C. David Pruett
Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics & Statistics
James Madison University
Presented at Harrisonburg Unitarian Universalists
June 23, 2013
Introduction
The Catholic theologian Thomas Berry–who preferred to be called an eco-theologian, or better yet a geologian—observed, “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are between stories.â€
I think what Father Thomas meant was that the scientific discoveries over the past five centuries since Copernicus have eroded our ancient myths of meaning without providing us with palatable alternatives. This has forced what Ilya Prigogine, Nobel laureate in chemistry, has deemed a “tragic choice†between “an alienating science†and “an unscientific philosophy.†And in that either/or choice can be found the seeds of much human dysfunction.
Recognizing how crucial a viable story is if the people are to thrive, or at least survive, Berry dedicated his life to understanding and articulating the “new story,†a cosmic creation myth that weaves together modern scientific insights and ancient wisdom, with fidelity to both. He joined with cosmologist Brian Swimme to write The Universe Story in 1992. Reason and Wonder is my attempt to tell essentially the same story in a different voice.
One of the first to begin weaving the new story was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Berry, who died in 2009, was widely recognized as Teilhard’s heir apparent. This highly educated audience is well aware of the scientific cornerstones of the new story: the theory of evolution and Big Bang cosmology. However, there is an aspect of the new story that is only beginning to emerge. I believe that the second quotation from Teilhard read earlier sheds light on one of the great mysteries of the universe. Laying open that mystery is the subject of today’s talk, which I title “On Evolution, Entropy, and Love: Three Facets of the Cosmos.â€
Teilhard: His Life and Legacy
Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.
This expansive view of evolution was penned by Teilhard de Chardin in his seminal work The Phenomenon of Man (1959). Teilhard is not exactly a household name. So, who was Teilhard de Chardin, and why should we pay attention to his thought and vision?
First, Teilhard was both a scientist of the first rank–a world-renown paleontologist–and he was a Jesuit priest, so devout in his Christian faith that he wished to die at Easter, a wish granted on April 10, 1955. Teilhard’s unique synthesis of science and faith serves as a model today for those who seek wholeness in the integrity of mind and heart. It may seem surprising then, given continuing attacks on evolution from the religiously pious, that so bold a view of evolution as expressed previously should originate from a man of profound faith. How is that possible?
As a scientist who studied both geology and human origins–and carried a geology hammer on every outing–Teilhard wholehearted accepted that the nature of Nature is to change. Moreover, keenly aware of 20th-Century developments in cosmology, among them that the universe is expanding, having originated in a “primeval atom†(to use the original term for the Big Bang), Teilhard realized that evolution applies not only to biological processes but also to the universe as a whole. From this recognition emerged the beautiful notion of cosmogenesis, which signifies a universe in continual creation. When was the moment of creation? Now! Needless to say, such freethinking did not go down well with the keepers of orthodoxy. Teihlard was forbidden to teach and publish; all his great works were published posthumously.
Still, as a man of faith, Teilhard did not see either biological evolution–or cosmogenesis–as directionless. However haltingly, evolution marches in a general direction that creates beings of greater biological complexity and concomitantly higher consciousness, a process for which Teilhard coined another term: complexification or complexity-consciousness.
Finally, Teilhard was a mystic. On a battlefield of the First World War, where he fearlessly served a Moroccan regiment as a stretcher-bearer, Teilhard had a mystical experience. In a suspended moment on a moonlit night, he intuited that consciousness is not the by-product of evolution; rather, it is the purpose of evolution. To conceptualize the collective consciousness of the earth and her inhabitants, he coined the term noosphere—literally “the sphere of knowingâ€â€”to parallel and extend the scientifically accepted notions of geosphere and biosphere.
Entropy
In the poetic passage from The Divine Milieu (1960) that was read earlier, Teilhard describes the inner workings of the universe as he envisioned it:
The labor of seaweed as it concentrates in its tissues the substances scattered, in infinitesimal quantities, throughout the vast layers of the ocean; the industry of the bees as they make honey from the juices broadcast in so many flowers–these are but pale images of the ceaseless working-over that all the forces of the universe undergo in us in order to reach the level of the spirit.
