Into the Cool

Update from Eric with New Review and Upcoming Talks

2006-03-24T17:42:00.000-08:00

We are back. I apologize to our readers that this blog has been dormant for several months. We-I have been involved in lectures, book readings and research.
*In January Dorion and I spoke at a day-long session at the National Sigma Xi meeting. The organizers gave us two whole sessions to talk about thermodynamics and life and to explore some of the philosophical implications of our work. The room was packed and there was lots of lively discussion.

* I will be talking at the Harvard School of Design in Cambridge on the 21st of April [Thermodynamics, Ecosystems and Successions] and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on the 24th of April [Thermodynamics and Life]. I will post the places and times when I get that information. The talks are open to the public.

* Presently I am working on three research projects. Any one interested in these subjects please share your thoughts with me on this blog. I will make postings on these subjects from time to time.

A. Can ecological processes be mapped on evolutionary trends? Are ecological attributes carried forward into evolutionary processes (Hutchinson)?
B. Are there trends in evolution? Or is it the stochastic random process attributed to Gould and Mayr? I see trends i.e. species increases, and increases in metabolic intensity over time.
C. I plan to drive a stake in the heart of the premise that dissipative systems operate at a state of maximum entropy production. This idea has been suggested by climate modelers who say their models run better when one assumes maximum entropy production. They claim it is a universal principle. As one thermodynamist said to me "They have invented a new law in physics". Biological systems operate optimally at a minimum basal metabolism rate. Ecosystems do the same thing. I already have several collaborators working with me on this subject.

* In the coming weeks and months I plan to post an in depth rebuttal to Doyne Farmer's review of our book that appeared in the 4 August 2005 issue of Nature. I will post his review in the next week. The review is like drinking warm flat beer.
* In the meantime, here is a little review that came out of a web site I have never seen, Science a Go Go. With a web name like that, it is easy to see why I have not read their stuff before. Actually it is a good science review site. It is like an abbreviated web-based New Scientist. They read the book and liked it...

Into the Cool is a book that weaves its way through a forest of scientific literature, providing a multidisciplinary account of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and its prevalence and relevance in everyday life. Eric D. Schneider, a former atmospheric scientist who has worked in thermodynamics for over twenty years, and Dorion Sagan, coauthor of Acquiring Genomes and Up from Dragons, thoroughly explore chaos and equilibrium within diverse systems such as politics, economics, and even human health. The second law of thermodynamics is used in Into the Cool to explain the laws governing systems like evolution, ecology, economics, and the universe itself. Using entropy to explain the dynamics of such systems, Schneider and Sagan show us the relationship between hot and cold, meteorological pressure systems and fluctuating market prices. The book is an eye-opener, an extraordinary glimpse at what might otherwise seem mundane phenomena to the casual observer. Those in search of newfound insight should know, however, that they might need to lock themselves away in a quiet room in order to fully appreciate the complex subject matter. Despite its complexity, Into the Cool is deftly written, and an excellent initiation for anyone interested in the underlying laws of energy common to all complex systems.

--
Eric D. Schneider

Finding the Sun: Toward a Lower Higher Power

2005-11-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

No idea causes greater philosophical consternation than that of the purpose of life: Why are we here?

Many stories have been proffered from the religious front to explain this all but inexplicable puzzle. We are here because God put us here. But why did He put us here? In order to glorify His own image. In order to test us. Those are rough Christian answers. But why did He put us in such a screwed up situation? Surely He could have done better, unless He has a bizarre and malevolent sense of humor.

Which perhaps He does. (Or She. Or, if we want to get science-fictiony about it, It.) Acclaimed author Vladimir Nabokov was not a Christian--he criticized Gogol for it--but he did have a notion of a whimsical author-like Creator making trouble for creatues that could not explain themselves by science alone. In his autobiography Speak, Memory (which was to be called Speak, Mnemosyne, but that title was nixed by editors who considered it too difficult for the normal reader), Nabokov writes of the mysteries of mimicry by butterflies whose wings exemplify artistic perfection. "Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refaraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis ("Don t eat me--I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. Natural selection, in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of the struggle for life when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."

Although hardly the official version, Nabokov s trickster creator elegantly accounts for many of the facts. The Gnostic and Hindu solutions are also more logical than the official local version but still not quite satisfactory. The Gnostic sect, considered heretical by the Church fathers even though its sharp divide between divine spirit and debased flesh left its mark on the development of Christianity, considered creation to be a botched job. This is much more in accord with the facts than the Panglossian notion that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Of course, in the Christian story badness can be laid at the doorstep of the Devil--but then how is God so all-powerful? The Gnostic position is more consistent. The perfect God did not create this world. Rather the Demiurge did it. The Demiurge is a subsidiary creator. The Gnostics add some nice touches like the purpose of life is for the divine spark within each of us to ascend upwards back through layers of terror overruled by the planetary archons, up to return to its original home in the seventh heaven of fixed stars. A nice story, but a little dated since we know now that the fixed stars are not fixed and that we are not at the center of the universe surrounded by seven spheres. (Gnostic cosmology arose before the outer planets had been discovered.) Seventh heaven will have to wait.

Hinduism suggests the purpose of life is to amuse the Godhead, who would otherwise be confined to eternal boredom. Like the cartoon says about Heaven, make sure to bring a magazine.

Given 20th century grappling with genocides, totalitarian regimes, nuclear explosions, prison camps and the rest, it is easy to see why many would give up on the idea of a divine purpose. The fashionable French existentialists followed German philosophers Heidegger (who never renounced his brief fling with Nazism) and Nietzsche, who said God is dead but that the news has not reached man. Into the vacuum created by the absence of divine design rushed Dadaism, nihilism, surrealism and allied artistic and philosophical movements, movements which substituted human-centered notions of play and dream and void for coherent cosmic purpose. The philosopher Aristotle had divided causes up into material, efficient, formal, and final but scientists, despairing of the idea of a deity running the show, dispensed with all but the mechanical explanations of the efficient cause. It was enough to study the mechanism of things (which ultimately attested to the craftiness of the creator, but he could no longer be considered a hands-on creator). Why ask the question why when you couldn t find out? Better to bask in the operational research program and potential discoveries of how. Thus Aristotle, who had been a favorite of the Church fathers, went out of favor. Questions of why things were could only be answered in terms of how they were unless scientists wished to risk being considered unscientific.

After Darwin, the great question of why does life exist was answered by the tautology, or question-containing answer, of "to reproduce" or "to produce offspring." Life existed as life. It did not make sense, scientifically, to ask why it existed outside the parameters of its origins, operations, and development.

Nonetheless, evolutionary theorists, as Stephen Jay Gould points out, were at least a little closer to Aristotle s multipartite division of cause than most scientists. That is because when they asked what is the purpose of a given part of an organism, what is its function, the answer was twofold: the efficient cause, to use Aristotle s language, was stated in terms of physiology, while the final cause was given in terms of evolution. For example, it is clear that the purpose of the heart, physiologically, is to pump the blood. That is why it exists. But before the anxious theologian could jump in and say "aha! So there is a Creator," the evolutionist would say no, the seemingly designed structure has resulted from the fact that nonfunctioning organisms perished. In other words biology gives a dual explanation of how an organ works, its functioning via cell structure, nutrients, bodily mechanisms etc., and its value to the organism that has it versus those that didn t, and perished. In the case of structures that have no obvious function, evolutionists often explain them with reference to ancestors living under different conditions in which the organs were of use. The wings of flightless penguins, for example, may point back to less blubbery birds that flew. Indeed, such reasoning is one of the primary evidences for evolution, organismic change over time.

All well and good, but what of the purpose not of the organ--the breathing lung, the calculating brain, the detoxifying liver--but the organism itself? We can understand animal organs in terms of evolution and adaptive value, but can we understand the organism similarly?

Many scientists would have a problem with this, and it is here where we glean the frightfulness for the working evolutionist of the question of why life exists. But they shouldn t be frightened. For, as we shall see, the question of life s existence can be approached scientifically. The same is true of an allied question, that of whether evolution shows any clear direction over time. The orthodox neoDarwinian position is that evolution is essentially random. Great modern evolutionists who differ on many fine points--Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins--all agree that the evolution is basically stochastic, that is, random.

