Mark, I thought you were just kidding about biology being anti-entropic.
Solar radiation is the source of all life on earth. Look at a photo of earth from space. The equatorial regions teem with life and diversity. The sun warms the ocean currents. Our seasons are variations in the solar winds. Our planet absorbs a tiny fraction of the sun's output but it is enough to melt water. Currents in the atmosphere and seas arise from irregularities in heat dispersal. The flow of these fluids fueled by sunlight assumes stable patterns over time. They will remain as static latches as long as the conditions that give rise to them don't change. A sunbeam's purpose is to escape into space. The earth gets in its way. The lucky ones bounce off at a tangent and fly away as light. Others are trapped and must fight to escape. Over billions of years sunbeams have devised ever more complicated ways to escape into space. Plants evolved to catch as many as they can, mixing them with chemicals from the earth and air. A plant is a system that converts light into chemical and electrical energy. This is not anti-entropic. It all happens because sunbeams can't find any other way to escape into space. Some sunbeams get trapped in blades of grass and stuck inside complex molecules waiting to be released. The lucky ones only wait until winter then drift up to warm the air as the plant decays. Some get trapped in grass and eaten by cows. Most of the energy trapped in the grass is wasted or stored in the cow. Some little sunbeams get suspended in fat. Some get passed as gas. None of this violates entropy at all. The biological level is powered by sunlight. Sunlight is absorbed and converted mostly into heat. It does this in such complicated ways because it can find no other way to do it. All of the energy that can dissipate into heat, does. If the sun were not providing its light, things would get really still here, really quick. All of the complexity of life results from the accumulation of trapped sunbeams. If you put a chemistry professor on a rock in the sun, I bet he could live maybe five days. If you suddenly removed all of that solar radiation I wouldn't give him five minutes. The earth is not a closed system. Life is not only not anti-entropic; it takes the shapes it does because of entropy. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
