Home The Progressive Strangification of Order
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Selection itself as an entropy reducer
Here we're looking not directly at Ilya Prigogine's Nobel Prize-winning findings that complex systems under some conditions, instead of disintegrating into meaningless rubble, actually explode into higher forms of order. Instead, we go back to the simple example in classical thermodynamics where, by pouring a glass of hot water and a glass of cold water into a bucket, what you have and all that you can pour back into the two glasses is luke-warm water. The hot and cold molecules of water have randomized their distribution.

Only if you have someone or some agency acting as a selective gate, passing hot molecules in one direction and cold molecules in the other, can you restore order—i.e., hot and cold concentrations—to that system.

o Selection on any basis other than random represents some sort of increase in order—i.e., is negentropic.

o All the time that bioevolution continued on earth between those times of all-consuming catastrophe, selection was at work on non-random bases and thus did cumulatively point life toward higher orders of sophistication—i.e., negentropically. 99.999% of the time life was evolving on Earth, negentropy therein was progressing.

o The very fact that there are breaks in that line of progress, from the simpler to the more sophisticated, actually helps make the case since the breaks are the product of catastrophic events whose impact on life forms at the time was essentially random, having nothing to do with the "fitness to survive." The factors (or descriptive principles) making for "fitness to survive" are, therefore, of greater bearing on the universal case than hitherto suspected.

o Virtually everywhere, then, that life or life-like phenomena exist, somewhere between the extremes of totally unchanging conditions and catastrophic changes which produce 100% rates of extinction, will be found tendencies to evolve from the primitive to the sophisticated...from elaboration of specialties in one set condition to ability to survive over far wider-ranging conditions....from reflex-moment response to being able to take into account more and more different factors in one's pursuit of one's needs and wants—i.e., to becoming intelligent.

(We are reminded that, yes, we still have the primitive with us: protozoa, slime molds, etc. But these each have limited capabilities and would have to evolve far beyond where they are now for them to start pointing to evolutionary trends. Their continued ubiquity is our guarantee, in a sense, that if we do let some new catastrophe happen to Earth, life will continue and start evolving from some new baseline.)
Some further implication can be sensed in all of this when we put together the tendency of conditions to evolve life into coping successfully with wider and more differentiated sets of conditions. Put that tendency together with several other interesting phenomena—

Evolution of intelligence.#It is apparent that Earth's is an average or near-average case, in terms of the length of time required for this habitat to develop intelligence; and, from that intelligence, civilization; and, from a run of civilizations, an instance where a civilization actually stayed its hand from self-extinction through one major opportunity, that of strategic nuclear warfare. (No guarantee, of course, that we will also stay our hand on any of the many other opportunities we have for creating a new high-extinction-rate catastrophe.)

Earth can be counted as average not because we are here and therefore where we're looking from has to be the middle. Rather, periods of many millions of years of unchanging conditions are inefficient in evolution; as are also those catastrophes which undo so much of the preceding sophistication. So out of the huge variety of conditions obtaining throughout the Universe, there have to be settings more efficient or faster in giving rise to these universal tendencies than those of our Earth, just as obviously there must be many, many places even where life is flourishing that must have settings less efficient, slower.

Prevalence of life.#It's increasingly evident that planetary settings for life, in the physical universe, must be relatively frequent because planets themselves are so frequent. Until a few years ago we had never observed planets even around nearby suns. Now it seems that almost all stars and all types of stars have planets. Even if only one in a thousand can bear life, that means billions of instances even in just our one galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, one of the smaller of the billions of galaxies now within reach of our scopes.

(It also appears that most of the "missing" mass or dark matter of the Universe may actually be comprised of planets, ranging from the planetesimal to "brown dwarf," though most of these are wandering lifelessly in the cold of interstellar space—a marvelous resource for some future technology to develop!)
Nor are we limited to planetary environs as the habitat for life to evolve and flourish. Even within the range of what we recognize to be organic, huge interstellar clouds of organic compounds, each aggregating more mass than the Earth itself, are to be found almost everywhere in space.

Infinitely evolving.#Such abundances, taken together with the tendencies set by evolutionary selection through dynamics which apparently pertain everywhere, and also taken together with the prospect that some habitats evolved life and went on beyond our own present levels long since, mean that we have to look at each of the characteristics which selective evolution necessarily selects for, and examine the case in which that tendency or tendencies may be extended to infinity.
(It seems we might not have to assume God or a god creating the Universe in order to come up with the possibility that, even if the Universe in the beginning did not have a universal being as part of the picture, one emerged long since.)
Take to infinity such tendencies as not only intelligence but the taking into account of more and more factors, and survival over a wider and wider range of conditions — either overwhelming all environments or finding more and more supportive and mutually supportive ecological ways to involve with all environments, and at this late juncture we here still exist! —and the general mutually-supportive tendencies which move specific species from predation and parasitism toward symbiosis. Can this be love? — Or are we a farm, and what's getting harvested? If we can put aside some old and emotional assumptions and do some fresh thinking on fresh data, we might obtain some useful or even practical insights.

We don't even have to go to such ultimate(?) levels to find ourselves neck-deep in some pretty large considerations. And that brings us toward the general situation which the title of this exploration reflects:— the general strangification of everything in the Universe.

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