And yet the evidence is to the contrary. Many trends are observable over the course of Earth s history: increase in number of individuals, species, and taxa; expansion of the area inhabited by life; increase in the respiration efficiency (measured by living representatives of animal taxa ordered by appearance in the fossil record); increase of cell types; increase in capacity for storage of energy, food, and information; and, last but not least, increase in the number of chemical elements involved in the process of life as it has expanded and evolved over Earth s surface through time. Moreover, with the appearance of technically capable human beings, rare radioactive isotopes never before seen in this part of the solar system, have made a brief appearance on the planetary stage. Although it is not true, for example, that there has been an increase in brain size or brain-to-body ratio in all lineages of animals over time, the many measurable trends towards increasing organization and complexity suggest that something a little less cavalier than mere evolutionary "randomness" is going on.

So, what is it?

It turns out that the question of the purpose, or function, of an organism s whole body is related to that of the observed evolutionary trends.* The functioning of the whole organism connects to the observation of evolutionary trends via the science of energy flow. The key observation of this science, thermodynamics, is the second law. The second law of thermodynamics, which has wrongly been argued to conflict with life, says quite simply that energy disperses. You may have thought that the second law of thermodynamics says something about entropy rising, or disorder. Well, it does, but not exactly. The use of the terms entropy and disorder have been bandied about in many confusing ways. But the spreading of energy also leads to what we would call ordered or organized systems. Examples include hexagonal structures called Bénard cells, whirlpools and hurricanes, and complex chemical reactions of which life, of course, is a most fascinating example. In each case the complex structure arises in an area of energy flow, and represents nature s "attempt" to follow its second-law mandate of energy dispersal. I put "attempt" in quotes because obviously it is considered an example of the pathetic fallacy, silly personification à la Disney or nature-worshipping heathens, the imputing of an active will or animate spirit to nature and its inanimate operations.
And yet the universal tendency for energy to disperse--a kind of proto-animate directionality--is as omnipotent and important in terms of nature s laws as is Newton s law of gravity. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington,

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell s equations--then so much the worse for Maxwell s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation--well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The beginning of the universe itself obeys the dictates of energy dispersal, with the spreading of that inconceivable pinpoint of energy we locate at the origin as the big bang. Another way of getting a handle on the second law is to say that nature abhors a gradient. A gradient is a difference across a distance. The difference can be of pressure, temperature, or chemical concentration. As such differences are rectified--not really because nature "wants" to rectify them but just because that s what nature does--energy tends to flow. For example, the difference between a hot boiler and a cool radiator runs a traditional steam engine. But that is manmade, a machine. Nature behaves this way without any consciousness (that we can detect). A hurricane reduces temperature and pressure gradients in the atmosphere, spinning into existence and disappearing once its second law task is done. We give them names like Wilma and Katrina but don t really think hurricanes have agency.
Which brings us back to the question of purpose seen in light of the second law. One of the main obvious traits of organisms is that they seem to be doing something: they have an agenda, a motive, some sort of task or goal. The question we can ask is, Is this goal, this trending behavior in organisms looking for food or mates or shelter or company--is it related to the second law? I believe it is, although living matter s ability to store energy, and then redeploy it to seek new energy sources makes it a higher-order thermodynamic phenomenon than, say, a hurricane. But consider how simple second law behavior can mirror that of the deliberating mind. Imagine Abe Lincoln s heated log cabin as he reads by fluttering candlelight without his stovepipe hat: anywhere there is a space between the logs, or the windows, or the doors, heat will act as if it is "trying" to escape. And why--if we can use that word--is it acting like it has a will to get outside and keep our future president cold? Well, the answer is not mystical. The heat behaves this way because it is concentrated energy following its natural second law mandate to disperse; or, ag"in, because there is a temperature gradient between the inside and the outside of the heated cabin--which nature "wants” to rectify. Are our human wants, desires, and needs related to this higher scientific "purpose"? If a house insulator were to come along and, as they sometimes do, sprinkle powder in the air to make visible the gaps in Lincoln s cabin, he might find behavior similar to that reported by a modern insulator: a streamer of hot air, rising through the face-like hole of an electric outlet, rising up a wall, half-way across the ceiling then, as if changing its mind, reversing course and heading out the same hole whence it came.
Such behavior of simple thermodynamic systems is intriguing and begs the question as to the nature of that sacrosanct mindfulness with which we regard ourselves divinely, or at least superiorly endowed. If an unconscious streamer of air, in fulfilling its natural end to spread out, to reach equilibrium with the cooler air outside, can somehow calculate its position to do a u-turn on the ceiling, then perhaps the purposeful behavior we see in living things is not so grandiose. As Aristotle (in Physics II. 8), often called "the first biologist," wrote, "Nature belongs to the class of causes which act for the sake of something...In natural products the sequence is invariable, if there is no impediment. It is absurd to suppose that purpose is not present because we do not observe the agent deliberating. Art does not deliberate. If the ship-building art were in the wood, it would produce the same results by nature. If, therefore, purpose is present in art, it is present also in nature...It is plain then that nature…operates for a purpose."
In fact, to follow up on our earlier question, we can regard the whole organism as having a natural function, or purpose: to reduce gradients on a more or less continuous basis. Indeed, satellite measurements show that complex ecosystems are more effective at reducing the long-wave sun-Earth radiation gradient than less complex ecosystems or nonliving areas. There is evidence that over geological time life has kept itself cool despite the sun s increasing luminosity. This global regulation, which disperses more of the sun s energy as it grows more luminous, is physiological and thermodynamic, and need not be explained with recourse to natural selection or conscious will. Indeed, life s gradient-reducing activities have recently been marred, not aided, by the conscious agent humanity because of our fossil fuel use and deforestation. More and more human life, infused with energy and cycling matter, seems an amazing but natural process.
Thermodynamics teaches us that complex systems, far from violating the second law, arise naturally during the course of energy dispersal and gradient reduction, and that our precious consciousness, with which we like to consider ourselves far above the animals, may in the end belong not just to life but to the principles of organization of a second law-endowed cosmos. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner said that our lives here seem to us as if we are part of a great story. We feel the plot is very complex, but is somehow more than singer Lou Reed s encapsulation of the existential viewpoint, that "life is just to die." It is as if the universe is up to something, something making a mockery of our limited attempts to understand it, something involving the implacable resolution of the simple, indomitable, second law.

References:

Nabokov, Vladimir, 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, G. Putnam s Sons: New York.

McKeon, Richard, ed., 2001. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Princeton University Press: Princeton.

Minkel, J.R., 2002. "The Meaning of Life—Are we nothing more than energy-shredding machines—Byzantine contraptions for reducing the Universe to a state of bland uniformity?" New Scientist, 30-33.

Sagan, D. and Whiteside, J., 2005. Gradient-Reduction Theory: Thermodynamics and the Purpose of Life. In Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, MIT Press, Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston, eds, pp. 173-186.

2005. Schneider, Eric D., and Sagan, D. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

The Hydra of Doubt: Big Time Bush-Sanctioned Intellectual Dishonesty

2005-08-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

It is great to see that Don Mikulecky has joined our page. Don is one of the most talented minds in science. A Noam Chomsky of science might be an appropriate title. Don has been a Marine, a preacher, a premier researcher in several fields of science and philosophy, including complexity science, relational biology, network thermodynamics, and other fields that I forget. He is a great teacher and lecturer. Check out his web site site. Don is correct. I tend to come in charging on a horse. However many of us have dedicated a lifetime to science and to see others debasing the basic premise of our lives with nonsense is bothersome to say the least. This is a dogfight that I did not expect. They have come out of their blogs attacking my book before they have even seen it. These are people like we have not seen before. We scientists all like a good scientific fight. Often some small advances are made by such turmoil. But here is what a colleague said on National Public Radio this week about the ID community:

"Most people--even many who are writing in this group--do not
appreciate how unbelievably dishonest the ID crowd is, Behe and
William Dembski in particular. Dembski is really the principal 'go to'
science guy for the ID crowd. The one thing Dembski and Behe share with the creationist crowd in general is a deep aversion to the term 'natural science.

