Selected excerpts from Into The Cool:
Culture critic C. P. Snow, disapproving the increasing gap between the sciences and the arts, suggested that any educated person should know the second law of thermodynamics. Not knowing the second law was, he said in his Two Cultures and a Second Look (1969) -- and early warning shot in the ever-changing battlefield of the culture wars -- equivalent to not having read a work by Shakespeare. The second law is neither a guarantor of cosmic death nor an arcane mathematical equation of interest only to polymer chemists. Rather, the second law helps explain the creation and elaboration of complex systems run by energy flow. The second law also directs our attention toward the directional processes we see in may sorts of developing complex systems, including those of our own evolution. In short, the natural phenomena described under the rubric of the second law not only destroy, but create -- by destroying gradients. [p.8]
Those who work on environmental toxicology and persistent toxins in the environment have found that the manmade chemicals were more persistent because evolutionary pathways did not exist for their degradation. The molecules like DDT and PCBs manufactured in the chemical crucible of mankind were "new" chmicals not seen before in life; "new" manmade, as opposed to nature-made, bioengineered genetic material may prove even more dangerous, without a strategy for dealing with it. [p.14]
There is a joke that a scientist is someone who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing, and a philosopher is someone who learns less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. [p.31]
[Epigraph to Chap. 4]
The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it becasue he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. -- Jules-Henri Poincare [p.47]
Yet as a scientific discipline, the thermodynamics of life -- a subdiscipline of nonequilibrium thermodynamics -- remains esoteric within science and virtually unknown to the public.
Why?
One reason is "academic apartheid" -- the partitioning of separately funded sciences into territorial fiefdoms whose inhabitants don't talk to each other or understand each other when they do. Referring to specialization in science as the digging of "deeper holes," Canadian biologist Vaclav Smil (2002) points out that synthesis -- putting specialized knowledge together -- was honored by German national historians and the Russian innovators of modern sciences. [p.144]
Those beings that best access, store, and deploy energy, or the informational means to do so at a later date, prosper. [p.148]
Maximum power principles state that those organisms or ecosystems that can most efficiently convert energy into biomass (including seeds and spores) enjoy an evolutionary advantage over their neighbors. Individuals and populations that fail to maintain or expand their systems' energy flow head for the exits of extinction. [p.148]
[Quoting R.J.P. Williams and Frausto da Silva (2002,695)]
It is the sun's radian energy and the intitial composition of Earth which drive the whole system. Any alternative ecosystem but the most efficient at energy retention could be overwhelmed by a more effective energy-retention steady state...The survival of the fittest seen by Darwinian analysis of species and linked by it today to random adaptive genetic searching is then seen to be a side effect of the development of a whole ecosystem toward such optimal energy retention. Fitness resides in the whole ecosystem, not just the species. [p.164-5]
As small-farm activist Wendell Berry has pointed out, the "environmental crisis" is a crisis not of the environment, but of ourselves (cited in Kellert and Franham 2001, 123) [p.186]
Psychological regression in humans also is prompted by reduced energy or stress. When the energy available for the formation of complex systems is taken away, these systems revert to a more priimitive level of function. [p.207]
Nietzche said the world is beautiful, but it has a pox called man. Thermodynamically, this is true insofar as our global activities have impaired life's most highly developed systems of gradient breakdown. [p.234]
[Quoting Stanford University professor of medicine Walter M. Bortz]
"No diet of drug is as important for longevity as exercise. It's not that you are too old to exercise, it is that you are too old not to exercise...Fitness becomes a survival issue. There is no drug in current or prospective use that holds as much promise for a life of extended vitality as does physical exercise," Bortz says. "Why reward the stockholders of Merck and Johnson and Johnson when we know that exercise is better for you and infinitely cheaper?" [p.261]
The very word economy, as a verb -- economize -- suggests functionality via increased elegance and efficiency. [p.288]
To survive sustainably we need to live like climax ecosystems. This means:
Use sustainable energy gradients....Control our human population....Increase energy efficiency....Recycle....Close leaky cycles whenever possible....Develop ecology as a worldview....Encourage cultural and biological diversity, rather than uniformity....Encourage interconnectivity, but not to the point of a single homogeneous system. Stressed ecosystems, and ecosystems deprived of energy, retreat to earlier stages of organization. These tendencies are predictable, and humans are not exempt. [p.296-8]
Evolutionary theory links organisms in time. Ecology links organisms in space. Chemistry links them in structure. NET links them in process. [p.303]
[Quoting Alan Watts]
The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are -- as now practiced -- like exhausted mines: bery hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in with the universe as we know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete by graduation day....[p.399]
Even when overseen by corporations funding continuous development, humans' conscious creative activities are negligible in comparison to natural creativity. [p.316]
The short term goals and profit-orientation of a corporation makes it an especially difficult arena for creative activity.
Creation science's efforts are lopsidedly weighed to debunking evolution rather than providing scientific evidence for the specific Genesis story of special creation. This is understandable, as the Bible's two-thousand-year-old account invokes miracles, which are paradigmatically unscientific. The biggest problem with ID and its creationist ilk is its absence of a true spirit of inquiry. [p.322]
It is difficult to say why the universes is so organized (e.g., into space and stars, an electromagnetic gradient0 in the first place. But once it is, life appears not as miraculous but rather as another cycling system whose physical, material, and ultimately mundance purpose it to get rid of prior complexity in accord with the second law. [p.323]
An interesting perspective on the importance of thermodynamics that is easy to read.
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