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Information Theory Places New Limits On Origin of Life
KentuckyFC writes:
Most research into the origin of life focuses on the messy business of chemistry, on the nature of self-replicating molecules and on the behavior of autocatalytic reactions. Now one theorist says the properties of information also place important limits on how life must have evolved, without getting bogged down in the biochemical details. The new approach uses information theory to highlight a key property that distinguishes living from non-living systems: their ability to store information and replicate it almost indefinitely. A measure of this how much these systems differ from a state of maximum entropy or thermodynamic equilibrium. The new approach is to create a mathematical model of these informational differences and use it to make predictions about how likely it is to find self-replicating molecules in an artificial life system called Avida. And interestingly, the predictions closely match what researchers have found in practice. The bottom line is that according to information theory, environments favorable to life are unlikely to be unusual.
Wait. If they are unlikely to be unusual, then they are likely to be usual. Right ?
Maybe we deserve this world ?
And this is the only information that you need.
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The key idea in Adami’s formulation is that living systems do not exist in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium
Not only is it not required, they're looking for exactly the thing you're mentioning, so I don't see any point in your comment. Also, they're not saying anything about Earth with increasing entropy. Where did you get that? Are we reading the same things in the first place?
Ezekiel 23:20
Even starting with you assumption, life is much more complex and it seems to me has much lower entropy than any diamond.
You are making my point for me. The only reason you beleive life is more complex than a diamond is because of the complexity of it's many different kinds of organization. a diamond is a very simple organization based on a single organizing principle. (and so I might add is DNA oligomerization which is what the author of the paper is discussing). But a living cell has many different kinds of organization whos infomration partioning and propagation seems very non-random.
and yet the diamond has lower entropy than the cell.
so thanks for making my point.
Costs more in what sense? Energy cost? Lines of code cost? Time cost? In any event, it is not something that I consider when zipping a file. Zip and unzip are treated as equivalent from the user's standpoint.
The great thing about the universe (and information theory) is that it's flexible in how the cost be paid, but the laws of thermodynamics apply all the way down the chain. Zipping can cost more in memory, or more in CPU cycles. The fact that it's the same to you doesn't really matter. It's not the same to the things doing the work.
The point that confuses me is: the energy on the outside lens surface can't light a fire, but the energy produced by the glass can.
The energy hitting the outside of the glass *can* light a fire. It's simply spread over too wide of an area. In the same way that all the potential energy in the gap between the clouds and the ground doesn't immediately kill you, as it exists at all times. It requires a mechanism to focus it before it becomes fatal. The poles are cooler than the equator not because there is less sunlight passing through a square meter of space above them as opposed to the equator, but because the earth sits at a less perpendicular angle to that light, so it is spread out over more area.
You can simulate this effect by angling your magnifying glass in such a way as the focused dot obliquely hits the object-to-be-burned enough to spread out the energy again (let entropy do its thing)
How is the lens doing any work, in that sense?
The lens is doing work via diffraction. Light can't just be redirected by anything but the curvature of space. While that lens looks transparent, what is actually happening is the light is being aborbed by every atom (or electron, more precisely) it hits, and then re-emitted as an all-new photon with a change of direction that follows a statistical set of rules that focuses it (based on the diffraction qualities of the lens). The absorption and re-emission has a cost, it's not free.