"The logic goes like this: after Darwin (Dembski, I think he says
Voltaire was the first enemy of God, leading to Darwin) science was
forced to adopt the moniker of natural science to show its ideological move to naturalism. "Natural" science necessarily excludes the "super"-natural. Excluding the supernatural excludes God; and anything that excludes God is anti-God. This is a mantra for the WHOLE
movement, creationist and ID-ist all.

"Dembski publically maintains that his books are not an endorsement of religion (Behe does the same). They say this to give the impression that their goal is a new scientific orthodoxy. Behe was one of the persons who was on the losing side of the Louisiana test case on
Creationism in LA schools. The Supreme Court decision, as you will
remember, concluded that Creationism is not science and therefore
could replace or compete with evolutionary biology in school curriculum. More than that, though, the decision seemed to suggest to creationists that they reformulate their position to reflect that necessity. Behe and Dembski have that, and only that, as their goal. In fact, not only is Dembski's writing an endorsement of the most vulgar evangelicalism, it advocates the teaching of daily miracles, for example God's hand in one's choosing lines from the Bible for
making daily decisions, etc., as well as Bible numerology, etc. And
while hiding behind his pseudo-mathematics (algorithms, information
theory, etc.), all of the most serious objections to 'Darwinism' are
really just the same old 'a room of monkeys with typewriters will
never compose Hamlet by chance' yarn. I recommend, if you will excuse
the phrase, Dembski's book "Intelligent Design" as proof of all of this (published by InterVarsity Press!!! How distinguished!). Moreover, the ID movement is, and Behe and Dembski are, entirely and exclusively 'Christian' in intent, to the exclusion of all other faiths. While it is true that the latter do not advocate the 6000-year Earth or six-day creation, and while they do give a nod to some notion of evolutionary processes, they cannot be understood,
by ANY reading of their books and articles, as being anything short of Christian advocates of the most basic kind.

"These guys are just shameless liars when addressing criticism in
public. They will endorse things one day and say the opposite the
next. They really do not seem to care about the verity of their
positions, and they, in fact, do not: they are only interested in
knocking down the 'epoch of naturalism' by proffering a 'scientific'
counter to evolution. It is guerilla ideology, pure and simple. AS
LONG AS THEY CAN BRING THE DEBATE TO ANY SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS, they
will have shown, legally, that ID is a science. That is the only goal."

I have spent several months on their non-science. There is nothing there. It is like one hand clapping; the one reason they have received so much press is that the media says that it is only "fair if we cover both sides." But there is no "other side" as far as the science goes. They should cover it as a religious story.

I have spent too much time deeply immersed in this ID-science issue and I must tell you there is a WAR going on out the on the net and in the courts. They HATE each other with comments like "get the AK 47 and spray and pray" on the net. The day Bush came out in favor of ID there were over 300 messages on one discussion group. There are secret discussion groups. The ID groups are well funded, their web pages look great and are up to date almost hourly. Their leaders are very smart and many have multiple PhD's from good schools. They have had a plan, and recent polls suggest that only 10 and 35 percent of Americans believe in evolution without God's help. They have won!!!!!!!! (The disrespect for science is cut from the same cloth as Bush's EPA appointee Christine Todd Whitman's pronouncement that the World Trade Center site was safe despite toxic levels of mercury from pulverized computers that, along with asbestos dust and radioactive elements further endangered fire and other workers as the crime evidence was being whisked away. If you scroll down Mikulecky, who happens to be deeply spiritual, suggests that Bush should be impeached on the basis of his de facto "war on science" alone...it is hardly surprising that the super-smarmy political dirty tricksters who have taken over our government feel threatened by intellectual honesty and the scientific method--even if it could have saved Reagan's life.)

As for bringing religion and science together that is another matter. This is where is Don and I agree. How do we meld them? Boltzmann once said that philosophy gave him headaches but that he was returning to thermodynamics to look the hydra of doubt in the eye whatever the consequences and however perilous it is if one value's one's life. I suffer from daily migraines but am no Boltzmann. I have been asked to write an article for a major magazine on ID and Science. Any suggestions from any of you are welcome.

Eric

Science and God: Can We Handle the Truth?

2005-07-27T10:14:00.000-07:00

On the 28, April 2005 readers of the British science
journal, Nature, were greeted with a jarring cover
headline banner, replete with faux University of
Regents red seal:

"This journal contains material on evolution.
Evolution by natural selection is a theory, not a
fact. This material should be approached with an open
mind, studied carefully and critically considered.

Approved by the University Board of Regents, 2006"

Such front-page satire from the world's premier
science journal was staggering in itself. But polling
data inside showed that a moneyed fundamentalist
mission, having taken up intellectual arms against
science, especially cosmology and evolutionary
biology, was winning big time. A Gallup poll published
in Nature showed that today only 35 percent of
Americans "believe evolution is a scientific theory
well supported by the evidence." Among Americans with
a high school education or less, only 20 percent
accept evolution as fact.

This summer the Kansas State School Board is considering changing their State's curriculum to include "other theories than evolution" (creationism) in their science courses. The conservative Kansas School board is expected to approve this measure. Similar issues are in front of schools boards in 20 states.

After the defeats of the concept "Creationism" in state courts
and the United States Supreme Court these religious
campaigners have turned to a morphed creationism that
they call Intelligent Design. The movement makes
three main claims against evolution. The first is
that our biological world is too complex to have been
produced by biological variation and selection and
that an unidentified designer must have designed the
object or process. A related argument is a hazy "God
algorithm" that supposedly separates natural objects
from those changes done by a designer.

The ID- creationists' third area of complaint takes
refuge in thermodynamics. An example is given by a group
known as the Institute for Creation Research:
"Evolutionists are embarrassed by the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. The obvious tendency of nature from
disorder to order and organization is, of course, only
an assumption of evolutionists. The real tendency in
the natural world, as expressed by the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, is from order and organization to
disorder. This very obvious problem is commonly
bypassed by evolutionists."

Such statements are made in ignorance of the last 60
years of research in thermodynamics. There is
absolutely no contradiction between the Second Law and
the evolution of order and life. Order and disorder
are intimately connected. Life and its ecosystems,
driven by energy from the sun, not only do not violate
the second law but it is thermodynamic phenomena that
provide the "go" for life. The cosmos is indeed highly
and surprisingly organized; but the presence of life
inside this organization is in perfect keeping with
other spontaneously appearing systems that naturally
organize to produce atomic and molecular chaos. As
evolution links all organisms through heredity,
thermodynamics links all complex systems through
common patterns of energy flow.

It is a poignant irony that the biblical Jesus
reserves his harshest language for the rich and for lawyers.
Perhaps predictably, an unholy alliance of these two
forces appears to be behind the well funded,
rhetorically unctuous attack on what is arguably
civilization's greatest triumph: the honest search for truth, the rewards of which include knowledge, education, technology, and science.

Much of the ID power and coordination comes from the
the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, with a full
time staff of less that 10 people with some forty
Fellows including all the high-profile ID advocates.
It is partially funded by reclusive, deeply Christian
multi-billionaire, Howard H. Ahmanson Jr. Ahmanson
sits on the boards of the Discovery Institute and the
Claremont Institute, an ultra-right-wing think-tank
that stresses "Christian values." The last data
available showed that he and his family own Home
Savings of America, worth $47 billion in 1997.

The leaders of this movement may not be interested in
scientific research but they have political acumen. By
far the most vocal and politically astute member of
the Discovery Institute is lawyer Phillip Johnson.
Johnson had a mid-life crisis and Christian religious
conversion turned him from being a law professor at
the University of California Law School into an
anti-evolution provocateur. In 1999 the
Johnson-Discovery Institute's twenty-year strategic plan
was leaked via the Internet. This proposal was to
drive a theistic "wedge" between science-evolution and
religion. This formal plan was complete with dreams of
PBS documentaries, plans and strategies for "cultural
confrontation, publicity and opinion shaping and
timed public relation campaigns. In 2004 Pennsylvania
Senator Rick Santorum praised Johnson for his efforts
to inject a new and unbiased understanding of science
into our public schools. To the dismay of many, this
summer the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
is showing a film sponsored my the Discovery Institute.

