Complexity
Volume 2017 (2017), Article ID 4745379, 4 pages
Research Article
Entropy and Selection: Life as an Adaptation for Universe Replication
Michael E. Price
Department of Life Sciences, Brunel University, London, UK
Correspondence should be addressed to Michael E. Price
Received 21 February 2017; Accepted 28 May 2017; Published 20 June 2017
Academic Editor: Carlos Gershenson
Copyright © 2017 Michael E. Price. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Natural selection is the strongest known antientropic process in the universe when operating at the biological level and may also operate at the cosmological level. Consideration of how biological natural selection creates adaptations may illuminate the consequences and significance of cosmological natural selection. An organismal trait is more likely to constitute an adaptation if characterized by more improbable complex order, and such order is the hallmark of biological selection. If the same is true of traits created by selection in general, then the more improbably ordered something is (i.e., the lower its entropy), the more likely it is to be a biological or cosmological adaptation. By this logic, intelligent life (as the least-entropic known entity) is more likely than black holes or anything else to be an adaptation designed by cosmological natural selection. This view contrasts with Smolin’s suggestion that black holes are an adaptation designed by cosmological natural selection and that life is the by-product of selection for black holes. Selection may be the main or only ultimate antientropic process in the universe/multiverse; that is, much or all observed order may ultimately be the product or by-product of biological and cosmological selection.
“Another, related meaning of entropy is that it is a measure of disorganization. The atoms in a gas are disordered to the extent that there is no way to tell one from another. In equilibrium there is maximal disorder, because every atom moves randomly, with the same average energy as any other atom. A living system, on the contrary, continually creates an enormous number of different kind of molecules, each of which generally perform a unique function. The entropy of a living thing is consequently much lower, atom for atom, than anything else in the world.”
Smolin (1997), The Life of the Cosmos, p. 28.
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