections to the theory of evolution, entropy never even entered the discussion.I would be highly intrigued if you could provide evidence to the contrary.

It is one thing to know with our mind that magnitude of what is outside the brain in a forensic probability is likely not the same equilibirium or homeostasis of/in life but ones use of the brain for the brute's body and any else human parts the corpse presents on death is not the same thing.Boscovich wrote in an Appendix "Relating to Metaphysics THE MIND AND GOD" 528."Now, certain local motions in our body are engendered by impulse from external bodies, or even self-produced by the manner in which they come from without, & these are carried to the brain. For in the brain, somewhere...arise certain non-local motions in the mind, that are not indeed free motions, such as the ideas of...they are vital actions, though not voluntary."Since then Maxwell called needed renewed attention to "entropy". It has not happened except say for Shrodinger's generalization of a negative in-finity which even if positive seems more about Bohm hidden vaule explaination of Einstein's dice (or two different ways to calculate quantum fields and mechanics) then what Delbruk thought multiplication (not replication) was. I would need to invoke Aritotle's distinction in distributive justice of involuntary vs voluntary in order to show (which is indeed possible) that the common view of entropy in c/e is NOT how it has appeared so far electronicaly. We would need a difference of local and global brain negentropy for starters but Changuex's brain wash chemcials really wouldnt give the global sense that Boscovich proposed and I would be on a neurological limb to project this from my brain in a realistic way that one wouldnt otherwise get from simply reading the sources.

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Actually, entropy is critically involved in every single chemical reaction on earth, including those that occur in the human body. A reaction will not occur if it violates thermodynamics.

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Rei, my statement was in the vein of Rrhain's statement below from message 3. You're being a bit nit pickey, aren't you?Rrhain's statement:

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In the end, life and death have nothing to do with entropy. Oh, entropy is an important part of chemistry and all chemical reactions need to take place in accordance with the second law of thermo, but it isn't like food is "negative entropy." After all, a person who is alive could eat you. So if you are filled with "positive entropy," why is it that somebody else sees you as "negative entropy"?

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Umm...
where have you been?

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As far as the C-vs-E debate goes, the only people who purposely bring entropy into the picture are creationists, with their flawed understanding of the 2nd Law. Until someone developed an emotional need to manufacture logical objections to the theory of evolution, entropy never even entered the discussion.

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I would be highly intrigued if you could provide evidence to the contrary.

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Umm...
Were it not for the entropy factor, evolution would even be more impossible wouldn't it?

yep. If there was not the thought comparing "small diffusive effect" and "entropy" I would guess the 30 something generation would not have found Carl Zimmer starting with an interest in ENGLISH being a serious populizer of what in NJ still would be a lizard the size of a dime and not even the State of Mexico to say nothing of the book by the word named "evolution" otherwise discussed here on EvC. Carl and I did the same osmosis expt in high school which went UNCHANGED at the IVY SCHOOL. The errors were never cleared up.

entropysimple.com -"The second law of thermodynamics says that energy of all kinds in our material world disperses or dissipates if it is not hindered from doing so. Entropy is the quantitative measure of that kind of spontaneous process: how much energy has flowed from being constricted or concentrated to being more widely spread out (at the temperature in the process)."Without entropy we would have no dispersion of energy in any form and therefore no process that goes on in the universe would be possible.

That's only a valid opinion if you don't know what entropy is. Entropy (among other definitions) could be said to be the phenomenon of how things (like heat, or fluids) tend to flow from areas of high concentration to low concentration.As a result entropy is what allows chemicals to react. Entropy is what makes gases or dissolved solids flow into areas of lesser concentration. Without entropy you wouldn't be able to breathe or eat, as food and air wouldn't dissolve into your body.Entropy isn't bad. Entropy makes life possible. A universe without entropy would be a universe where nothing at all could ever happen. Life isn't possible in a universe without entropy, despite what you've heard about the Garden of Eden or whatever. If this is true, it's because creationists don't know anything about entropy.

buzsaw writes:

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The human body is born with everything intact which causes it to live and grow and a brain to guide it towards survival and growth.

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Physically impossible.That would violate the First Law.The human body starts as a single cell, approximately the size of a period or the dot on an i. It doesn't even have a brain. By the time it has become an adult, it is much larger and is composed of trillions of cells.The First Law indicates that everything has to balance. If that first cell has everything, where is it keeping it? You can't go from that single cell to the multi-cell without adding matter and energy into the system from the surroundings.

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I guess this is why creationists talk less about entropy than evolutionists.

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Incorrect.What is true is that evolutionary biologists talk about entropy more accurately than creationists. For example, evolutionary biologists will discuss the entropy changes in specific chemical reactions such as in photosynthesis. They will do this in order to better understand the chemical reactions that are taking place. Creationists, on the other hand, will mistakenly claim that entropy prevents evolution from happening in the first place. They will do this in order to shore up their preconceived notion that evolution is the devil's work.