WHITHER EVOLUTIONARY INFORMATIONAL ENTROPY?

Change is a special category of motion.  While general motion is unwritten, change is special motion because it is written.  Thus change is potentially a deliberate act, not a preprogrammed or automatic act.  General unwritten motion is substantive, never formal, but special motion, change, may be substantive or it may be formal, literally depending on what is written.  What is written may be due to luck or randomness.  The jury is still out as to whether given an infinity of time 10,000 monkeys (or is it 99,000) with typewriters could in fact by sheer luck hammer out Hamlet.[1]  Even given an eternity it must not necessarily happen.  At the other end of the spectrum, the most substantive or least formal writing discovered to date is DNA.  But, of course, this is only this writer’s opinion.  Others may have other opinions.  Regardless, here is the point:  DNA is an insulating agent against changeless motion.  Yes, the Sun shines, protons are fused at its hot core, it is a machine in motion, but there is no change, it is motion without change as “change” is defined here.  There are no deliberately contemplative acts, every solar act is automatic, perfectly deterministic.  The reason, as defined here, is because the Sun is not written, it does not come into being as a result of a written plan.  Every physical act in the universe is perfectly automatic, no proton or photon or phonon needs to consult a manual to ascertain what it must do.  The contrast could not be greater.  Yes, the physical acts of the universe are substantive because no science, or anything else, has to date rigorously demonstrated any ability to violate gravity, for example, except in the movies which does not count.  On the other hand entropy, it seems, is a two way street, it generally increases but in special cases it may decrease as it does in the special case of DNA.  Inside life entropy has been steadily reduced, defying the general case of which the Sun is an example, due to DNA evolution, which is nothing more than editing of the written by deliberate selection, or at least not fully automatic or totally mindless selection.  Selection implies competition, as when a female may select from several eligible males, or when several eligible males compete to gain reproductive access to a herd of females.[2]  The reality of  less entropy means greater organization, less chaos, a species with less entropy has on balance a greater chance of winning a competition, and this ability to have less entropy is written, not unwritten.  The Sun attains the point of minimum entropy when it first ignites after the self-organizing principle built into gravity has collapsed the original cloud of molecular hydrogen.  Thereafter the Sun’s entropy slowly rises until it runs out of fuel.  This action can be predicted for every star ever “born,” even if the universe contains a infinite number of stars.[3]  How does DNA manage to reduce entropy over an evolutionary time scale?  The unwritten, although incapable of being violated, is “dumb” in contrast to the written which is “smart” because the information captured with the written, with DNA, can not exist physically anywhere else in the universe, and due to the cell cycle, the duplicability of DNA, the capturing of information is cumulative thusly the requirement of slow, steady change the end result of which is a reduction in entropy, an increase in how much information is captured with a given number of words.  There is little doubt the physical atoms are organized by DNA into life, DNA is an intermediary, is an absolute necessity.  The process of modifying life in writing is “change,” it is not merely “motion.”  A base pair is added (not all DNA is of equal length) or dropped, the code is edited sometimes by blind luck (mutation), or, most often (for the eukaryotes), due to selection, by a non automatic process leading toward less and less systemic entropy.  Gravity as self-organizing principle applied to atoms in a free, gaseous state, forms a star which arguably is in a state of lower entropy than the original gas cloud, it appears the same self-organizing principle is in operation with respect to writable information in the form of DNA.  The writing itself changes in such a way as to have a tendency to produce organisms of lesser entropy, therefore because the lesser entropy organisms are more organized, because their DNA is packed with more information, this leads to a greater variety of behavioral responses to changes in the biotic environment, enhancing survival chances.  If it is hypothesized the biotic environment is information rich then tendency toward the ever lowering of organizational entropy makes sense because the “animal” which processes and possesses more information, has senses which are sharper, more precise in terms of delivering information than of another animal, has the edge, is more competitive, has attained a state of lower informational entropy.

Just how information rich is the biotic, planetary environment?  Humans are about to find out for their own actions have put humans, literally, “under the gun.”  To put it another way, it is “crunch time” for the planet in general and humans in particular.  The burden to know information has never been more acute, there shall be no second guessing, no Monday morning quarterbacking.  Decisions humans make collectively during the next few decades shall prove their worth.  Natural disasters, tsunamis, eruptions, earthquakes are not subject to human control, this is not what the information burden is all about.  It is products, including commercialism, propaganda, humans have created artificially, technologically, which humans today do not have control of, it is about this “stuff”  which decisions shall be made or not made.  As time moves a informational bell rings, meaning a decision to change is expected, and if the decision is not forthcoming the moment passes, the favorable historic conditions never to return, technology’s machinery marches on, on its own time table, the humans losing the chance due to procrastination.

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[1]   [cite, Hamlet contains more than 4,000 lines]

[2]   In rare footage, a night fight to the death between an older leopard (who held the territory) and a younger leopard was captured, mostly only the sound is on tape, it was too dark to see the leopards themselves, but it lasted several minutes and the sheer ferocity was unmistakable.  [cite].

[3]   From The Encyclopedia of Physics (Lerner, 1991):  “The upper limit of stellar masses is about 100M_{[sun symbol]}:  stars of larger mass are evidently not found because in the gravitational contraction stage the denser core forms first and provides sufficient heat and radiation pressure to disperse the remaining matter,” i.e., to prevent more matter from contracting.”  [p. 1175].