Entropy Disproves Abiogenesis

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

There are many theories (regarding the order in the universe) but I'm not afraid to say I don't know.

Do you rule out the potential that it was an intelligent Being? Intelligent beings (humans, etc) and DNA code are the only things I am aware of that are capable of creating order.

You localized it to an extreme level by bringing in abiogenesis on earth.

Chemically it would be like lighting a match underwater for DNA and protein monomers to polymerize in water. This is why we don't have a "how" regarding abiogenesis.. it is remarkably unfavorable thermodynamically.

originally posted by: cooperton
Do you rule out the potential that it was an intelligent Being? Intelligent beings (humans, etc) and DNA code are the only things I am aware of that are capable of creating order.

I don't rule out anything but then you run into the turtle argument.

Chemically it would be like lighting a match underwater for DNA and protein monomers to polymerize in water. This is why we don't have a "how" regarding abiogenesis.. it is remarkably unfavorable thermodynamically.

Chemical reactions are not the same as your erroneous entropic argument. You failed to account for the fact that the earth is not a closed system.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

I don't rule out anything but then you run into the turtle argument.

Would you admit that order most likely came from an intelligent being?

Chemical reactions are not the same as your erroneous entropic argument. You failed to account for the fact that the earth is not a closed system.

Even with a sun-sized heat lamp, DNA and protein monomers do not self-polymerize in water. Higher temperatures would make this process even less favorable.

originally posted by: cooperton
Would you admit that order most likely came from an intelligent being?

No.

Even with a sun-sized heat lamp, DNA and protein monomers do not self-polymerize in water. Higher temperatures would make this process even less favorable.

That still has nothing to do with your poor entropic argument.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
"Even with a sun-sized heat lamp, DNA and protein monomers do not self-polymerize in water. Higher temperatures would make this process even less favorable."

That still has nothing to do with your poor entropic argument.

Yes it does because part of the reason DNA and protein monomers do not polymerize in water is due to the fact that such a reaction would decrease entropy. This is part of why it is such an unfavored reaction. That's why it is absurd to think that random chance could have overcame this massive thermodynamic hurdle to create not just one bond, but 10s of thousands of DNA bonds just to code for one protein. Even the simplest bacterium known to humankind has over 500 genes....

There are hundreds of proteins required even for the most basic organism. In a primordial soup environment, entropy will destroy protein polymers, rather than build them.

This is why abiogenesis is impossible.

originally posted by: cooperton
Yes it does because part of the reason DNA and protein monomers do not polymerize in water is due to the fact that such a reaction would decrease entropy.

This has nothing to do with entropy as your initial point was completely earth-centric. So long as the amount of energy doesn't change there can be localized instances of lower entropy.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

"Yes it does because part of the reason DNA and protein monomers do not polymerize in water is due to the fact that such a reaction would decrease entropy."

This has nothing to do with entropy as your initial point was completely earth-centric. So long as the amount of energy doesn't change there can be localized instances of lower entropy.

Entropy is a factor in any chemical reactions "spontaneity". Spontaneity, measured by "G" in the equation below, indicates whether a reaction will occur spontaneously or not.



Entropy increase or decrease is a key factor that determines whether or not a reaction is spontaneous. The key reactions that would be required for abiogenesis to be possible are all unfavorable reactions, meaning they don't happen spontaneously. Order does not arise out of this, that is why organic polymers decompose rather than spontaneously synthesize without catalytic aid.

All that aside, you are referring to an ordered cosmos that could not have come to be from a disordered cosmos, according to the 2nd thermodynamic law. The initial order, that is now succumbing to disorder, is what the 2nd thermodynamic law is referring to. For the sun to become an ordered cosmological structure from chaos is not plausible according to this law.

a reply to: cooperton

Nice cut and paste.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: cooperton

Nice cut and paste.

I'm flattered you think my descriptions are textbook. but no I did not copy and paste from anywhere. I have a chemistry minor from college.

a reply to: cooperton

Sure it is, which is why the 'see the formula below' part was so funny until you edited it in.