If faith is substituted for evidence, and ignorance
spackled with a miracle putty that can do anything, then
science is no longer needed. There seems little doubt
that the emotional source of this debate is pure
religious belief, which we honor and, indeed, do not think
should be desecrated by pretending its science. It is
difficult for our human ego to imagine a cosmos
without a special place for human beings. Scientific
investigation has revealed that we are not at the
center of the universe, and that we are not made of
special stuff but of atoms such as are found
abundantly throughout the cosmos. The DNA studied by
molecular biology proves Darwin's contention that we
are all related through common ancestry.
Thermodynamics takes the story one step further,
showing that complex systems and progressive
tendencies, such as we see in evolution,
are the natural result of energy flows.

Centuries ago Benedict Spinoza's Theologico-Philosophical Treatise helped lay the political foundation for separation of Church and
State, as well as the freedom of speech and worship.
This philosopher also pointed out that a God who
intervenes to create miracles is not as amazing as One
who orders the universe according to unchangeable
scientific laws. Only an impersonal God such as this
(believed in by Einstein) is consonant with science. Insofar as the laws of nature are eternal, if they imply a God it is
a God who neither intervenes nor makes special
allowances, least of all for specific human groups.
The explicit dependence of religious belief on faith
makes it inimical to science. Science is about finding
the truth whether we like it or not. No amount of
money or clinging to past mythology is enough to
create the truth.

Such twisting of science by the Church has occurred
before. Galileo was forced to sit on the sidelines
while religion reigned over astronomy and physics. It
took hundreds of years for science to recoup. The
current setback in science is even more pernicious as
it is the result of an orchestrated disinformation
campaign to ensure the general public cannot decipher
myth from fact. Now Darwin sits on the sidelines.

Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan

Bedazzled by Design

2005-06-30T05:49:00.000-07:00

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. This junior high school motto seems to be the secret motto and modus operandi of the "intelligent design" (ID) movement, which used to be the "creation science" movement, and was before that simply "creationism." Author and ID advocate William Dembski has kindly given us permission to post on his website, which we have been pleased to do, in the hopes of promoting a more considered view of the second law's role in life and evolution. Obviously this was naive. Ironically we have been criticized--apparently by those who have not read our book--for promoting "pseudoscientific bunkum." Apart from ad hominem attacks to the effect that we are just a "geologist and Carl's son" and that our book would better have been named "Into the Baloney," the criticism has been leveled that the second law's role in life's complexity cannot be crucial because natural phenomena such as tidal waves and fires produce much more entropy. The point, however, is not that life outstrips other natural processes in entropy production but that it measurably (as shown by outgoing long-wave radiation satellites, to take just one example) produces more entropy than would be the case without it. Indeed, if a person were to spontaneously combust, more entropy would be produced--in the short-term anyway--than if she were to continue metabolizing normally. Yet a living thing produces more entropy than a mere random collection of matter--and, over the long run, more than someone spontaneously combusting. As Eddington writes. "If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations--then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation--well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation." Some of the more scientifically savvy creationists have gleaned this fact and, speculating quite wildly, attempted to make an end run around the second law. Perhaps the most surprising of them is Frank Tipler, author of The Physics of Immortality, who has devised an elaborate means in which the future of evolution, encompassing human technology, will preserve each human soul in a futuristic heaven. This is interesting science fiction, and cannot be ruled out; but it is not science. We enjoy the work of Philip K. Dick, which includes stories of God as an alien ("The Divine Invasion"), aliens sending a vampiric (to them a devouring God is more natural than one that you eat) Jesus simulation onboard a faltering spacecraft, and a lowly future worker, beta testing a time travel device, who turns out to write the Bible by accident ("A Prominent Author"). By contrast the intelligent design ur-plot that Jesus is somehow--but of course they are reluctant to say how on the record as it sounds, well, a tad unscientific--behind it all seems rather trite and boring. The Christian proto-existentialist Soren Kierkegaard remarked that the more preposterous a belief is the greater the faith necessary to believe it. Precisely. We were surprised to see Tipler--co-author with Templeton winner John Barrow of a massive tome on the Anthropic Principle--included in a Dembski anthology on intelligent design. What was worse was Tipler's claim that Lynn Margulis supported intelligent design in Aquiring Genomes because she mentioned Behe while criticizing Darwinism--and was joined in such criticism by doyenne of evolutionary biology Ernst Mayr. Unfortunately, this showed a solid lack of scholarship if not disingenuousness on Tipler's part. Margulis was criticizing neoDarwinism's claims that mutations were the sole source of variation, not Darwinism of which her endosymbiotic theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells is a shining--and genetically proven--example. (The Behe "mention" was perjorative.) The amount of money coming in to support creationism is astounding. One of us (Dorion) even thought fit to apply for a John Templeton Grant as they were advertising in Nature that they were seriously looking for scientific treatments of what they called the "great debate" concerning purpose in life. To their credit, the Templeton committee now summarily reject the creationist conceit that evolution is a theory.

But the anthropic principle notion that the universe is somehow created with man in mind or as its end point, is too often a smokescreen for wholly speculative creationism. Book after book is written highlighting the supposedly inconceivable concatenation of finely tuned constants that supposedly (if unstatedly) reveal the miracle of creation. And yet if the chances, based on information theory (or whatever other scientific disciplines can be pounded into shape to suit creationist purposes), of us being here are so remote as to suggest an all-powerful Creator, then simple calculation suggests that the chances that You exist are even more remote. More remote still is the startling unlikelihood that You will be reading this Precise Peevish Note on the cryptic political machinations of scientific underlings. The Intelligent Designer is apparently a many-faceted monster with an exceedingly devious plan that includes the meta-miracle of anonymous posters spewing incomprehensible theories on our website and creationists who have not read our book criticizing it on theirs. In engaging the creationists we were hoping to generate more light than heat but apparently the Intelligent Designer's mysterious ways include cavalier dismissals of evidence in favor of worldviews that place mammalian bipeds at the center of the universe. Will wonders never cease.

Behe and the Proton Rotary Motor

2005-06-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

Ironically, in rejecting religious accounts of creation, science has acquired a taste for an almost equally anthropomorphic view based on human experiences of mechanical construction. This taste for a reductionism that pictures complexity formation as a kind of bit-by-bit construction, rather than natural flow process, plays into the hands of those who argue that specific biological structures are too complex to be scientifically explained. In Darwin's Black Box (1996) Michael Behe draws attention to what he considers an example of ID: the "irreducible complexity" of the "proton rotary motor" of a corkscrewing bacterial appendage used in locomotion, the flagellum. The flagellum helps the prokaryote move through its viscous medium. The phrase proton rotary motor conjures up images of a more-than-human craftsman, the divine equivalent to those artists in Manhattan who write poetry on grains of rice. Scientists describe the proton rotary motor as a real rotating motor, with a membrane-embedded rotor running on ion flow (charged particles). It has a helical filament like a propeller, a hook like a universal joint, a drive shaft-like rod, and a ring complex with stator, which represents the heart of the mechanism. Some bacteria can even reverse their motors, allowing them to switch directions. Behe revels in the clear design function--to propel bacteria through the water to where they are going--and disparages the notion that such microscopic complexity could have possibly evolved by an incremental evolutionary process. But a closer look, one that links non-equilibrium thermodynamics (NET) and natural selection, gives us a clearer take on nature's creative potential. The bacteria with such motors travel along food gradients. When E. coli dart about, then stop and tumble (by reversing their motors), they sample the environment for data and move toward the concentrated sources of the carbon, energy, and electrons needed for survival. Although at first it may all seem impossibly well crafted from the outside, in fact evolutionary antecedents of the bacterial movement "apparatus" are there. The ability to switch directions, for example, is not present in all bacteria. This suggests evolution from simpler forms. More to the point, there are close similarities between the proteins making up the flagella with their "motors" and other proteins routinely secreted by bacteria naturally as part of their thermodynamically mandated entropic waste production. Indeed, in some cases the exact same proteins used in the flagellar motor are excreted through a tube much like that seen in the growth of proton rotary motors (e.g., Komoriya et al. 1999; Young et al. 1999). Thus, the proteins involved in export probably got caught up in ion flows moving across the membranes of bacterial cells, leading to mobility systems that became honed by natural selection. Details aside, the take-home lesson is that flow patterns are omnipresent in the area of gradients and the complex cyclical structures that navigate them: life is not starting with a blank slate, but with a chalkboard intricately sketched with thermodynamic "designs." Behe, a leading semi-scientific spokesman for the ID (intelligent design) movement is right that not all "motors" are made by man. Nor are human beings. But there is nothing scientific about cryptically intimating that where science reaches a gap in its understanding, religion or its ID surrogate should rush in. (We will pass by here the obvious and appropriate if cliched motif regarding sneakerless angels and fear.) In fact, it is, at best, a superficial understanding of science that makes divine magic or its engineering equivalent of the intricate and functional arrangements described propelling bacteria. Natural selection cannot explain everything, but what it does not explain does not move automatically over from the Darwinian realm into the arena of Unexplained Mysteries. Thermodynamics, consonant with Darwinism, allows structures to grow and complexify when their kinetic arrangements aid and abet the second law. Such a perspective should be more commodious to the scientific mind than the hypothesis that God, like our Manhattan rice grain artist, is consumed with microscopic engineering feats concentrated on the rear end of germs. Thermodynamics provides the needed flashlight to peer in to Behe's cathected "Black Box."

