Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life

Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan

The reason for this, we argue, and for the very origins of life can be traced to the energy flows of an energetic universe, most likely on a hot pockmarked Earth of molten iron, bubbling with sulfur and hissing with steam (Wachtershauser 1992). … Recent discoveries of deep-sea ecosystems feeding not on light or food but on chemical energy suggest an origin of life, paradoxically but poetically, in fire and brimstone --- as do experiments showing that amino acids and peptides can be synthesized in such energetic enclosures.

The discovery of heat-tolerant bacteria able to live on sulfur reactions at the bottom of the ocean, and deep inside rocks --- bacteria grouped together because of common stretches in their ribosomal RNA --- paints a picture of energy rich matter maintaining and making more of itself before gene evolved. (p. xiii)

There has always been a relationship between energy and wealth, energy and life, energy and exuberance. Economics, chemical reactions, ecosystems, and solar systems organize around energy gradients --- natural differences in temperature, pressure and chemistry that set up the conditions for energy flow. (p. xiv)

Schrodinger emphasized two themes: the presence in life of a chemical “code-script” --- which was discovered to be nucleic acids --- and life’s ability to concentrate upon itself a “stream of order”, thereby resisting the tendency for things to fall into disarray, into thermodynamic randomness and atomic chaos (Schrodinger 1944, 20 -21). (p. xiv)

Nature’s tendency to reduce gradients, energy’s tendency to spread in accord with the second law of thermodynamics, is assisted by natural complex organizations, living and nonliving (Schneider 1995). …When we measure the area around complex organisms and ecosystems, we find that they are keeping themselves cool, pushing heat away from them, in such a way as to accelerate the natural production of entropy. (p. xv)

Read Schneider 1995 and more about it. If this pattern is universal, then resource conservation in a human society is impossible.

Clearly gravity, producing gradients at a cosmic scale, must challenge any claim that the second law is an inexorable, omnipotent force. (p. 51)

The relation between gravity and entropy also puzzles me a lot.

Read Eirch Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe.

Read Wicken’s Evolution, thermodynamics and information: Extending the Darwinian program.