So, where is everybody? If there's some grand spectrum of intelligent life and we're approximately in the middle of it, where's all the superior ETs that can apparently design life and seed it across the galaxy? Why are they so shy and elusive but they are willing to jumpstart an entire ecosystem and civilization from scratch? This hypothesis raises more questions than answers.

a reply to: TzarChasm

Imagine you are a dog. You live amongst a god like creature known as human. They are able to feed you, keep you warm...your existence is kind of attached to them. You have learned to love a couple very deeply, as they have loved you as well over the last 15 years.

Another human you recognize from periodic visits walks up to you as you sit in that stark white room, in a kennel, awaiting their visit. You don't feel great, but in the past when you didn't feel great, these visits always seemed to help.

This human picks you up, tells you its going to be ok like they always do. They give you a shot, like they always do. But now you are really drowsy and begin to fall asleep....

From the perspective of the human everything was ok. They compassionately ended the life of a faithful friend. To the dog, its was not ok, as they didn't even get a choice. They weren't even aware a choice was to be made. They lived amongst a race of magical gods, so who knows what can and cannot happen.

My point is: we are dogs when compared to even other humans like Williams Sidhis. A 300 IQ is stunning to contemplate. Its hard to understand. His IQ was in a relative vacuum of 130 IQ's, so it was highly unactualized. He was front loaded with human hormonal interactions, and human synaptic connections. So the limits of what that IQ could do was certainly limited. But he lived amongst us, and few really were able to understand him. The world crushed him, and he ended up nearly fully unactualized. But imagine if he were to have lived among a species of being with a matched IQ, and a few thousand years of development with that IQ. How would you even contemplate their motivations?

The question you ask is the right question. But its a question that is almost impossible to answer from within the closed system that is Earth (at least closed biologically).

Its likely that life is common. Its also likely that life that is intelligent is not. And also likely that life that gets intelligent enough to leave their own solar system is even less common. Just think of all the things that have to happen to get to that point.

a reply to: cooperton

Isn't Entropy supposed relate to movement or even vibrations, where if it near static, it low Entropy, where rapid, means very high.

I think Vsauce did episode on it, like replacing the head of a hammer, and later the handle, would it essentially be the same hammer?

a reply to: bigfatfurrytexan

Imagine a small point of light between what you are observing but thats just to try and focus on and then you notice quite few in your field of vision as a sort of space with that but not really noticing it as a 3rd dimension space all this tiny small points are in and it appears as a small spec of 1 dimensional space as light is gathering at the lense as an inner focus from the outer focus on as a mid ground but it appears static and not fluid like space shows light in streaks at scientific theory of near light speed.

How could you ever interact with that nearly imperceivable light point and countless others with any technology being so large then zoom out and consider it the same for those perceiving something like a galaxy the same sort of very small spec of light but zoomed in better than our eyes could where those couldn't interact any more than we can with all those tiny small specs.. then after all that gathering one can close there eyes look to the middle of their forehead rub their eyes gently in a circle and see there all the light gathered within that used to be out there as something that one cannot perceive or interact with however it is still collected. meaning it is being interacted with in our view of it though it would be to simply see in the environment But thats really the only interacting that can really ever occur in it. The rudimentary forms manipulating elements is the best we have as interaction and them to... larger or small in the spectrum.

That eye rub and focus does change shape and color and it is being automatically gathered as that wave length in personal experiments sometime blue sometimes white sometime dright white etc... and focusing on that it sometimes appears as a slightly large light ball is ejected out of some color or combination of but if one focuses on it? as you were the origin like the tiny specs when noticed you can slightly rotate and see that in what appeared as purple that the red or blue appeared before or after it not following that ejecta? it would just look purple.

Where it is going after there is too much of that in a spectrum? I don't know.

But that's a simple observation taking all of those tiny lights found at arms length as a observable hugh barely as a focus until closing the eyes and seeing how much has been collected out of that nearly imperceivable field.

a reply to: rnaa

There are homes that are hundreds or even thousands of years old in daily use today as homes.