Here, complexification is seen as a quintessentially counter-entropic process out of which spirit is distilled from the proto-consciousness scattered about the cosmos in every particle of dust and atom.
In order to appreciate the significance of counter-entropic processes, it is first necessary to visit the notion of entropy. Entropy is a technical idea and a slippery concept. In a short talk it is impossible to do justice to such a complex idea. So let’s simply try to summarize what entropy entails, to caution what it does not entail, and to make some useful connections.
In common understanding, entropy is associated with disorder. Low entropy states are characterized by high degrees of order. Conversely, high entropy states are characterized by low order or equivalently by high disorder. The common association of entropy with disorder, however, is problematic. First, it suggests that entropy is some loosely defined quantity that lies in the eyes of the (human) beholder. Not so. Entropy, like mass, momentum, and energy, is a physical quantity whose value can, in principle, be evaluated with great precision. Second, for gravitational systems, in which aggregates of particles of dust and gas accrete and collapse into stars and planets, the tendency is toward greater apparent order, not less, as entropy increases (Penrose, 1989).
A more universally valid understanding of entropy, therefore, associates entropy not with disorder but with probability. Low entropy states are those that have low probabilities of occurrence; high entropy states have high probabilities. Because the natural tendency of the physical world is for states to transition by degrees from low probability to higher probability, entropy tends to increase over time. For example, what prevents a wine glass that has fallen off the table, shattered into bits, and spilled its contents from reassembling and leaping back onto the table? Surprisingly, physics doesn’t prevent this. Probability does.
The notion of entropy arose in a most unromantic context, from the bustling and grimy industrial revolution that was ushered in by the steam engine. In order to make steam engines, in particular, and heat engines, in general, as efficient as possible, an understanding of the flow and transformation of energy was needed. Thermodynamics, as the new science was called, at first seemed counterintuitive to those steeped in classical physics. As a result, the key to its development as a new scientific field lay in successive steps of abstraction, by which the lumbering steam engine was gradually stripped of all its mechanical apparatus to reveal its underlying essence (Atkins, 2003). At the bottom of this process lay a fundamentally new principle, now known as the Second Law of Thermodynamics and first elucidated in 1824 by Sadi Carnot, a Frenchman:
Heat does not flow spontaneously from a cooler body to a hotter body.
The second law is far subtler than it appears at first blush, and it can be expressed in many equivalent ways. The most common is:
The entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease over time.
When the physicist or engineer first encounters the second law, it is something utterly foreign. The laws governing mass, momentum, and energy are conservation laws. For example, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only change form, from potential energy to kinetic, from chemical energy to heat, and so on. But unlike energy, or mass, or momentum, entropy is not conserved; rather, its tendency is to increase. How unusual.
Some re-statements of the second law are humorous, but each captures a facet of its reach (Trefil and Hazen, 2003):
It is easier to scramble an egg than to unscramble it.
Refrigerators don’t work, unless plugged in.
The universe is going to hell in a hand basket.
The first and last statements reflect the fact that the natural trend of systems, including the universe as a whole, is toward increasing disorder, or more correctly, toward states of higher probability. The second statement dices things more finely. It addresses what the second law does not say. The second law does not say that heat cannot flow from cold bodies to hot bodies or that order cannot be created out of disorder. But doing so requires an input of energy from outside the system, in which case it is no longer isolated. A refrigerator transfers heat from colder bodies (the carton of milk) to hotter ones (the room), but it doesn’t do so spontaneously. It must first tap into a source of energy via the electrical cord and the outlet.
Here is where things get interesting. From the thermodynamic point of view, the mere existence of life offers a most curious fact to ponder. In the words of Sir Charles Sherrington, the 1932 Nobel Laureate for medicine (Schroedinger, 1992):
The universe of energy is … running down. It tends fatally towards an equilibrium which shall be final. An equilibrium in which life cannot exist. Yet life is evolved without pause. Our planet in its surround has evolved it and is evolving it. And with it evolves mind.
