Chapter 127 21.1 Four billion years of Ponzi schemes

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the question of "heat" was still a puzzling and esoteric problem.Everyone instinctively knows that a hot object will gradually cool down to the same temperature as its surroundings, and that a cool object will also slowly increase in temperature.But a complete theory of heat was not yet born, and it baffled scientists of the day. A true theory of thermodynamics must be able to explain something puzzling.Yeah, an extremely hot object and an extremely cold object in the same space will end up at the same temperature.But some objects, such as a basin of ice-water mixture, do not increase in temperature as quickly as a basin of ice or water of the same size.Thermal expansion and cold contraction, motion produces heat, and heat causes motion.There are also certain metals that increase in weight when heated, that is to say, heat has weight.

The early pioneers who studied heat didn't know that they were studying temperature, calories, friction, work, efficiency, energy, and entropy—terms that came later.In fact, after decades of doing it, they're not even sure what they're working on.One of the most widely accepted theories is that heat is an all-pervasive elastic fluid—a physical ether. In 1824, the French military engineer Carnot (Carnot and Samuel Beckett's famous absurd drama "Waiting for Godot" is a homonym for the slow-moving protagonist Godot) deduced what was later called the second law of thermodynamics. A simple statement of the principle is as follows: there is no perpetual motion system.Carnot's second law of thermodynamics, along with the first law of thermodynamics (the law of conservation of energy), influenced the ensuing century as the main framework for understanding many scientific theories.This includes not only thermodynamics, but most of physics, chemistry, and quantum mechanics.In conclusion, the theory of thermodynamics underpins the foundation of all modern physical sciences.

Biology, however, has no such illustrious theory.The most popular joke among complexity researchers these days is that biological science today is "waiting for Godot."Theoretical biologists feel like they were heat researchers just before the birth of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century.Biologists discuss complexity without a single measure of complexity; they hypothesize biological evolution but cannot reproduce an instance.This brought them back to thinking about studying heat without having concepts like calories, friction, work, or even energy.Just as Carnot established a framework for the disordered physics at that time through his heat death principle, some theoretical biologists are also eagerly looking forward to the birth of the second law of biology to frame the general trend of the field of life - never Find order in order.But there is an underlying irony in the joke, for Godot is a mysterious figure in Beckett's famous play, and does not appear at all!

Behind the exploration of deep evolution and the search for super life, most of them hide the exploration of the second law of biology, which is the law of orderly birth.Many post-Darwinists question whether natural selection itself can be powerful enough to counteract Carnot's second law of thermodynamics.Since we still exist, it means that it is possible.They didn't know exactly what they were looking for, but their intuition told them that it was, so to speak, a complementary force of entropy.Some call it anti-entropy, others "negative entropy."Gregory Bateson once asked: "Is there also an entropy of a biological species?"

The formal scientific research literature rarely articulates the search for this mystery of life.When read in the dead of night, most documents give people the feeling of seeing through a window or a blind man: each document only sees part of the thing.They all strive to fully express their ideas and intuitions in rigorous scientific vocabulary.Here, I summarize the ideas they contain as follows: In the ten billion years since the Big Bang, the universe has slowly cooled from a dense and extremely hot mass of primordial matter.About two-thirds of the way through this long history, something special happened.An insatiable force began to force these slowly dissipating heat and order into better order locally.The most unusual thing about Cheng Yaojin, who came out halfway, is that: (1) it is self-sufficient, and (2) it is self-reinforcing: the bigger it is, the more it produces itself.

Since then, two trends have coexisted in the universe.One is a perpetual downward trend, a force that starts off hot and then sizzles into a cold death.This is the frustrating second law of Carnot, the cruelest of all laws: all order is reduced to chaos, all flames are quenched, all mutations are flattened, and all structures die of their own accord. The second trend parallels this, but produces the opposite effect.It removes heat before it dissipates (as heat must dissipate), building order out of disorder.With the help of the trend of decline, it goes against the current. This ascending current takes advantage of its short time of order to snatch dissipated energy as much as possible to build a platform to pave the way for the next round of order.It gives everything and keeps nothing, and its order is all used to enhance the complexity, growth and order of the next round.In this way it breeds anti-chaos out of chaos, which we call life.

The upwelling is a wave, a slight rise in a sea of ​​ebbing entropy, a never-ending crest falling upon itself, always on the verge of collapsing. The wave is a track across the universe, a thin line between two different sides of chaos: one side of the line slides down into a stiff gray solid, the other sinks quietly into a seething black gaseous state, and the wave is both states The ever-changing moments in between - is an eternal fluid.The gravitational pull of entropy cannot be underestimated; but as the crests keep falling, the biological order glides like a surfer on the waves. The biological order uses this rising wave to build up, like a surfboard, using external energies to send itself into more orderly realms.As long as the power of Carnot’s law continues to cool down the universe, the upwelling will continue to steal heat energy to improve itself, and maintain its own height with its own strength.

