THE PARADOX.
I’m sort of simultaneously reading Schrodinger’s What Is Life, Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and for a little light relief, Prof Brian Cox’ Wonders of Life. Ha!
This choice of research material stemmed from my desire to get back to basics with the whole “what is life?” thing – to start at the very beginning of thoughts about what “life” has meant in the past, before I begin to think about what “life” might mean now.
I had a momentary and short-lived flash of clarity when, after reading Richard Dawkins’ proposition about the origins of life in the “primordial soup” where random atoms randomly blobbed together to form not so random structures, indeed forming actually rather stable structures, some of which randomly became “life”, I remembered for some reason The Second Law of Thermodynamics. In my mind, this law is about entropy and how everything tends to chaos (I may be oversimplifying here and quite possibly mis-remembering… but this is the version going on in my mind – if anyone wants to put me straight I would welcome it!)
So the thought arose in my overcrowded little brain that Dawkins description of the origins of life was rather in opposition to The Second Law of Thermodynamics, because surely, in that primordial soup, Dawkins is telling me that chaos was somehow tending to order, not the other way round? He even goes so far as to say “If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way” – well that’s not what The Second Law of Thermodynamics says! And Schrodinger seems very certain that for “life” to exist, “life” really does have to maintain some sort of order because otherwise a living thing could not function – it would simply randomly float apart. This was bothering me. Then, ureka! Whilst flicking through Prof Cox’s nice book, there it was – I flicked onto a page headed “LIFE AND THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS: SCHRODINGER’S PARADOX”. Wow! So he spotted it too did he? I am inspired to keep reading. It’s slow progress though and I might need a lie down now.
