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From: RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: 2nd law clarifications
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2025 09:14:47 -0600
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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?
>>>
>>>
>>> Local entropy can decrease in an open system with an input of free 
>>> energy.
>>>
>>> Free energy alone is not sufficient to maintain or further decrease 
>>> low local entropy: an energy capture and transformation mechanism is 
>>> also needed.
>>>
>>> Extant life *maintains* low local entropy through its organisation 
>>> and processes.
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>> There is no other known mechanism apart from natural selection that 
>>> does this. For example, neutral drift alone increases entropy.
>>>
>>
>> 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
> 

"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