Just wanted to add to your thoughts. Wood also left long enough in the correct elements become petrified and basically get stronger, not destroyed.

a reply to: cooperton

Coop, read through the information below. I don't think your model works because it doesn't take into account external/internal heat transfer. Remember, thermodynamic principles are based on adiabatic (closed) systems.

Review the work of Ilya Pregogine who won the Nobel prize for his work in dissipative systems. You can find it in arVix arxiv.org... or links in the info below. Let me know what you think.

Self-organization[edit]

Dissipative structuring[edit]

This theory postulates that the hallmark of the origin and evolution of life is the microscopic dissipative structuring under UVC light of organic pigments and their proliferation over the entire Earth surface.[257][258][259] Present day life augments the entropy production of Earth in its solar environment by dissipating ultraviolet and visible photons into heat through organic pigments in water. This heat then catalyzes a host of secondary dissipative processes such as the water cycle, ocean and wind currents, hurricanes, etc.[260]
Self-organization by dissipative structures[edit]

Ilya Prigogine circa 1977

The 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann first recognized that the struggle for existence of living organisms was neither over raw material nor energy, but instead had to do with entropy production derived from the conversion of the solar spectrum into heat by these systems.[261] Boltzmann thus realized that living systems, like all irreversible processes, were dependent on the dissipation of a generalized chemical potential for their existence. In his book "What is Life", the 20th-century physicist Erwin Schrödinger[262] emphasized the importance of Boltzmann's deep insight into the irreversible thermodynamic nature of living systems, suggesting that this was the physics and chemistry behind the origin and evolution of life.

However, irreversible processes, and much less living systems, could not be conveniently analyzed under this perspective until Lars Onsager,[263] and later Ilya Prigogine,[264] developed an elegant mathematical formalism for treating the "self-organization" of material under a generalized chemical potential. This formalism became known as Classical Irreversible Thermodynamics and Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his work on Dissipative systems. His analysis showed that if a system were left to evolve under an imposed external potential, material could spontaneously organize (lower its entropy) forming dissipative structures which would increase the dissipation of the externally imposed potential (augment global entropy production). Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has since been applied by Karo Michaelian and others to the analysis of living systems, from the biochemical production of ATP[265] to optimizing bacterial metabolic pathways[266] to complete ecosystems.[267][268][269][270][271][272]

en.wikipedia.org...:_Energy_and_entropy

a reply to: cooperton

The point was that dead things decompose inevitably. Living things don't randomly emerge from inert matter without a seed containing DNA that tells it to do so

But that isn't what you said at all. Not even close. Nor did I say anything about "living things emerging randomly".

Dead things decompose, but that does not mean that their remains no longer contain energy that can do work. The process of a living thing entails decreasing entropy - decreasing entropy is the "meaning of life" - all life seeks to reproduce and reproduction is specifically and undeniably decreasing entropy.

A dead leaf composts into humus releasing its nutrients for use by other living things - worms, mushrooms, moss, the tree it fell off of, whatever - and entropy continues to decrease (or perhaps stabilize) as life continues.

Do you suppose we should all go dig up the graves of our ancestors because there's a chance their bodies may have regenerated and rendered them alive again by random chance?

You must have really struggled to come up with that extremely far-fetched pretense of misunderstanding (perhaps almost as much as I struggled to write this sentence without lashings of vitriol). The question is ignorant, disingenuous, and insulting to even your low reputation.

Where did I say or imply or suggest anything like that? That is an extremely ignorant attempt to pretend you don't understand the meaning of what I said.

Dead things decompose - even our ancestors - and their remains fertilize other living things unless we poison them with embalming fluid and bury them in lead lined boxes - (even then, there's probably SOMETHING growing in there). No, the "initial" dead thing doesn't come back, its chemical composition is reused by new generations of other living entities.

Entropy decreases with each generation, a leaf doesn't un-decompose, it gives its chemical makeup to other living things. And yes, that process takes energy which the Earth has in abundance from the Sun.

