List, Sung:
On Nov 2, 2014, at 7:54 PM, Sungchul Ji wrote: > (2) All processes require dissipating free energy (or energy more briefly). > There are two kinds of organizations – (a) random organization (e.g., > Gaussian distributed word-length frequencies in German or English > dictionaries; gene-length frequency distributions in genomes), and (b) > non-random organization (e.g., the word-length frequency distribution in a > speech, Figure 1h attached; annual income distributions in the US, Figures > 1i and 1j). > In my opinion, this argument is meaningless because it fails to distinguish between the source of where the energy was dissipated and the location where the energy was converted into another form. This is of fundamental importance in biology. For example, the sun dissipates energy as light / photons. A photosynthetic cell captures the light and uses it for constructing new cellular components, it gains free energy. In the physical level of description, both processes can be described as random or statistical processes. At the biological level, the initial conditions are such that the cell utilizes the energy for growth and reproduction. This line of argumentation about free energy is neither compelling nor pragmatically useful, in my opinion, because the dicisigns originate in two different systems, separated in cosmic space. The meaning of thermodynamic changes become propositionally meaningful if and only if they are co-located in the same system. Cheers Jerry
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