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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature’s Plan for Humankind
Part 1. Metabolic Metaphysics

Entropy: Nature's Preferred Direction?

The old science of thermodynamics assigns to nature a capacity to disorganize—to deconstruct complex structures and processes spontaneously.

The ideas swirling around complexity theory seem to amount to a skirting of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The hallowed Second Law declares nature on the whole to be running down, falling apart, drifting toward equilibrium—away from organized complexity. Mountains erode, stars burn out, organisms die and decay, and the distinguishing features of these physical forms get lost as their materials get recycled. Entropy, or disorganization, increases as the world sinks into homogeneous featurelessness. Physical forms are transient.

Science gives the name entropy to this tendency toward disorganization. The assertion that entropy increases on the whole is canonical to the the scientific understanding of nature. Given enough time every potential source of energy will have exhausted itself. The Second Law sentences the universe to death.

But the Second Law is a curious description of nature, because it relies fundamentally on the concept of a closed system, an imaginary box that is cut out of nature and is perfectly isolated from all outside influences. In other words, in fairness to the Second Law, it applies, strictly speaking, only to closed systems, (even though "openness" does not guarantee that any particular physical system will be shielded from the pull of entropy). Qualifiers aside, a closed system is a construct of the human capacity to idealize. No closed systems occur in nature.

As a result, the Second Law must be treated as contingent. The ideal of the closed system to which it applies is a fiction. In nature energy always leaks into or out of any defined volume of space. Nature is of a whole. And within that whole, entropic—tearing down—and anti-entropic—building up—processes operate side by side, being intertwined with one another.

Scientists labor in the shadow of the Second Law to account for natural systems that grow away from equilibrium, spontaneously gaining in complexity and shedding entropy. Theorists have proposed terms such as "extropy" or "negentropy" to name the attribute of a system that increases as the system grows in complexity. In any case, the physical world can be seen as a process governed by the tension between entropy and complexity, just as the biological subset of nature can be seen as a process governed by the tension between catabolism and anabolism, the two composing the broader process of metabolism.

In developing complex systems theory, science comes to grips with the paradox of a natural world that both obeys the Second Law and flaunts its ability to outrun the law. Science tells us that, despite apparent violations or bendings of the Second Law, that the Law should remain on the books because every anti-entropic process—every self-organizing complex system—draws energy from a source outside of itself, so that the total system that constitutes both the complex process and its energy source does predictably increase in entropy. But the question remains as to why nature would construct complex structures and retard their degradation via metabolism, broadly conceived. From what law of physics does this capacity issue? And what evidence exists to support the contention that the entropy of the universe as a whole is increasing?

In the light of science’s new enthusiasm for vitalism, the scientific mind suffers from cognitive dissonance. It observes that nature tends spontaneously to degrade organized structures into their simpler components while simultaneously using those components to build up new complex structures. So where do nature’s loyalties lie, in the building up or in the tearing down? Complexity or entropy? The dilemma suggests a theoretical impasse. But the impasse can be resolved by retaining both tendencies in their full expression and linking them in a feedback relationship of mutual dependence. What is needed to break through this impasse is a meta-concept that encompasses both tendencies and locates each operationally relative to the other, in feedback loops. The biological sciences provide such an overarching concept. It is called metabolism.

NEXT > Metabolism and the Complexity-Entropy Circuit

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