I have not bothered writing book reviews for five years now, but I have one book I’d like to comment on, because it is so surprising. That book is “A World Beyond Physics” by Stuart A. Kauffman.
Mr. Kauffman wrote a book entitled “At Home in the Universe”, which impressed me immensely. It presented one of the most brilliant ideas I have encountered in many years. I still recall bursting out laughing in joy when I grasped his meaning. I will not attempt to explain it here; it’s too complicated.
Hence I have held Mr. Kauffman in great respect and resolved to buy the book based on its subtitle “The Emergence and Evolution of Life”. The appearance of life on this planet is an age-old problem, but one that I know they’ve been making progress on, and if anybody could explain the latest developments, I knew it would be Mr. Kauffman.
It seems that Mr. Kauffman was at a social gathering where a physicist made a comment that Mr. Kauffman found demeaning, so he dedicates his first three chapters to an assault on physics as a field of learning. Herewith some of this juicier claims:
“The scientific world is a machine and quite without meaning: a blight on Shakespeare and your natterings.”
If you find the second clause somewhat confusing, don’t worry; this kind of vaguely grammatical sentence is common in the book. Mr. Kauffman appears to be entering his dotage.
“One thing missing in the world of physics is the crucial idea of agency…”
This is part of a continuing diatribe about ‘meaning’ in the universe. Most scientists leave the matter of meaning to philosophers, but Mr. Kauffman appears to believe that mere understanding of the operation of the universe is insufficient; he insists that the universe itself has some kind of meaning, and attempts to explain his concept of meaning later in the book. I found his intellectual peregrinations in this regard unconvincing. Searching for meaning in the universe is motivated by the same forces that drive some people to prove the existence of the soul, or of God, or other grand mysticisms that make us glorious and noble.
Mr. Kauffman later insists that “biology cannot be reduced to physics” because physics cannot explain that the function of a ball is to bounce. I wish that Mr. Kauffman would explain this profound truth to my dog, who seems to think that the function of a ball is to chewed into small pieces.
But Mr. Kauffman’s greatest error arises from his confusion over the Second Law of Thermodynamics:
“Life somehow partially collaborates with and yet beats the Second Law of Thermodynamics with its insistence that disorder — entropy — must inevitably increase in closed thermodynamic systems. How does life evade, but not avoid, that law?”
In many other places, Mr. Kauffman displays his inability to grasp the Second Law. I don’t want to be too hard on him here, because few people outside the world of physics understand the Second Law.
There is absolutely no, none, zero conflict between living systems and the Second Law. Indeed, if you understand the Second Law, you see that life is an entirely natural consequence of the concepts underlying the Second Law. Here’s how it works:
The Second Law says that the entropy of a closed thermodynamic system will never decrease — and will usually increase. Entropy is the concept that trips up so many people. Entropy is “disorderliness”. The opposite of entropy is called “negentropy”, and it represents orderliness. Thus, my desk at this moment has a lot of entropy — it’s very messy. If I spend some time cleaning it up, I can decrease its entropy. This is no violation of the Second Law, because the thermodynamic system consisting of my desk is not closed; when I intrude into it and clean it up, I’m decreasing its entropy. But at the same time, I’m increasing my own entropy by my efforts, and the increase in my own entropy is greater than the decrease in the entropy of the desk, because my efforts are not perfectly efficient. The thermodynamic system consisting of myself and my desk still increases its entropy.
The earth four billion years ago was an arid wasteland of rocks. Today it is covered by a rich and diverse biosphere. Obviously, the earth has become more orderly in four billion years. People like Mr. Kauffman consider this to be miraculous in some fashion. What they don’t grasp is that the earth, like my desk, is not a closed thermodynamic system. There’s this thing called “the sun” that intrudes into the earth’s thermodynamic system the same way that I intrude into my desk’s thermodynamic system.
The sun is a gigantic source of negentropy. It radiates humongous amounts of negentropy in the form of light. People trip over the difference between energy and negentropy. Remember, negentropy is orderliness. A closed thermodynamic system consisting of a blazing hot gas inside a bottle has oodles of energy but NO negentropy: the gas is maximally disordered. On the other hand, a closed thermodynamic system consisting of a bottle with a cold gas inside — but all the atoms of gas concentrated in one corner of the bottle — has little energy but lots of negentropy.
