Re: Lizard engines and rat engines

Perplexed in Peoria <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:
> "Tim Tyler" <tim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dd39mm$10l1$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> > Perplexed in Peoria <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote or quoted:
> > > "Tim Tyler" <tim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dd06f7$2psj$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

> > > > Looking at what he writes beneath:
> > > > http://w3.jamstec.go.jp/frsgc/research/d1/contents/paper/ozp1.html
> > > > ...he's talking about a range of non-biological dissipative structures.
> > >
> > > I don't dispute that Ozawa is doing (non-equilibrium) thermodynamics.
> > > I do dispute that Lotka and Odum are doing thermodynamics. They are
> > > doing ecology. [...]
> > >
> > > Biological systems have the freedom to "overrule" or "subvert" such
> > > thermodynamic imperitives if it is in their interest to do so. They
> > > include processes which, for example, mostly counteract the natural
> > > tendency for information to degrade.
> > >
> > > Faced with a thermodynamic tendency toward maximum entropy production,
> > > living systems have (at least) two options. They can choose to "go
> > > with the flow". Or they can choose to "buck the flow". They will
> > > make that choice based on a criterion that is totally alien to
> > > thermodynamics and physics. They will choose based on what is in
> > > their own best interests.
> >
> > You're talking as though organisms can choose to follow a MinEnt
> > principle if they choose to.
> >
> > Look closely and you'll see that most organisms acting to
> > preserves overall information in systems are doing so in
> > the hope of exploiting it better in the future - sacrificing
> > short term gain for long term entropy production.
> >
> > The underlying reason for this is that organisms that fail
> > to exploit natural resources quickly are out-competed by
> > those that make a better job of translating the natural
> > resources into copies of their genome.
> >
> > In this case, an organism "choosing" to "buck the flow" is
> > like an organism choosing to commit suicide. They are not
> > behaving in their own best interests. Of course that's
> > not to say that suicidal organisms don't exist - just that
> > they can expected to be rare, since they are penalised by
> > natural selection.
>
> You have just made my case for me. That was not a thermodynamic
> argument. It was a biological/ecological argument. The entities
> which bounce around in a thermodynamic argument don't reproduce.

I was addressing the issue of whether organisms could choose
to avoid following a maxent principle - by following
"their own best interests" - by saying that they would find
that their interests were curiously aligned with the MaxEnt
principle.

That wasn't an attempt to address the point of whether
biological entities were goverened by much the same rules
as non-biological entities in this area.

> > > Now it may well be that collections of interacting
> > > biological systems (i.e. ecosystems) will typically
> > > go one way or the other. It may well be that the
> > > logic of ecosystem evolution causes them to maximize
> > > entropy production. But I would be amazed if that
> > > logic turned out to be sufficiently identical to the
> > > logic that Ozawa is looking at so that it turns out
> > > that Lotka and Ozawa are really looking at the same
> > > phenomenon.
> >
> > There are differences. The ability of biological systems
> > to engage in open ended evolution gives them advantages
> > in the /extent/ to which they can downgrade environmental
> > energy sources.
> >
> > However, I would stress similarity. The systems exhibit
> > the same kind of entropic behaviour because there's an
> > underlying isomorphism between the processes that are
> > going on in living systems and in other dissipative structures.
> >
> > To give an example, a river is subject to variations in
> > the paths its stream takes, some variations result in
> > more rapid fluid flow than others - and these are favoured
> > by selection processes. The river "remembers" where it
> > is running from moment to moment - and that information
> > is transmitted across time. The eventual pattern of
> > the river is analogous to an adaptation - the solution
> > to an optimisation problem involving maximising entropy
> > degradation. The result is a process directly analogous
> > to other complex adaptive systems - including living ones.
>
> I'll accept that this is isomorphic if you tell me that rivers
> reproduce. That unsuccessful rivers fail to reproduce.

There is heritable information in this system, it is subject
to variation, and there's natural selection going on between
the variants.

The main inherited traits are volume of fluid and spatial location.

Weak streams dry up, while strong streams get stronger, and develop more
tributaries.

If at one stage there's one main river, and later on it has developed into
two forks, then something closely akin to reproduction has taken place.

The offspring owe something to their parents - they most
likely share a drainage basin, and have a shared outlet
that winds up in the ocean at the same point.

These things tend to be inherited in river systems.

Anyway, the similarity between evolutionary processes and the
ones that occur in self-organising systems is the underlying
reason why it can be expected that they follow some of the
same thermodynamic rules.

Looking at things "from the other end", there are going to
be thermodynamic rules that characterise the behaviour of
dissipative structures - and these are likely to also
apply to living systems - since living systems are
also dissipative structures.

I think a MaxEnt principle fits this description.

Such a princpile explains why water flows out of a bottle
more quickly when a whirlpool is introduced into it.

It explains Paltridge's suggestion of maximum entropy increase
by heat transport in the earth's climate system.

It explains Malkus-Howard-Busse's idea about maximum energy
dissipation in turbulent fluid flows - and so on.

> > There are processes that are analogous to evolution going
> > on in these systems - it's just that the evolution is not
> > open-ended, and runs up against an "information ceiling".
> >
> > Recognising that there are things very much like adaptations
> > present in processes such as whirlpools, eddies, drainage
> > patterns is a clue which relates to how life got started.
>
> Only if you assume that transport processes are important in
> life's origin, as Antoine Muller does. Come to think of it,
> your clay genes scenario also involves transport, as does the
> Martin sulfide bubble scheme. But scheme doesn't make much use
> of material flows in the thermodynamics. So I am doubtful that
> MEP even applies.

The idea is that before there were real living systems, there
were pre-biotic self-organising systems - that sought out
high-energy locations, and eventually turned into the first
living organisms - or perhaps generated the conditions that
allowed for their formation.

Stuart Kauffman-style auto-catalytic nets would qualify on this
front, and so would Cairns-Smith's crystals.

What would *not* qualify is the idea that the first living
organisms formed directly by some chance combination of
chemicals - with no preceding self-organising system being
particularly evident in the vicinity before hand.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.

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