Loyal Rue and Religious Naturalism

2005-06-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

Two-time Templeton Award winner Loyal Rue (Luther College, Decoarah, IA) is a breath of fresh air cutting through the obscurantist, politically motivated fog of creationism-ID theory. In his new book, Religion is Not About God, Rue writes (pp. 365-66) "The more we learn about the details of natural processes, the more evident it becomes that these processes are themselves creative. Nothing transcends Nature like Nature itself...Holmes Rolston speaks of the cosmic evolutionary process in terms of struggle, endurance and achievement. Nature appears to be informed by internal, systemic values as it struggles through to something ever higher. Some strains of process theology assert that all natural phenomena arise from elementary movements of experience and valuation. Thus, without natural values there can be no Nature. God is viewed as an essential part of the natrual process, and to this extent God is a natrual entity, not a supernatural one...The gap between Nature and God is being narrowed from the other direction as well--that is, Nature is becoming divinized...Margaret Atwood reinforces the point beautifully 'God is not the voice in the whirlwind. God is the whirlwind.'...As the gap between the natural and the sacred narrows--as God is naturalized and Nature is divinized--the problem of the missing metaphor begins to fade away and the central core of religious naturalism becomes clear: Nature is the sacred object of humanity's ultimate concern. Nature is the ultimate ground of natural facts, and eco-centric values are justified by the claim that Nature is sacred. The values inherent in Nature are obscure (as are the laws of Nature), and our apprehension of them will always be heavily conditioned by our biology and culture. It will always be too much to claim that we know Nature's agenda, just as it has always been too much to claim knowledge of God's will. But if we attend carefully to the feedback, we will see clearly enough that Nature does not tolerate everything...the fact of human survival presupposes a narrow range of values, and it is these values, these natural commandments, this Dharma, that will be the ultimate concern of religious naturalists." In a final section, "In the End, Irony" (p. 368) Rue sums up, "Theists will insist that religion is about a transcendent God, yet the God worshipped and served is always incarnate in natural forms. And religious naturalists may affirm the sacredness of Nature and practice eco-centric piety sincerely, yet deep down they must know that religion is no more about Nature than it is about God." These comments, although somewhat cryptic and critically impregnable insofar as they partake of a negative theology, are consonant with the religious possibilities we leave open at the end of Into the Cool. We particularly like the Atwood quote since the example she uses, the whirlwind, is in fact a paradigmatic nonequilibrium thermodynamic structure: although inanimate, it is complex, purposeful, and materially cycling, like life itself. And, like life, the whirlwind--be it a destructive tornado, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, or an innocuous whirpool in your bathwater--requires absolutely no divine intervention. Its form follows its function. It does what it does beautifully. And its "design," consisting of trillions of atoms acting with off-the-charts statistical coherence, works with a robust natural precision that compares favorably to the clunkier productions of technologists and engineers. In Into the Cool we argue life is precisely such a thermodynamically organized system. With reference to the comments below on Spinoza, natural activities such as these are far more likely to elicit reverence in the scientific mind than superstitious, evidentially unsupported attributions of interference by an outside, emotionally fragile, and human-like God.

Respectfully submitted,

Dorion Sagan

Creationists and Intelligent Design

2005-06-19T15:45:00.000-07:00

Our book, Into the Cool, should be on the stands this week.
But before the book is even out, the Creationists-Intelligent Design movement is shadowing our book. The site on Amazon that advertises and sells our book has paid advertisements to lead people to Creationist sites. Although this is automatic as part of Google's Adsense program, postings have also been put up on our blog and then been mysteriously removed. Our work will bring a new light on this debate. First, we reject the Creationist-ID program. It is not science. As we have said, unfortunately for those who want to pin life's origin on Him, life is but one of many systems that measurably exhibit directional tendencies and more effectively produce entropy than random aggregates of matter.
Overlooked in this conflict is the role of modern thermodynamics, which shows how matter, including living matter, cycles and becomes more complex in regions of energy flow. In a sense here the
creationists are correct because life is not random. Dawkins and Gould have been wrong! Life evolves towards more species, cell types, and taxa; increased area inhabited, respiration efficiency, stored energy, food, and information; and increase, despite several
mass extinctions (each hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than all-out nuclear wars). But it does so due to thermodynamic factors not a finger-pointing creator. The beauty and functionality of plant and animal "designs" have to be contrasted with the horror of an African child starving and his eyes being eaten out by a worm: does not the great Creationist God also deserve credit for designing the worm? And all the other diseases and species not specified in the Bible? In fact, Dembski's supposed algorithm to distinguish created things that are too complex to have evolved from evolved things does not distinguish between creation by a beneficient God and evil aliens or the Devil. If Dembski believes otherwise, we invite him to post a response here. We agree with Dembski that (Stuart) Kaufmann's search for a fourth law of thermodynamics is weak but Dembski's law of "Conservation of Information" is just as bad as Kaufmann's futile search for a new law of thermodynamics. We will take up these issues in later discussions on this BLOG.
Also in later postings we will look at the work of two of he most prominent leaders of the ID movement. Michael Behe, and William Dembski. Behe is formerly unheard-of associate professor at the small
College of Lehigh in Pennsylvania. Behe published a bestseller book Darwin's Black Box. This book with a catchy title by an unknown biochemist has caused an inordinate amount of smoke and chaff from the scientific community. Scientists, being scientists, methodically deconstructed Behe with logic, data, and
theory. These critiques have rolled off the back of the ID community like water off of ducks. Behe's
favorite hobby horse is his belief that nature shows "Irreducible complexity" that can only be explained by
a "designer." He finds the flagellum of bacteria so complex that a designer is required for its existence. True scientists do not walk away from difficult problems with a copout of, "It's too complicated for me to understand, therefore it was a product of a designer God." The intellectual guru for the intelligent design move is 45-year-old William A. Dembski. Dembski has a PhD in philosophy and a PhD in mathematics both from the University of Chicago. He also holds a master's degree in divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
Dembski's dense mathematics seems to be the design of a series of probability-based filters that allow one
to distinguish between natural events and those developed by a designer. He claims to have designed a
calculus for "detecting design-God" in natural systems. Again Dembski, formerly unknown in the field
of biology, has released a torrent of six books over the past seven years with titles including No Free
Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot be Purchased Without Intelligence (2002) and The Design Revolution
(2004). If Dembski is the intellectual spine of this movement his writing favoring a "designed universe"
offer no scientific hypothesis, data, or evidence for his scientific "revolution." It is like arguing with a person who comes to the public and says the earth is flat: God told me so. Why the media gives so much credence to these views which are on the order of a "Flat Earth" hypothesis is a disturbing question. Could it be peer pressure and political intimidation? As Dave Reney reminds us below, when Benjamin Franklin suggested starting each constitutional congress with a prayer, Alexander Hamilton replied, "We don't need any foreign aid." Where are such witty and ballsy patriots today? Such true Americans? Let us hope the newly lamblike media, lying down with the would-be leonine executive branch, isn't hoping for divine intervention to bail out their possibly catastrophic political and fiscal blunders.

