Tag Archives: biology

life, mindfulness

Devolve into Chaos

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cosmos

My Mom used to always say “close the door because you’ll let the cold in!” Then I took college physics and the professor said something profound. He said “there is no such thing as cold, there is only lack of heat.”

Diffusion – (my definition) movement of molecules from a state of high concentration to low concentration.

When you have people respiring oxygen and carbon dioxide, and numerous gases emanate from furniture, carpet, foods, whatever, you get a fairly high concentration of molecules. Then, add heat (aka energy) so these molecules are continually energized and bounce all around. What happens when you open the door to the less energized and colder outdoors? These bouncing molecules find release. They bounce until reaching their own stasis. If you leave the door open, equilibrium will no longer find a concentration gradient. They will be the same in concentration of molecules and thereby similar in temperature.

Second Law of Thermodynamics – Everything tends toward entropy or disorder.

If you have water in a basin and the vapor pressure is low, eventually those molecules will move from a liquid state to a gaseous state (i.e., they evaporate). If you look at the Grand Canyon, it will never be the same as it once was. You can’t put the sediment that has eroded away back on the steep cliffs. It would never stay. All those tiny grains are somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Everything tends toward disorder. But does it?

Life is the oddity in this process. When I’ve debated these ideas with biochemists and physicists, they always confine the system to validate their reasoning. But when you explain life, how is life even possible? How is it possible to evolve into a higher creature when the 2nd Law says that we tend toward disorder? It seems like we should have devolved into microorganisms and not the other way around.

Neo-Darwinists began to realize that life is truly an oddity of nature. Did you know that science is never fully explained? There is always a Black Box somewhere in the process. Scientists would say that it is the Next Frontier, or some other grandiose statement. But its really something unknown that is yet to be known. Its a theory.

I would call it a Miracle.

The Neo-Darwinists acknowledge this Miracle as some kind of Life Force. Hmmm, a Life Force? That’s not very sciency!

Is the Life Force the Sun? Maybe a divine Universe? Maybe its Chi or some other meta-physical property. It makes me wonder. This is what wakes me in the middle of the night.

life, Uncategorized

Life is a Miracle

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prehistory
Do you ever wonder how certain creatures are stuck and have not appeared to evolve?

What about crocodiles? If you look at pictures of what people claim are pre-historic, why do they show crocodiles?

How about pelicans? If you look at pictures of Pterodactyls, I would say they are pelicans.

What about ferns? Why no seeds? Where seeds? Why don’t they start producing seeds? What’s wrong with them?

We see pictures of changes in life. We don’t see the changes happen.

Do you remember the adage, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Much of it stems from human embryonic development. At some points in development in the womb, you can see a salamander with a tail, a fish with gills, maybe a bacterial blob. And just because you can picture each of these stages, the hypothesis was that each stage represents a different creature in its evolution. That theory has been wholly debunked.

But we still have these pictures and say that one creature came from the other. In the sciences I’ve studied, we depend on replication of experiments. Sample size, error rates, all the statistics that matter come into play. Yet how does scientific reasoning apply to these pictures? Somehow we get lost in comparison and contrast; cause and effect; correlation versus real relationships.

I would propose a few experiments. Let’s change a common squirrel into a chipmunk. Or let’s change a crocodile into an alligator. Is that too difficult? How about something simpler. Let’s change Escherichia coli into Salmonella typhimurium (bacteria if you didn’t know). Show me the study and evidence and then let someone else recreate your study in another independent lab. Do that, and I’ll give you a Nobel Prize.