Similarly, the evolutionary biologist Sir Julian Huxley wrote in the introduction to Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man:
[Evolution] is an anti-entropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organization.
Thus, there are two counter trends in the grand scheme of cosmogenesis. There is the tendency of the physical world to run downhill according to the second law, and there is the counter-entropic trend of biological systems toward greater complexity and higher consciousness. This begs the question: Are these trends somehow related, and if so, how?
What is Life?
In the same year that Sherrington took the Nobel Prize for medicine, the Nobel Prize in physics went to quantum physicist Erwin Schroedinger. In the little gem of a book entitled What is Life?, published in 1944, the eminent physicist delved into biology to address the question implied by the book’s title: What are the primary characteristics that distinguish life from non-life?
To Schroedinger, above all, life is characterized by its ability to temporarily hold at bay the ravages of entropy. A living organism is defined as “living†precisely because of its ability to avoid decay, to maintain itself temporarily free from the universe’s tendencies toward disorder. So-called inanimate matter does not possess this amazing quality. For all their grandeur, mountains are powerless against the forces of erosion: wind, water, and acids. Each grain of sand on each beach testifies to the powerlessness of rocks and mountains in the face of natural forces. Life, in Schroedinger’s (1992) words, is characterized by “… an organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos–of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment … ”
But how does the living organism avoid decay? In a word, by metabolism (Schroedinger, 1992). The word “metabolism†originates in a Greek root meaning “exchange.†Life is fundamentally associated with some sort of exchange with its environment. But what is the currency? It is tempting to regard energy as the currency of exchange. But Schroedinger, ever the physicist, catches the common mistake. Life does not thrive on “energy†per se any more than a nation needs an “energy†policy. Why is that? Well, as anyone familiar with the laws of thermodynamics or physics knows, energy is conserved! For example, for an adult organism, one no longer growing and whose weight is constant, the net exchange of energy with the environment is zero. That is, the energy consumed by the organism in the form of food is exactly balanced by the energy relinquished to the environment in the form of low-grade heat. The forms of the input and output energies, however, are vastly different. Energy contained in food is highly concentrated, while that in waste heat is highly diffuse. Which brings us back to thermodynamics’ second law. In the concise language of physics and the words of Schroedinger: “What an organism feeds on is negative entropy.†(Schroedinger, 1992.)
To the ordinary person who is not a Nobel laureate, Schroedinger’s statement seems at first incomprehensible. It helps to recognize that, as a measure of probability, entropy is also a measure of the quality (availability) of a form of energy, in the sense that the more concentrated (available) the form of energy, the lower its entropy. Conversely, the more diffuse (unavailable) the form of energy, the higher its entropy. Because an organism consumes energy in concentrated form as food (at low entropy) and expels that energy in diffuse form as heat (at high entropy), the net difference (entropy in minus entropy out) is negative. Put in Schroedinger’s more down-to-earth terms: “Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.†(Schroedinger, 1992.) Schroedinger’s observation is a 180-degree twist to the existentialist’s lament: “Life sucks.†If it didn’t suck, it wouldn’t live.
It would seem, however, that the second law of thermodynamics forbids the decrease of entropy associated with life. Fortunately, the prohibition is for isolated systems, and the earth is not isolated. Provided there is a concentrated source of energy (low entropy) available that can be tapped, life can proceed to swim upstream. In Galileo’s Finger (2003), Peter Atkins writes:
Although elaborate events may occur in the world around us, such as the opening of a leaf, the growth of a tree, the formation of an opinion, and disorder thereby apparently recedes, such events never occur without somehow being driven. That driving results in an even greater proportion of disorder elsewhere.
In other words, entropy must increase somewhere else for it to decrease on earth, and by the second law, the overall increase is greater than or equal to the local decrease.
Thus, crucial to life and evolution is the existence of a well of low entropy somewhere nearby from which life can draw. For life on earth, that well is the sun. Radiant energy from the sun is the ultimate source of all life on earth. The sun’s light fuels photosynthesis for the metabolic processes of plants. Plants in turn concentrate energy into sugars for herbivores, and in the tissues of herbivores are the further concentrated energies necessary for carnivores.