It may be that as the universe expands, the universal 'store' of energy will be so far dissipated that 'nothing is happening' - but that, in turn, assumes that the universe is a closed system, and that is not necessarily a sure thing. Certainly we KNOW that the Earth is not a closed system, so the Earth's entropy will continue to decrease or stabilize as long as the Sun/Earth system remains in approximately the current state it is now in.

originally posted by: rnaa

But that isn't what you said at all. Not even close. Nor did I say anything about "living things emerging randomly".

well that's the meaning of abiogenesis... living things emerging randomly from non-life. Living things don't emerge randomly due to thermodynamic laws. The rest of your ramblings were mostly true regarding energy transfer of living systems, but the OP and the follow-up points are regarding the emergence of life from non-life despite it involving highly unfavorable reactions. Your examples about energy cycles among living things is irrelevant, because that has nothing to do with abiogenesis.

"Do you suppose we should all go dig up the graves of our ancestors because there's a chance their bodies may have regenerated and rendered them alive again by random chance?"


You must have really struggled to come up with that extremely far-fetched pretense of misunderstanding (perhaps almost as much as I struggled to write this sentence without lashings of vitriol). The question is ignorant, disingenuous, and insulting to even your low reputation.

So you are admitting that the assertion of life emerging by random chance is absurd? You admit that we would not expect life to come from random chemical reactions. That is my point. The point was that chemical thermodynamics pushes towards decomposition and not synthesis.

Even with the help of the sun, the thermodynamics of DNA and protein polymerization are remarkably unfavorable to the point where there is no accumulation of these polymers by random chance because they all will tend towards decomposition - as I was showing by saying you know a corpse will decompose. It's the thermodynamic equivalent of rolling a boulder up a mountain.

Scientists tried to resemble a reaction of how DNA or protein polymerization could accumulate by random chance against this thermodynamic burden. One experiment I saw that tried to replicate abiogenesis used very acidic conditions (which is why you see the speculation that the early abiogenesis earth must have been a highly acidic environment) but even this is insufficient because the proteins will denature at such acidic ph's!. Even acidophiles, which can resist high acidity environments, must maintain an internal pH around 6.5-7 due to most of the essential proteins of living organisms requiring a more neutral pH. So if very high acidity is required to make protein and DNA polymerization a favorable reaction, yet such high acidity denatures the proteins that would result, abiogenesis still remains unsolved.

There is also the harmful effects of uv light from the sun on unprotected protein chains. uv light is known to denature proteins. Same with gamma rays and x-rays from the sun.

You also have to realize that heat from the sun will only amplify the entropy of a reaction to the thermodynamically favorable side - which is decomposition and not synthesis. Notice as temperature increases, it multiplies 'S' which is entropy in the equation



This HAS to be the case, otherwise the cycles you described about living organisms taking in the energy of dead organisms would not work. Ironically, If nothing decomposed then you wouldn't have the persistence of life. And since things do decompose rather than synthesize spontaneously, we would not expect an emergence of life from these thermodynamic bounds.

originally posted by: Phantom423

Dissipative structuring

At a quick glance I couldn't find anything with this regarding protein polymerization. Interesting stuff though I will give it some further reading and edit later

a reply to: cooperton

No need to over-complicate it. Time does not create ordered biological beings from base components. It's a law of physics. The fact that our genetic code has persisted despite this law shows that the Intelligent spark that created us continues to this day.

I made a thread a little way back titled The Queen Of The Trees. I think the video I included lends itself to simplifying how it works.

We look at birth as the beginning, and death as the end of life. I don't think there is ever an end. Death is just the next phase. Just a reset.

It is hard for us to understand, because our ego will not allow us to see that we all start out as tiny microorganisms with no identity. Early enough in our development, you can't tell the difference between a cow, a pig, or a human, with your naked eyes.

We are blinded because we only see what we want to see. The magic is in the fact the we are all living on this planet together and are dependent on the other inhabitants, and environmental factors, much like the inhabitants in a terrarium.

Without death life ends. Death is at the core of abiogenesis. That is where the first law comes into play.

" The energy of a closed system must remain constant—it can neither increase nor decrease without interference from outside."

a reply to: cooperton

At a quick glance I couldn't find anything with this regarding protein polymerization. Interesting stuff though I will give it some further reading and edit later

That says you didn't understand your own topic. Read it again. It's about entropy, not polymerization.