You can measure the amount of entropy in a system by calculating the probability that you’d find it in its current state if it had been left alone for a long time. Suppose that you’re floating through space and you come upon a bottle containing a blazing hot gas uniformly distributed throughout the bottle. That’s an obvious and highly likely state for the gas to be in, so the probability that you’d find it in that state is high. We therefore conclude that its entropy is high.
On the other hand, if you were drifting through space and came upon a bottle with all the gas atoms concentrated in one corner, you’d be surprised — such an arrangement is highly unlikely. It has low probability, hence has low entropy (or high negentropy).
Energy carries negentropy in the same manner that money carries “value”. Money itself has no intrinsic value: you can’t eat it, wear it, live in it, or play videogames with it. But it carries value with it, and you can therefore use it to obtain intrinsically valuable things. It’s not the energy from sunlight that drives life, it’s the negentropy.
You think not? OK, consider the following scenario: the earth stops rotating and the Western hemisphere always faces the sun, while the Eastern hemisphere is always dark. All life would die. Sure, the plants in the Western hemisphere would be getting lots and lots of energy, but that energy would heat up the Western hemisphere until it was so hot that the chemical reactions of photosynthesis wouldn’t work any more. Thus, the same amount of energy, with zero negentropy, would kill all life.
So the sun is pouring gobs and gobs of negentropy all over the earth. Is it any surprise that some chemical reactions arose that intercept and make use of a tiny fraction of all that negentropy? The biosphere taps a tiny fraction of all that negentropy, yet look how orderly the biosphere is.
This also explains, a physics kind of way, why life has evolved. The biosphere has been collecting and accumulating negentropy for billions of years. As the cumulative total of negentropy rises, you would expect the biosphere to become more orderly — that is, more complicated. That’s what has happened. I’m a hell of a lot more complicated than the trilobites that crawled over the sea floor four hundred million years ago.
You might be thinking that Mercury and Venus are even closer to the sun, so they should be intercepting even more negentropy and so should have even bigger biospheres. They would, if they could. But neither planet has the right conditions for developing something that can capture negentropy. Mercury always faces the sun, so its front and back are thermodynamically stable. Venus’ thick atmosphere makes it difficult for highly localized temperature gradients. To put it in more familiar terms, you can invest millions of dollars in a rock, but it won’t make any money for you. If you’re going to pour money (or negentropy) all over something, let it be something that can actually make use of the money.
Anyway, Mr. Kauffman clearly does not understand any of this. His complaints about physics are rooted in ignorance, not erudition.
Mr. Kauffman makes much of the fact that living systems build their own constraints that allow them to function. He seems to consider this one of the magical difference between glorious non-mechanical living systems and dull mechanical systems. Mr. Kauffman obviously doesn’t know how stars work. They too create their own constraints and autogenerating systems. Gravity holds the star together and creates the high pressures and temperatures that permit it to have thermonuclear reactions that give it power. By Mr. Kauffman’s definition, stars are living creatures. Ironic, no?
HOWEVER!!!!
Once Mr. Kauffman gets off his anti-physics hobby horse and starts talking about biochemical systems, he’s brilliant. His explanations of how the very first systems arose out of simple constituents, and then grew in complexity, is illuminating. I wish he were a better writer; some of his sentences don’t quite make sense. But if you stick with it, you’ll learn an enormous amount.
I wish also that Mr. Kauffman had discussed the hypothesis of life forming in deep ocean vents. The great strength of this hypothesis is the ready supply of large amounts of negentropy at these vents. By contrast, the “primordial soup” hypothesis that he runs with does have a problem with negentropy: there’s just not enough of it to drive the mechanisms Mr. Kauffman describes. Until biochemical systems developed photosynthetic capabilities, life on the surface of the earth was poverty-stricken.
So, I recommend that you skip the ranting in the first three chapters, and ignore the occasional rant in the remaining chapters, and attend only to the material about biochemistry. That’s the value of this book — and it’s worth it.