What then is the relationship between these two universal counter-currents: physical entropy and biological complexification? The words of ordained scientist Arthur Peacock (1984) reveal what I believe to be one of the most profound connections ever made by human beings:
It has recently begun to appear possible, even likely, that the continuous increase in entropy over time in the universe may itself, in the natural course of events, gives rise–through the development of so-called dissipative systems–to complex forms of organization, eventually including living systems.
The counter-currents therefore are intimately related. Indeed, the former propels the latter! Once again, in the words of Peter Atkins (2003):
The ceaseless decline in the quality of energy expressed by the second law is a spring that has driven the emergence of all components of the biosphere. In a very direct way, all the kingdoms of creation have been hoisted out of organic matter as the universe has sunk ever more into chaos.
But as Sherrington noted, “With life evolves mind.†Life is the carrier of consciousness. Or, as implied in the poetry of Teilhard, life is the distillery of consciousness, gathering spirit from the proto-consciousness scattered about the cosmos as bees gather nectar for honey. We are drawn like moths to a flame to the synthesis expressed by Peacocke (1984), which continues:
There could be no self-consciousness and human creativity without living organization, and there could be no living dissipative systems unless the entropic stream followed its general, irreversible [and downhill] course in time.
Love
To this point, I have said nothing that is not scientifically defensible. But we still haven’t quite gotten to the crux of the story. So let’s put a little human spin on the science.
Let’s leave the broad universe for a moment and re-focus, each of us, on our little corner of the planet: our home, our yard, our family. What counter-entropic events can we find on a daily basis in our small neck of the woods? For those who own homes, home maintenance is counter-entropic. Left alone, the roof will leak, the paint will flake, and the wood will succumb to termites and rot. Unattended, the home will disintegrate around us. Expenditures of energy are necessary to reverse the decay: repairs to the roof, painting of the siding, and chemical barriers to keep the termites at bay.
For those who garden, gardening is also counter-entropic. Left to its own, a plot of untended earth rapidly degenerates into a chaotic tangle of vines and weeds. Weeding, mulching, planting flowers, collecting June bugs one by one, and sculpting plots: these are counter-entropic inputs of energy from the gardener.
Finally, consider the act of parenting, perhaps the most counter-entropic of all human endeavors.
And so, what name do we humans give to the counter-entropic processes of our daily experience? We call these “labors of love,†or simply “love†for short.
So let’s wrap up. Under the mantle of cosmogenesis–Teilhard’s term for cosmic evolution–there exist two counter tendencies. There is the relentless tug of entropy on the material universe, by which iron rusts, bodies decay, aged stars collapse into black holes, and thermodynamic equilibrium known as “heat death†ultimately prevails. Against this, there is Teilhard’s counter-entropic trend of complexification, by which life swims upstream against entropy, becoming ever more ordered and biologically complex, and ever more self-aware. And what is the connection between the running down of the physical world and the running up of the biological world? Extrapolating from Teilhard with the help of Peacocke and Atkins: The former enables and drives the latter. It is the very running down of the physical world that propels the biological and conscious worlds upward!
And so, to conclude, what is the deep secret of Nature that we have uncovered? In anthropomorphic terms we might express it simply as follows:
The universe is engaged in a great labor of love, expending its energy so that higher consciousness has a chance to emerge.
REFERENCES:
1. Peter Atkins, Galileo’s Finger, Oxford University Press, 2003.
2. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Bantam Dell, 1988.
3. Ursula King, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin, Orbis Books, 1996.
4. Arthur Peacocke, “Thermodynamics and Life,†Zygon 19 (1984), p. 430.
5. Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989.
6. Erwin Schroedinger, What is Life? with Mind and Matter, Reprint Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
7. Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper & Row, New York, 1959.
8. Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, Harper & Row, New York, 1960.
9. James Trefil and Robert M. Hazen, The Sciences: An Integrated Approach, 4th Ed., Wiley, 2003.