# Thermodynamics favors life, can someone explain this to me? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [January 5, 2015, 6:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015 "2015-01-05T06:32:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 6:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/1 "2015-01-05T06:32:32Z")
> **[God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the...](https://www.salon.com/2015/01/03/god_is_on_the_ropes_the_brilliant_new_science_that_has_creationists_and_the_christian_right_terrified/)** > > A young MIT professor is finishing Darwin's task — and threatening to undo everything the wacky right holds dear > [@](#): > > From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. He seems to be making the argument that organic matter is better at absorbing energy and dissipating it than inorganic matter. But why exactly does that matter? Is he arguing that in an environment where there is a lot of energy life develops because it is better at processing the excess energy? Why wouldn’t the energy just cause more complex (but non-living) molecules to form rather than life itself? I am not entirely understanding this theory of life. ---
**Author:** ![Tabby\_Cat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Tabby\_Cat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tabby_Cat)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/2 "2015-01-05T06:54:38Z")
My guess is that they’re talking about entropy. For some reason, life is faster at increasing entropy in any given system. I guess what needs to be proved is that given any 2 methods of increasing entropy, the method that increases entropy faster is likelier to happen. I don’t see why though. ---
**Author:** ![DataX](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@DataX](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DataX)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/3 "2015-01-05T06:55:44Z")
Being that the subtitle is “The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified” - I think it is safe to say this article is likely to contain exaggerations. To think that any science terrifies the Christian right is a bit silly when you argue with people where a decent portion of the members think fossils we’re put here as a test of faith. Didn’t quite get what the theory was either, but the way the article was written (hey the theory was latter picked up by business insider!) doesn’t make me want to out of my way to understand it either. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 7:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/4 "2015-01-05T07:17:55Z")
It is a theory put forth by an assistant professor, and yeah I agree it is exaggerated. But I don’t know why organic life would be the natural result of an environment full of energy. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/5 "2015-01-05T07:48:35Z")
If you import energy from an outside source into a local system (such as, solar energy piling into the local earth environment), then it’s possible for _local_ entropy to be reversed, driven by that imported energy. That is, less organized structures can become more organized. What England seems to be saying (and note, if this article is the same as the one I read just today on AlterNet, there was some earlier work and even a Nobel Prize dealing with this) – was that not only can local entropy be reversed, but this can happen spontaneously, and not only that, but he worked out the math and statistics to show that it is not only possible, but probable. The article lists a variety of phenomena, mostly non-biological, demonstrating this: Things like tornadoes, rivers, and such-like. But the possibility of organic molecules forming is there too. So what he seems to be saying is that this is not only possible, but probable, and apparently highly probable. ---
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/6 "2015-01-05T15:36:09Z")
The actual paper Salon is gushing over - [http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsrep.pdf](http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/3/7803054/2013jcpsrep.pdf) Basically the author is claiming that self replicating entities exhibit better thermodynamics than non self replicating entities when in a constant heat bath (external heat source). So if you have a replicator and some equal amount of inert stuff hanging around, the replicator is more likely to achieve a rearrangement (replication) than the inert material. At least I think that’s what he’s saying. It’s a neat paper. ---
**Author:** ![asterion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/4da419/32.png) [@asterion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asterion)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/7 "2015-01-05T16:48:38Z")
Wasn’t there an Onion-like article once about Creationists discovering the sun? ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/8 "2015-01-05T17:23:42Z")
Oddly, this isn’t a new idea. I read a book a decade or so back called “At Home in the Universe” by Stuart Kauffman, where he presented essentially this exact idea. He used computer simulations to mimic the primordial soup, and found that when you tune the model to closely match reality, the patterns that emerged tended to self-correct toward the border between static patterns and complete chaos - in other words, very “lifelike” behavior. It’s an interesting read. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/9 "2015-01-05T18:09:38Z")
> [@Tabby\_Cat](#): > > My guess is that they’re talking about entropy. For some reason, life is faster at increasing entropy in any given system. I guess what needs to be proved is that given any 2 methods of increasing entropy, the method that increases entropy faster is likelier to happen. I don’t see why though. Perhaps not likelier to happen, just likelier to prevail. Increasing entropy is more or less equivalent to ‘getting work done’ (or at least vice versa). He who gets the most work done, wins. ---
**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2015, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thermodynamics-favors-life-can-someone-explain-this-to-me/709015/10 "2015-01-05T20:13:12Z")
A simpler, and less contentious, example of a more complex system arising due to thermodynamic pressures is convection cells in fluids. If you have a body of viscous fluid with a very slight temperature difference between the bottom and top, the temperature differential will be dissipated primarily through conduction. A larger differential results in erratic convection. An even larger differential results in the formation of large scale convection cells which dissipate the temperature differential even faster. The cells are a large-scale structure, but they form as a result of the system “trying” to increase its entropy. And then the hand-waving starts with life being like convection cells which spontaneously form to increase entropy.