I’ve been working my way through Stuart Kauffman’s Investigations. The question to be answered is a
profound one: “What is Life?” Short answer: We still don’t really know.
Kauffman has been thinking about this problem for quite a while and has
developed a model of “autocatalytic sets” to investigate the transition from
chemistry to biology. His papers are not the easiest to read, but his ideas
sure are interesting! I’ve been following some of his work although there is
much that I don’t quite comprehend (yet).
In his book, Kauffman suggests a candidate fourth law of
thermodynamics: “As an average trend, biospheres and the universe create
novelty as fast as they can manage to do so without destroying the accumulated
propagating organization that is the basis and nexus from which further novelty
is discovered and incorporated into the propagating organization.”
That was a very long sentence, which is also chock-full of
information (no pun intended). Here’s his next sentence which
summarizes/defines Life, which is its own paragraph: “Autonomous agents
themselves, self-reproducing systems carrying out one or more work cycles
linking exergonic and endergonic processes in a cyclic fashion that propagate
the union of catalysis, constraint construction, and process organization that
constitute that autonomous agents are but the most miraculously diversifying
examples of this universal process in our unfolding, ever-changing universe.”
(This is on p85 of Chapter 4 for those of you who want to read the context of
these sentences.)
Here’s a short and sweet version from one of the NASA
working definitions of Life: “A self-sustaining
chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”
Of the definitions I’ve heard my
favorite is: “I know it when I see it.” This statement was famously used by
Justice Potter Stewart commenting on something completely different back in
1964.
But back to thermodynamics (which I’ve
been thinking about this week because my students are learning about it in my
General Chemistry class). Aren’t there already four laws?
Yes, you heard me correctly, there
already are four laws. Many people think there are only three because we tend
to forget about the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics, which folks back in the day used
as a starting assumption (but no one stated as a Law), thus allowing them to
formulate the other three laws. So technically Kauffman is proposing a fifth
law of thermodynamics, which would then be the Fourth Law. Confusing isn’t it?
My version of Laws Zero, One, Two and
Three:
0. Things are just going downhill
1. You can’t win, you can only break
even
2. You can’t even break even
3. Unless Hell freezes over
I think I’ll summarize Kauffman’s
Fourth as:
4. And yet things move and have their
being
(This is inspired by Galileo’s Eppur si muove or “and yet it moves”,
which he probably did not actually say, but was attributed to him later, and
also Acts 17:28 in the Bible which uses the phrase “live and move and have our
being” most likely recorded by Dr. Luke on behalf of the apostle Paul.)
Kauffman’s suggests that built into our
laws of physics and chemistry is the propensity to explore molecular space. We
don’t know exactly how this is built in, but it boils down to being in a
non-equilibrium situation (from a thermodynamic point of view) where not all
“space” has been explored. Another way of saying this is that the universe is
not ergodic. Kauffman postulates that
only parts of the “adjacent other” get explored in reality, and what gives rise
to the peculiarity of our universe is a cosmos that co-constructs itself. I
can’t say that I fully grasp Kauffman’s ideas (I will have to grapple with them
more) but I have a suspicion that he may be on the right track at least in
broad strokes.
I couldn’t find an online version of a
old comic strip (I’m pretty sure it was Zits) that ponders this very question. One
character, while pondering, muses: “There’s something about life I just don’t
understand.” His buddy responds: “What is it?” To which the original muser says
“Exactly.”
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