Letter from David Reney in Rome

2005-06-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Apropos of creationism, etc, I remember some 25 years ago that when Cosmos was aired in S. Africa, the 'righteous' authorities there insisted on editing the narrator's statement that evolution(like Bush's
dementia) is not a theory, but a fact. In light of that regime's aparthied policies, one might think that this was a nicely obfuscatory or perhaps perversely ironic position for them to adopt, as one of the bases of
modern racism is the Social Darwinism(forgive the possible redundancy here) whose proponents, as everyone knows, wilfully distorted the disinteresting findings of Darwin to justify the continual exploitation and 'removal' of the 'dysgenic' by the 'eugenic.' One of the often overlooked aspects of the Scopes trial is the fact that Bryan's advocacy of the creationist position was as scientifically flawed as it was socially admirable;what he objected to was indeed the social consequences of the new science of eugenics, particularly as it was used to support the sterilisation of those who drew low numbers in life's lottery. A further irony of the
creationist/evolutionist debate(and as one who just spent a week revelling in Rome's peerless Baroque magnificence can enthusiastically attest) is how wonderful at least the aesthetic application of the Catholic,
creationist postion is. One knows that in thinking thus, one is conflating effect and cause, but mutatis mutandis, a lot of great poetry(Lycidas, etc)has been written thanks to the fantasy of what Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy.

How would one love to either put the question to him oneself, or to at least hear a Washington journalist who has taken temporary leave of his/her perpetual cravenness to ask Bush to comment on Alexander Hamilton's
derisive and incomperable reply to Ben Franklin's absurd suggestion that each session of the Constitutional Convention be opened with a prayer, "No, we don't need any foreign aid."

"Mr President, many of the horrors of the last 2 millennia have been a direct result of ignoring Christ's original teachings of unconditional love and peace before all;similarly, many of the aberrations of particularly
contemporary American history have been a direct result of the decision of Republican politicians to ignore the Founders' original wisdom as contained in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Might you care to comment?"

Recent Reviews

2005-06-07T20:45:00.000-07:00

"So you didn't think that nonequilibrium thermodynamics could be romantic? This book, fascinating as it is provocative, proves your wrong!"--Roald Hoffman,Nobel Laureate, chemistry

"Into the Cool is a dazzling exposition of an idea: that life is fundamentally not a noun, or a thing, but a verb. Building upon the beautiful subtleties of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan take us on a tour de force through biology, touching upon the origin of life, sex, evolution, ecology, and even economics. Along the way, they dethrone the idea that the gene is the central actor in the drama of life and put the focus properly back on the plot—the organized flows of matter and energy that make life what it is. This book is destined to be a classic."--J. Scott Turner, author of The Extended Organism

More from Frederick Turner...(and lead in to Loyal Rue)

2005-06-06T14:57:00.000-07:00

Responding approvingly to our blog post of his poem, Fred Turner adds, "Interventionist theories of divine dreation are in my opinion not only bad science but also bad theology, as they imply an incompetent deity who couldn't get the evolutionary parameters right the first time. Carl [Sagan] suggested another possibility in CONTACT, however, which I find intriguing--that the fundamental constants in the universe--even pi--are so odd and absolutely essential--if they were off by a hair nothing would have evolved--that they might be intentional." [He has written an essay on this which will be in American Arts Quarterly.]

This is an interesting question that I elaborate upon above, where we look at the new writing of two-time Templeton Award winner Loyal Rue (Luther College, Decorah, IA) in his Religion without God.

For now, let's notice that Spinoza, the philosopher whose Theologico-Philosophical Treatise helped provide the rational foundation for the separation of Church and State, as well as the freedom to worship and of speech embedded in the US Constitution, ruled out any "God" who acted by whim or caprice as both a scientific and a theological travesty. For Spinoza, time is an infinite attribute of an infinite God. Thus, no "decision" ever gets made in time as God "Himself" is outside of time. The eternal laws of nature are, for Spinoza (and Einstein), necessary. God is much more than human, or personal. These somewhat cryptic comments prepare the way for our next gloss, on what Loyal Rue calls "religious naturalism."

Respectfully submitted,

Dorion Sagan

"Father Spin": Open Letter to The New Yorker

2005-06-05T16:55:00.000-07:00

With regard to the intelligent design (ID)-evolution "debate," were there evidence of life after death, my late father, Carl Sagan, might be found spinning in his Ithaca grave. Spackling ignorance with the infinite power of an interventionist deity is classic pseudoscience. Overlooked in this conflict, however, is modern thermodynamics, which shows how matter, including living matter, cycles and becomes more complex in regions of energy flow. Here the creationists score: Life is neither random nor rudderless on a sea of possibility. Rather, it moves towards more species, cell types, and taxa; increased area inhabited, respiration efficiency, stored energy, food, and information; and increase, despite several mass extinctions (each hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than all-out nuclear wars), in the number of chemical elements cycled at Earth's surface. Unfortunately for those who want to pin its origin on Him, however, life is but one of many systems that measurably exhibit directional tendencies and more effectively produce entropy than random aggregates of matter. Complex systems do not require a creator.

Respectfully submitted,

Dorion Sagan
Manhattan

Frederick Turner Poem

2005-06-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

On Gibbs' Law*

If hot solution, saturate,
Be set upon a ledge to cool,
Rayed crystals will precipitate
On dust no thicker than a molecule;

When the slow chilling of the night
Crosses the threshold of the freeze
The stars shine out as sharp and bright
As frostflowers in their fractal vortices;

The first white gas that was the world,
To ease the heat and press of birth,
Froze into forms as it unfurled:
The starry galaxies, the living earth;

Such pressure drives this crystal trance,
This thickening of art and hour,
Where order tumbles from the dance
Of dying syllables and forms a flower.

Note: In a note to us Turner, author of Natural Classicism, writes, "I think life can turn the increase of thermodynamic disorder into an increase of informational order."

* First published in April Wind and Other Poems, University Press of Virginia, 1991.

The Next Big Interdisciplinary Revolution: Not Just Another Airport Novel

2005-05-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

Our web page is now complete; please check it out. This new website provides a detailed description of our to soon-to-be released (June 1) book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (University of Chicago Press 2005). The addresses are www.intothecool.com and http://www.intothecool.com/blog/ About 8 percent of the book is text and 35 percent of the figures are on the web so that the main themes of the book are available online.

In a country where most people don't even believe in evolution, few may be ready for the next big interdisciplinary revolution. As evolution links all organisms through heredity, so nonequilibrium thermodynamics (NET) links all complex systems through common patterns of energy flow. Startlingly, life not only doesn't violate the second law, but it measurably accelerates the production of entropy (atomic chaos). This suggests a natural purpose for life the more effective production of atomic chaos and a reason why evolution trends toward greater complexity.

[T]he authors unravel the intricacies of cosmology, meteorology, chemistry, ecology and even the mysteries of human aging [by thinking] in terms of energy flow, gradients, and The Second Law. This turns out to be something of a delight, like using a new tool specifically made for that job that we all assume when we first ask why?

Tim Cahill
Author of Lost in My Own Backyard

From Publishers Weekly:

In his well-known essay The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow famously remarked that an inability to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a form of ignorance
comparable with never having read a work of Shakespeare. It is fair to say that these days, the Second Law gets far less press than the Bard. Enter Into the Cool, an impressive work that ranges across disciplinary boundaries and draws from disparate literatures without blinking. A book that (much like Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) requires effort on the readers part.

Read more about complexity, thermodynamics, and life. The creation controversy has visited our blog. Come and pitch in.
www.intothecool.com and
http://www.intothecool.com/blog/

Please pass this on to your colleuges.

Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan

Creationism and Thermodynamics

2005-05-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

Please forgive us for falling behind on our blog. Writing, lectures and planting potatoes and onions seemed to take precedent. In the next few days I will try and reply to some of the comments that have come in over the past month.

