Re: 2nd law clarifications

On 3/01/2025 1:17 am, RonO wrote:

On 1/2/2025 12:53 AM, MarkE wrote:

Are these statements correct? Could they be better expressed?
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Local entropy can decrease in an open system with an input of free energy.
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Free energy alone is not sufficient to maintain or further decrease low local entropy: an energy capture and transformation mechanism is also needed.
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Extant life *maintains* low local entropy through its organisation and processes.
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Evolving life *decreases* low local entropy through the ratcheting mechanism natural selection acting on random mutations in instances where that evolution increases functional complexity and organisation.
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There is no other known mechanism apart from natural selection that does this. For example, neutral drift alone increases entropy.
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 All of this doesn't matter.  The second law of thermodynamics does not prohibit the origin of life, nor does it prohibit the evolution of life over billions of years that it has been evolving on this planet.  Being wrong about your concepts like "neutral drift" doesn't matter because you can't get to where you want to go with this argument.  Just think, drift obviously does not have to be neutral to selection.  Drift can obviously decrease your concept of entropy.
 Entropy is always increasing whether there is an energy capture method or not.  As the entropy increases it just produces something like molecules that can exist for a while before contributing to the continued entropy increase.  Entropy is increasing a lot as photons are captured by plants and in their efforts to make glucose.
 

Further reading is warranted, e.g. this passage:
Relationship to prebiotic chemistry
In 1924 Alexander Oparin suggested that sufficient energy for generating early life forms from non-living molecules was provided in a "primordial soup".[31] The laws of thermodynamics impose some constraints on the earliest life-sustaining reactions that would have emerged and evolved from such a mixture. Essentially, to remain consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, self organizing systems that are characterized by lower entropy values than equilibrium must dissipate energy so as to increase entropy in the external environment.[32] One consequence of this is that low entropy or high chemical potential chemical intermediates cannot build up to very high levels if the reaction leading to their formation is not coupled to another chemical reaction that releases energy. These reactions often take the form of redox couples, which must have been provided by the environment at the time of the origin of life.[33] In today's biology, many of these reactions require catalysts (or enzymes) to proceed, which frequently contain transition metals. This means identifying both redox couples and metals that are readily available in a given candidate environment for abiogenesis is an important aspect of prebiotic chemistry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life