Re: 2nd law clarifications

On 1/3/2025 6:59 AM, MarkE wrote:

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.
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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.
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 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
 

"Oparin suggested that sufficient energy for generating early life forms from non-linving molecules was provided in the "primordial soup"".
How do you think that animals generate body heat?  All of this is accounted for.
Probably more of an issue is as the high potential chemical intermediates build up you have to maintain a low enough concentration of them (use them for something) so that the reverse reaction that made them does not occur and undo the effort to make them.  Catalysts can usually run the reaction both ways, and the direction of the reaction is dependent on the concentration of starting material and product.  Using the products for other chemical reactions takes care of the issue stated above.  All reactions release energy and result in an increase in entropy.  A lot of energy is wasted when ATP is made.  The chemical energy in ATP is less than what it took to make it, and when ATP is used the efficiency of the reaction is not 100%, so even more is lost "released".  Life still works.
As your quote indicates just the geothermal energy available would have been enough.  It looks like that after the genetic code evolved and proteins could be the catalytic molecules that life first relied on the salts (that spew out of geothermal vents) as an energy source (they were chemotrophes).  Life was likely chemotrophic before the genetic code evolved.  The last paper on the common ancestor of all extant lifeforms admitted that it's ancestors were likely chemotrophes, but that that common ancestor was either photosynthetic or on the way to evolving to be photosynthetic because some of the components needed for photosynthesis already existed in that common ancestor.  Reversion to chemotrophes would have had to occur in both the eubacterial and archaea lineages.  Anaerobic photosynthesis evolved first.  One eubacteria evolved oxygen generating photosynthesis, but archaea only evolved anaerobic photosynthesis.  Extant life relies on mostly the energy of the sun, but chemotrophic ecologies still exist around geothermal vents.
What does any of this matter?  Would any god involved in dissipating the energy be the god described in the Bible?  If you give up on the Bible having anything to say about nature why would any god be needed for abiogenesis?  Does the Biblical god open up the firmament to let the rain fall through?  Denton is a Biblical creationist and he will tell you that his god only needed to get the ball rolling with the Big Bang and the rest unfolded into what we have.  There really isn't any valid Biblical reason why life did not originate on this planet by natural means.  Both Behe and Denton are telling you that biological evolution is just a fact of nature.  Behe just claims that his god is a tweeker and messes with life every once in a while, but Denton thinks that, that is unnecessary.
Ron Okimoto