How did life arise?
One fundamental question is how did life arise. This question has been explored extensively with different interpretations. For instance, the classic Miller-Urey experiment suggests that perhaps life arose when lightning struck some carbon atoms and turned them into amino acids. So randomly and miraculously, some electrical force caused functional units of life to emerge.
Another theory is that of intelligent design, that DNA arose due to structured genetic engineering by some higher intelligence. Still, the answer to the origin lurks in ambiguity; however, another question that is overlooked is why did life arise in the first place? And is there a way to answer this question in a materialistic and scientific way that is not biased by philosophy or religion?
What is entropy?
Jeremy England, a theoretical physicist, attempted to answer this question with principles of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is that entropy in the universe is always increasing. What does this mean? Entropy is a quantity of disorder, so, with every atomic interaction, things become more disordered. There are more collisions, more chaos, and energy spreads out. So as time goes on, the material world can only become more and more disordered.
The easiest way to conceptualize entropy is through an oversimplified timeline of the universe. In the beginning of the universe, right after the Big Bang, the universe was very dense with with subatomic particles—electrons, protons, and neutrons— swimming in a really dense plasma, all close together and the energy was extremely compact. With time, these atoms interacted and collided and formed the universe as it is today.
The universe is still expanding, becoming more chaotic. What happened was at the beginning, the universe was very low entropy. It was highly concentrated in energy. Over time, however, the universe becomes characterized by higher and higher entropy, and the energy and atoms become more disordered and more spread out. So that’s the first part of England’s theory, that according to the second law of thermodynamics, entropy is always increasing with each atomic interaction.
Energy systems in living organisms
How does life relate to thermodynamics? To analyze this, let’s look at how energy is passed between different levels of organisms on an ecological hierarchy. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the producers the plants. So what is the purpose of a plant? A plant is able to convert concentrated, condensed, low entropy energy from the sun rays into dispersed, chemical energy for the plant. Only some of the sun’s energy is captured and the other is lost as heat. The same is true for organisms on higher levels of the ecological food pyramid, only some of the energy (10%) is passed to the next level, the rest of the energy is lost as heat, disordered and dispersed, and unusable.
Why is the energy lost as heat? Because of the second law of thermodynamics: with every atomic interaction the level of disorder increases. Because the universe is always changing from low entropy to high entropy. What does this all mean?
Purpose of Life
Life harvests low entropy, dense and ordered energy from the sun and transforms it into high entropy, dispersed energy that moves up the food pyramid. With every energy transfer, entropy increases, and there is more atomic disorder. Therefore, if the second second law of thermodynamics is true, that the tendency of the universe is that the entropy is always increasing, becoming more disordered, that means that life had to have arisen to further increase entropy and disorder.
Therefore, by way of thermodynamics, the origin of systems to further increase disorder had to have taken place. These systems, the universe’s way of increasing entropy, are what we call life. Without life, the energy of the universe would be more dense, compact, and ordered.
More information:
- By Jeremy England — Every Life on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things
- By Veritasium–Entropy– The Most Misunderstood Concept in Physics
- The Miller-Urey Experiment
- By Stephen Meyer–Theory of Intelligent Design and the Origin of Life-–Signature in the Cell
- Featured image from Burst Spotify– Pegleess Barritos–Fruit Tree Grows In Jungle Photo