In the meanwhile we have been overwhelmed by the recent fervor over the teaching of creationism and evolution in our schools. Over the past month there has been an inordinate amount of attention to the evolution-ID debate. Eighty
years to the day of the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee the Kansas State School Board is pondering the same issue. Today there is no William Jennings
Brian or Clarence Darrow. The scientific community has boycotted these hearings trying not to draw attention to this fringe nonscientific movement

Dorion and I wrote a book about thermodynamics and life (Into the Cool) and showed how the obscure science of thermodynamics is behind much of the complexity we see in nature; important to the manifestation of life whether it be its origin, its evolution or its contribution to the human experience. The book has
roused some in the Creationist-Intelligent Design movement who believe that thermodynamics proves a vital theoretical blow to the scientific facts of
evolution. The interest is this material seems immense. A Goggle search has 705,000 hits on the phrase "thermodynamics and life" and 569,000 hits for the
phrase "evolution and thermodynamics." Nearly half of these faulty entries are promoted by Creationists that misrepresent the famous second law of thermodynamics as proposing that the world should be falling apart not evolving into the complex living world of nature we see today. The answer to this dilemma is easy. Most of life and its ecosystems are driven by energy from
the sun and, with the help of interconnected cycles of energy and matter, generate most of the obvious complexity we see at Earth's surface today. There is
no need for a Creator to contravene the second law.

Inquiry versus Inquisition: The Freedom of Thought

2005-04-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

Due to some of the excellent comments we have been getting that are buried in the reader feedback section of our blog, we have decided to bring some of them "up for air" as it were and post them on the main site. In the following, John LaFave argues that the Church actually accepted the geographical positioning of Earth on the periphery of the solar system earlier than the 1990s. We find the late Pope's quote, in which the Church says the Galileo case was "a sort of 'myth'" to be well, sort of disingenuous. Did not the Church put Galileo under house arrest? Did not it blow the bellows of a chilly wind over the free inquiry that is the life blood of science, or make that a hot fire in the case of Bruno who was burned at the stake for entertaining unorthodox ideas for which there was, moreover, reasonable evidence? With regard to churchly faith and reason being consonant with each other, perhaps the most famous quote is that of Church Father Tertullian, "credibile est, quia ineptum est": "It is credible, just because it is absurd." This quote is apparently usually taken to represent the opposite of reason: one must believe in that which for there is no evidence by wishful thinking. However, a closer reading reveals that Tertullian in fact seems to mean that, because some stories are so wild, they are more likely. As in the case of the person whose excuse is just so bizarre that it seems unlikely they would have made it up. So Tertullian may have been more rational than he is given credit for here. However, burning people and putting them under house arrest when they don't go along with you is still far too high-handed to be considered remotely friendly to science! There is an old saying, "We don't swim in your toilet, so please don't pee in our pool." The Church determining the limits of what is valid scientific inquiry after failed attempts to stop it reminds us of this harsh but humorous dictum. The equivalent would be for scientists to go through Church doctrines, deciding which ones to discard depending on whether or not they passed peer review. The fact that the new Pope was chief of an organization that once went under the name of The Inquisition is enough to give one pause. Catholicism does seem to be less threatened by science and freedom of thought than Protestant literalism, and that is all to the good. A century ago, Samuel Butler warned that, "Scientists are the priests of the modern age, and must be watched very closely." Today things have come full circle: "Priests are the priests of the modern age, and must be watched very closely." No authority is impervious to critical questioning when what is at stake is the freedom to think--from which freedom of speech and worship naturally follow.

Here follows the occasion of our reflections:

Eric-
I saw you speak at Montana Tech last week. I hope that you can come back. Seems to me that "purpose to life" and "purpose of life" are different things, science can speak to the former and is agnostic on the later. That is, "purpose to life" (with respect to humans) speaks to our role as biological beings and how we came to be and how operate in our ecosystem (your argument is most compelling). However, I would suggest that the "purpose of life" speaks more to "why" we are here and our role as spiritual beings. One is scientific (describing/understanding what is) the other theological (describing/ understanding our relationship to God and one another). Some religious beliefs are scientifically untenable: for example, that the world is 6,000 (or 14,000) years old. However, for Jews and Christians not committed to a narrow, literal, interpretation of Scripture, and who recognize that the Bible is not about our natural history, that kind of contradiction between scientific facts and religious doctrines does not exist. There are "religionists" who feel that they need to confront science (Creation scientists, Intelligent Designers) and there are "scientific materialists" who feel the need to free mankind from superstition in all its forms, and especially in the form of religious belief. In my opinion neither group understands science or religion. I would suggest that science and religion are not at odds, but materialism and religion are. Materialism claims that everything in the universe is the result of matter and chance--that nothing exists except matter. Science need not hold to this claim. Likewise religion need not hold that the Book of Genesis is literal truth. Your statement that "Copernicus's view that Earth is not the center of the universe (belatedly embraced by fellow Pole the Pope before his recent death)" whether intentionally or not exacerbate this false conflict. I assume that you are referring to the Pope's 1992 formal apology for the Church's role in the Galileo affair. Contrary to the implication, the Church and the Holy See were not finally throwing in the towel and admitting that the earth revolves around the sun. That particular debate, so far as the Church was concerned, had been closed since at least 1741 when Benedict XIV bid the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the first edition of the Complete Works of Galileo. The Pope was trying to heal the tragic split between faith and science that occurred in the 17th century and from which Western culture has not recovered. He wished to make clear that science has a legitimate freedom in its own sphere and that this freedom was unduly violated by Church authorities in the case of Galileo.

But at the same time he pointed out that "the Galileo case has been a sort of 'myth,' in which the image fabricated out of the events was quite far removed from the reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was the symbol of the Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress." Galileo's run-in with the Church, according to the Pope, involved a "tragic mutual incomprehension" in which both sides were at fault. It was a conflict that ought never to have occurred, because faith and science, properly understood, can never be at odds. Thanks again for your excellent presentation, I look forward to the book.

Best regards,
John LaFave

Thermodynamics and Purpose

2005-04-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

Although science denies it, we often sense that there
is a purpose to life, an obscure or secret meaning, an
overarching direction. "Really, I don't know what the
meaning or purpose of life is," wrote psychologist
Carl Gustave Jung. "But it looks exactly as if
something were meant by it." Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People,
compared the unfolding events of one's life to the
turning pages of a story, with the implication that
there was a divine plan, and all would make sense in
the (hopefully happy) end. Well, yes and no. If our
lives were that story-like and meaningful, the film
and novel industry--which attempt to satisfy our
craving for the story apparently missing in our
ordinary life--might not be such big business. In his
poem, "The Butterfly," Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky
suggests,

this bleak surmise:
the world was made to hold
no end or telos
and if--as some would tell us--
there is a goal,
it's not ourselves.

And so science strongly suggests it is not ourselves. Copernicus's view that Earth is not the center of the universe (belatedly embraced by fellow Pole the Pope before his recent death); the chemical observation that life is made of no special elements but carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in combination; the astrophysists' realization that the elements of life are among the most common in the universe; and Darwin's linking of all living beings to common ancestors changing slightly over the generations--all these things show humanity to be part of natural processes. But we still feel special. The reason may be because we are the ones doing the feeling--a kind of selection bias. If we are really so special, why do we have imperfections and foibles? As physicist David Bohm put it, science is about facing the truth, whether we like it or not. Or, as Jack Nicholson put it, "You can't handle the truth."

The truth is that we, and other animals, and indeed even plants and microbes, exhibit purposeful behavior: finding food, avoiding predators, and looking for mates if not always tax planning or protecting the environment for future generations. What is strange, however, is that even inanimate systems exhibit a form of purposeful behavior: they come to equilibrium, using up energy as they settle into a quiescent state. Such behavior is famously described by the second law of thermodynamics and seems, at first glance, to be the antithesis of living behavior. Indeed, the second law of thermodynamics has been a favorite trumpet of creationists and intelligent design theorists who want to claim that, even if life has evolved, it must have originated by a divine act. But, as Benedict de Spinoza pointed out several centuries ago, a God who needs to intervene in His creation is less miraculous than one who does not. Yet if everything is heading toward the atomic chaos of entropy, how can complexity--let alone the high-fidelity complexity of life--accrue? In fact the second law states that entropy will increase in sealed off systems: the organization shown by life, an open system, does not violate the second law because life becomes more complex by feeding off energy and order from the outside. Scientists have long known this. But what is new is that the relationship between evolution and entropy is not just compatible--it is intimate.

