Further to “New formula for the origin of life, breaking, breaking” … where Laszlo Bencze offered some thoughts:
If Laszlo were to take a wide frying pan, put an inch or two of water spiked with glitter in it, carefully set a flat pane of glass over the skillet and get rid of all the air bubbles, and finally place it on a warm stove that he can slowly heat up, he will find that the glitter organizes into a hexagonal honeycomb pattern of convection cells. By varying the heat, different sizes can be created. They are known as Benard cells, and they arise simply from heat gradients in a gravity field. In other words, a highly thermodynamically randomizing energy source produces structure. This is the effect that seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
As the heat gradient increases, the layer of Benard cells can either get larger or split into two layers. This “complexity doubling” also seems to violate 2nd law. Eventually, however, the thermal gradient causes wild, turbulent cells–what my Joy of Cooking calls a “full boil”– and all the ordering appears to be lost.
Ilya Prigogine received a Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1977 for describing this system. There was also a binary chemical reaction with elegant scrolls illustrating the cover of Scientific American around that time, where two, well mixed reagents produced something that looked like art. The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by Los Alamos scientists plus Nobel prize winner Murray Gell-Mann to address this cross-disciplinary field of spontaneously appearing complexity. An early director of the Institute was Stuart Kauffman, who wrote and spoke widely on the approach.
The basic idea is that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is an equilibrium system. In equilibrium, the system moves towards its most probable state, which is the one with the greatest entropy. But when far from equilibrium, when energy flows through the system, then the highest entropy system is NOT the state that is most likely. Physicists obliquely refer to this condition as “open” because matter and energy flow through the box. In simple terms, the inputs are not disorganized (high entropy), and the mixing process takes time, but if the system doesn’t have enough time to mix–because the inputs are flowing through too fast– then the system is in an intermediate state with structure. No law of entropy are violated, but it does look like simple inputs are creating complex structures. In the Benard cell, the energy flows through. In the binary chemical reaction, the chemical potential flows through the box. In a wind tunnel with smoke vortices the air particles flow through. In all cases, complexity seems to appear spontaneously. After Prigogine made some fundamental contributions to the far-from-equilibrium physics, the Santa Fe Institute wanted to know just how much organization could result from these flows. They hoped, though they didn’t know until they looked, that they could find methods to “ratchet” the complexity upward, creating more and more complex systems just by flowing stuff through.
The term they used or invented was “Emergence” and in my physics graduate program in 1981 we taught about “self-organizing criticality”. UMd even had a whole department dealing with this sort of investigation–though UMd was more interested in chaotic attractors. Another idea along these lines was called “hypercycles”. Evolution was emergent structure ratcheting upward in complexity through a series of greater and greater hypercycles.
Is that what they found? Again, in laymen’s terms, what all that organization represented was a “Maximum Entropy Production Principle”. The fluid in the Benard cell is organizing itself to transport heat faster–it is creating a machine that stirs up the fluid fastest, maximizing the entropy. That is, if you have two little convection cells and a big convection cell, the one that starts moving really quickly, and therefore the most unstable cell in the pot, is the one that moves the heat the fastest. Each cell is a little heat engine, turning thermal gradients into motion, and Natural Selection picks the one that works fastest, so from a turbulent mutation source of convection cells, NS causes the biggest ones to grow fastest–a Benard cell pattern emerges.
So what happened to SFI and Kauffman and Prigogine’s insight? Well, just like genetic programming, they got their first stage of complexity and then hit a brick wall. The little heat engines were creating entropy faster than they were creating order. (Shades of John Sanford!)
And you could try to channel the little engines into a hypercycle, but it took fancier and fancier equipment. In Dembski and Marks terminology, they discovered that they had to put information into their system by carefully arranging the inputs, before they could get any information out. Nothing came for free.
Now it is true that Prigogine was correct, the far-from-equilibrium system was not Gaussian, was not maximum entropy or random, it didn’t have constant temperature. But instead of life, what they got were Levy-stable distributions, such as power-laws. From an experimentalist’s viewpoint, this is still great news because so much of the universe is organized into power laws that are not in equilibrium, but alas, power-laws do not make life.
Kauffman left SFI and went to Vermont, and SFI went on to study other things. But the dream did not die, nor was it disproven, it just seemed to recede into the mists of funding shortfalls. Which is why you see a journalist occasionally dipping into the 1980’s and declaring that far-from-equilibrium systems just had to be the solution to OOL. Like the Miller-Urey experiment, it went from the bench to mythology, where it is still reverently invoked.
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (origin of life)
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