This is like a pyramid scam, or a castle in the air. In this game, the biological order is used as the lever of the game, and its function is to capture more biological order. If it cannot continue to expand, it will only collapse.The history of all life, taken as a whole, is the story of a consummate liar.The crook has found an extremely simple trick to pull off, and has executed the plan to perfection—so far with impunity. "Life should perhaps be defined as the art of evading punishment." Theoretical biologist Waddington commented. Perhaps, this poetic idea is just my own fantasy, which is my half-knowledge and out-of-context interpretation of other people's works.But I don't think so.I have heard similar views from many scientists.I also don't think that the "Carnot's law" that people expect is pure mysticism-of course, this is just a hope of people, but I still hope to find a scientific theory that can be verified or falsified.Although there are various unreliable theories that seem to be upwelling, such as "vitality theory", the scientific nature of this second force is by no means inferior to probability theory or Darwin's natural selection.

However, an air of indecision hangs over "Upwelling."People's main concern is that "upwelling" means that there is some kind of directionality in the universe: while the rest of the universe is slowly running out of energy, the superlife is steadily building up its power, swimming upstream in the opposite direction.Life is moving toward more life, more kinds of life, more complex life, and more of something.And that leads to a certain skepticism.Modern cognition has a whiff of this process. The process oozes anthropocentricity.For some, it's as pungent as religious fanaticism.It was Christian Protestant theologians and monks who were the first and most fervent supporters of Darwin's theory because it provided scientific evidence for human dominance.Darwinian evolution provides a beautiful model of the progression of ignorant life to the pinnacle of known perfection—the human male.

The abuse of Darwin's theory not only promotes racism, but also does not help the development of the concept of evolution.Even more important than evolutionary progress is a re-examination of our place as humans.We are not the center of the universe, but just a tiny wisp of smoke on the edge of an insignificant spiral galaxy in an insignificant corner of the universe.If we don't matter, where does evolution lead? Progress is a dead end with no way out.In the study of evolution, as well as in postmodern history, economics, and sociology, the death of progress is largely a foregone conclusion.Change without progress is exactly how our contemporaries perceive their own destiny.

The theory of a second force rekindles hope for progress, but it also raises thorny questions: If there is a second law of life — upwelling, where exactly is this tide headed?If evolution does have a direction, what direction does it have?Is life progressing, or just wandering blindly?Maybe evolution is just a small slope that makes it seem like a trend and partially predictable.Can life (whether natural or artificial) have even a slight tendency?Are human cultures and other living systems mirror images of organic life?Or can a species develop independently of other species?Does artificial evolution have its own laws and goals, completely beyond the original intention of its creators? We must first admit that the progress of life and society that we see is nothing but an illusion of human beings.The notions of "ladders of progress" or "great chains of species" that are popular in biology find no evidence at all in geology. We start with the first life and see it as a starting point.Imagine all its descendants slowly expanding layer by layer, like a balloon that gets bigger and bigger.Time is the radius.Each species living at a particular time becomes a point on the sphere at that time. At the time of four billion years (that is, today), the world of life on the earth is full of about 30 million species.One point is a human being, and one point on the far side is E. coli.On this sphere, all points are at the same distance from the beginning of life, and therefore no species is superior to the others.The evolution of all creatures on the earth at any point in time is synchronous, and they have all experienced the same amount of evolutionary time.To put it bluntly, humans are no more evolved than most bacteria. Let's take a closer look at this sphere. It's hard to imagine that human beings are just an inconspicuous point in it. Why should they become the highest point in the world?Perhaps any one point among the 30 million other creatures that co-evolved—say, the flamingo or the poison oak—represents the entire evolution.As the life continuously explores the new field, the scope of the whole sphere is also expanding continuously, and the number of co-evolutionary seats is also increasing accordingly. This spherical diagram of life quietly destabilizes the self-documenting picture of progressive evolution—that is, the apex of life's successful climb from the simple single cell to the human being.This picture ignores billions of other evolutionary ladders that should exist as well, including the most prosaic stories of a single-celled organism descending a random evolutionary ladder into a slightly different kind of single-celled organism. cell body.In fact, evolution has no vertices, only billions of distinct points on a sphere.No matter what you do, as long as there is a result. It doesn't matter if it's wandering around or staying put.Over the course of evolutionary time, there are many more species that stay put than those that change radically, and there is little difference in their rewards.Both modern humans and Escherichia coli are survivors of evolution, and they are the best winners after hundreds of millions of years of elimination.Moreover, no one will have an advantage over the other surviving species in the next million years of evolution.In fact, many pessimists put the chances of humans surviving E. coli as 1 in 100, despite the fact that this puny creature currently lives only in our guts.