And related to purpose. For natural complex systems act with purpose to bring organized systems to equilibrium. Take a very simple example, a tornado. Feeding off an energetic difference in air pressure, a tornado forms. Spinning into existence, it would never be predicted on the basis of random particle movements. Tornados are like life in this respect, that they cycle matter and feed on energy. Fascinatingly, tornados also show a very mundane but obvious function or purpose: to get rid of the barometric pressure difference. When this difference, or gradient, is eliminated, the tornado itself vanishes. One may say that the natural purpose of the tornado is to reduce the previous organization and energetic potential represented by the pressure gradient. In the same way life reduces the electromagnetic gradient between the hot sun and cold space. This is not just theory, but measurable and measured by thermal sensing satellites and thermometer-like devices on low-flying planes. Indeed, the biggest gradient reducers are the most complex ecosystems--areas like the Amazon and the Borneo rain forest. It would seem that not only humans, but life itself, is not so special in its relationship to purpose as we like to think. This is important for several reasons. One is that science has long attempted to deny that life is deeply purposeful because of the association of purpose or teleology with religion. A further irony is that Aristotle's teaching on the subject, which was explicitly not religious, was absorbed into Church learning so that Aristotle himself is often considered to be a religious thinker on this subject. In fact, Aristotle said, in The Physics, that it was folly to think that, just because life exhibited purpose, it required a "conscious deliberator."

Take another example, this one from thermodynamic thinker Rod Swenson. Imagine a heated but slightly leaky cabin on a snowy mountain top: wherever there is a leak in the cabin, the hot air will try to escape. No one would say that the hot air is conscious and yet it seems in many ways to exhibit purpose--a sort of will to get out of the hotter house. Hot air can even be seen to be "calculating" its escape route: insulators who add fine powder to see leaks have reported cases of streamers of colored (hotter) air moving through an electric outlet, up a wall, halfway across a ceiling, and then turning around to go through the same outlet whence they came. Again, the streamer of air does not change its mind, but it sure looks like it is doing something purposeful. The question arises, If simple inanimate systems can exhibit such mindlike behavior on the way to equilibrium, is our own purposeful behavior based on this process? Considering the building evidence that life is another naturally complex energy system that rectifies imbalances in the environment, the chances are increasing that our mindful, purposeful activity is part of a larger tendency for systems to temporarily grow and become more complex as they bring their environments to equilibrium. While this may not be the basis of a new religion, it is exciting in that it perhaps explains the natural purpose of life.

Originally posted here
Click here for creationism debate

Thermodynamics and Fiction: The "Masterplot"

2005-04-01T12:25:00.000-08:00

The thermodynamic worldview we present in Into the Cool is not just applicable to science or the science/religion debates. It is also of considerable interest within the humanities. For example, in the under-read Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in the Narrative, literary critic and theorist Peter Brooks, now teaching Law and Literature: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives at the University of Virginia, develops a subtle, and ultimately compelling argument concerning the context not only of particular plots (e.g., Dickens' Great Expectations, Stendahl's Le Rouge et le noir, Conrad's Heart of Darkness) but of all plots in general. All plots in general are sublations, one might say, instantiations of the "Freudian masterplot"--which is not only impending death, but the need to provide meaning on the way thereto. And this is ultimately a thermodynamic phenomenon. While Freud has been severely lambasted, especially in England and America in recent decades, for being pseudoscientific--his maligned "death drive" (a.k.a. thanatos, in opposition to eros) makes considerable sense in terms of our nonequilibrium thermodynamics paradigm. The universe is a place governed not by an evolutionary or progressive drive but by the second law of thermodynamics. Complex, materially cycling systems including living ones, far from violating the second law, measurably increase the production of entropy and the destruction of gradients relative to unorganized agglomerations of matter. Indeed, claiming to have one-upped us, recent, apparently anonymous documents linked to Wikkipedia, have put forth an entropic anthropic principle that suggest a special place for humans due to our ability to lay environments to waste. Be that as it may, the recent revolution in the thermodynamics of life centers around the post-Prigoginian realization that organisms not only don't violate the second law, they actively and measurably optimize its activity. Thus the physical basis of what Brooks calls the Freudian Masterplot may itself be at hand. The Freudian death drive is not a bogus import of hydraulics into psychology but, rather, the fundamental scientific context for living systems both exposed in their limited lives to the ultimately fatal wear and tear of the second law, and able, generationally, to continue their effective entropy production by producing offspring before their inevitable deaths. Thus eros, the sex drive, and thanatos, the death drive, are twin phenomenological poles of a single underlying more-than-human reality: the drive to come to equilibrium, underlying life's activities as well as those of other natural complex systems.

Posted by Dorion Sagan

The Blind Leading the Lame: Science and Spirit

2005-03-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

Certainly for IMAX, the world's leading documentary medium, to take an anti-science stance is despicable in these times of declining education, constitutional defilement, and coercive Christianity. Unfortunately, however, the anti-rational tendencies of what Aliens of the Deep IMAX documentary director James Cameron (also director of The Titanic) calls "faith-based science" also can apply to standard science. One of the reasons many find science spiritually unsatisfying is that it portrays the world as a mechanism. This is highly ironic, because mechanisms require creators. The philosophy of mechanical science goes back to Descartes. By formally separating the investigable realm of God's mechanical nature from the sacrosanct inner realm of free will and spirit, Descartes made the world safe for scientific investigation. His philosophy, so fruitful for science, can be looked at as a religious compromise. Giordano Bruno, after all, was burnt at the stake for heresies including the idea that the Earth was not central and the universe was populated by other planets with living beings. But the scientific binge following the Cartesian compromise has helped lead to a cultural hangover. In Into the Cool we attempt to raise the level of the science-spirit debate beyond its present state of go-nowhere fractiousness. The energy perspective offers the possibility of fulfilling spiritual longing (and accepts the data of personal experience that we are not mere mechanisms) without being counterfactual. In retrospect, each scientific discovery that threw the religious authorities into hissie fits actually increased the potential for spiritual awakening and relinking (as in religion, from the Latin, religare) to the universe. Copernicus's insight (recently embraced by fellow Pole, the Pope) that Earth was not central has put us in the middle of a vast creation, opening all sorts of possibilities that were lacking in the more provincial, and geographically incorrect view. Similarly, Darwinism (easier to teach in Catholic schools where Church is not divided from state), while demoting us from angels to apes, connects us to all other life forms in a deep way that makes sense. Last but not least, we believe that the energy perspective, which links us and all life to other complex systems becoming more complex as they feed on energy, can be spiritually uplifiting. Sure, it is scary. But we can't just turn a blind eye to the evidence because it makes us uncomfortable. As Einstein said, "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Not politically correct, maybe, but damn true. Of course, by religion Einstein didn't mean a bearded middle east (or clean shaven American) potentate in the sky. He meant the impersonal everlasting principles of the universe itself that are comprehensible by and connected to human beings.

(posted by Dorion Sagan)
Click here for a crash course on evolution

Movies Can't Mention the "E" Word.

2005-03-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

On Sunday March 20th the New York Times and the Observer in UK ran articles describing the self-censorship of the IMAX movie chains by refusing to show science films that use the "E" word: evolution. A film called Volcanoes that mentioned evolution as a biological process is being withheld by several IMAX theaters in the Bible belt. Pietro Serapiglia, the US distributor of the film, said that theaters would not book the film because it had religious overtones. And because "the evolution stuff is a problem." What crap! Science must not be pushed aside in this wave of religious conservatism. We should let them have their Bible and their interpretation of it but it is a religious-cultural issue, not a scientific one. Into the Cool provides scientific ammunition for those willing to stand up to this lunacy.

Welcome to the "Into The Cool" Blog

2005-03-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome !

The following blog is a companion to the Into the Cool book and website and is a forum to respond to many of the issues we raise in the book. Although we are proud of this book, we are even more excited about the information conveyed in Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. This paradigm shows the scientific basis for progress and evolution that the creationists would like to say is so unlikely it must be divine. In addition, it explains complexity on the basis not of computer simulations but of energy itself. As powerful as the evolutionary perspective is, we believe we make a strong case that complexity's origins are energy based, and that reproduction with variation is a special case of a more general phenomenon. However, this general phenomenon, based on thermodynamics second law, is natural not divine. That said, we are in no way hostile to spiritual perspectives: indeed, we believe the view presented in Into the Cool has the potential to bring science and religion into a new unity that goes beyond both the blind faith and wishful thinking of religion and the overly mechanical perspective of science. Please participate in this discussion of these important scientific and cultural issues.

Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan