How do you say "physics" in the tongue of biology?

Okay, so we have our chimpanzee banging away at typewriters.  Each keystroke is assumed to be random (this is a thought problem, not a hiring problem).  Let’s limit the keys to the twenty six letters of the alphabet so I don’t have to count the keys on my laptop.  How long does it take our pan troglodytes to produce Shakespeare’s Richard the Third? 

Well, our hairy scribe will produce one “n” about every twenty-six strokes.  Multiply 26 by 26 and that is how many strokes will be needed to produce the first two letters “no”.  Assuming that Bonzo types 260 letters a minute, how long will it take him to turn out Now is the Winter of Our Discontent Made Glorious Summer by this Son of York?

I once actually calculated this out and quickly determined that it would take more time than the kosmos has existed for our chimp or indeed a whole army of chimps to get even halfway through that first line. 

I like to use this popular thought problem to test my philosophy students.  Could chimpanzees produce a Shakespeare play by random typing?  The answer is that not only could they do so but they would inevitably do so, given enough resources including time.  The problem is that the requirements are so vast as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible.  She who agrees with what I have just said is capable of thinking logically.  He who refuses to acknowledge even the contingent possibility is not. 

One might say that Darwin explained how it was not only possible but actual that that random typing produced chimpanzees.  What you need is some means of saving the good letters.  If every good letter survives and every bad letter perishes, then every twenty six strokes will get you one letter closer to My Kingdom for a Horse! 

Darwin can explain how you get from the simplest replicating organisms to certified public accountants because replicating organisms, by definition, have a means of saving and compiling the good letters in the DNA (or RNA) script.  But how do you get from inorganic chemistry to those UR organisms? 

Physicist Jeremy England has an intriguing guess.  His work is discussed in “How do you say “life” in Physics” by Alison Eck in Nautilus.  England addresses the problem that life presents to physicists. 

To the physicist steeped in statistical mechanics, life can, in this sense, appear miraculous. The second law of thermodynamics demands that for a closed system—like a gas in a box, or the universe as a whole—disorder must increase over time. Snow melts into a puddle, but a puddle does not (on its own) spontaneously take the shape of a snowflake. Were you to see a puddle do this, you’d assume you were watching a movie in reverse, as if time were moving backward. The second law imposes an irreversibility on the behavior of large groups of particles, allowing us to play with words like “past,” “present,” and “future.”


The arrow of time points in the direction of disorder. The arrow of life, however, points the opposite way. From a simple, dull seed grows an intricately structured flower, and from the lifeless Earth, forests and jungles. How is it that the rules governing those atoms we call “life” could be so drastically different from those that govern the rest of the atoms in the universe?

England’s guess is that the solution turns on irreversible shifts in states of atoms.  Here is my version, which mixes the metaphors in the Nautilus articles.  Someone jumping a fence with a pogo can jump back, given that she has enough energy to do so.  That’s a reversible change in state.  Someone being shot out of a canon cannot return.  His flight is irreversible. 

How does this work at the atomic level? 

A group of atoms could take a burst of external energy and use it to transform itself into a new configuration—jumping the fence, so to speak. If the atoms dissipate the energy while they transform, the change could be irreversible. They could always use the next burst of energy that comes along to transition back, and often they will. But sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll use that next burst to transition into yet another new state, dissipating their energy once again, transforming themselves step by step. In this way, dissipation doesn’t ensure irreversibility, but irreversibility requires dissipation.

Now, if I understand the argument, a shift in a configuration of atoms that dissipates the energy required to effect it is a means of saving information.  If the configuration acquires more energy and then jumps to yet another new configuration, then information is in effect compiled.  The third configuration has a history.  To really understand what it is, you would have to know the steps that led up to it.  To the extent that that is true, the history involves the compiling of information.  The gaggle of atoms is saving the good letters. 

This is a very long way from explaining how genuine organisms emerge out of the inorganic soup.  It doesn’t give us any idea of the chimpanzee typing odds.  It does give us an idea of how the simplest mechanics might have produced a selection pressure that tilted inorganic processes towards the emergence of life. 

The origin of life is one of the major mysteries.  The fact that life did emerge on planet Earth tells us that inorganic nature contained within it the seeds of life.  I like that idea.  England may be onto an important clue as to where those seeds lay and how they germinated.  

Late Night Thoughts on Being

We live at a moment of embarrassing riches.  I won’t try to catalog our blessings, but I will point out one particular blessing.  Someone who wants to think and knows how can find a lot of new ways to think about interesting things, just a few key strokes away.  Three online journals deliver bite sized brilliance for free: Aeon, This View of Life, and Nautilus.  All three feature consistently provocative, thoughtful, well written, articles that are easily accessible to anyone well-informed enough to be interested. 

I have been feasting on the third tonight.  Chip Rowe lists the “Top 10 Design Flaws in the Human Body.”  These design flaws count, in my view, as some of the strongest pieces of evidence for human evolution.  Take number one, for example.  The human spine, with its double curve, puts a ridiculous amount of stress on the lower back.  My beagle’s spine, by contrast, seems perfectly engineered: a curve that distributes weight evenly between two sets of limbs.  Of course, that was the cost of freeing our forelimbs to do such tasks as checking our Facebook pages.  Rowe’s opening sentences express what is marvelous about these new journals.

The Greeks were obsessed with the mathematically perfect body. But unfortunately for anyone chasing that ideal, we were designed not by Pygmalion, the mythical sculptor who carved a flawless woman, but by MacGyver. 

Yes.  The sculptor begins with a hunk of material but designs from scratch.  MacGyver has to work with what he has and can exploit but is limited by the design already present in whatever he can pull out of the crashed plane.  Like MacGyver, natural selection must rig solutions to present problems.  If you wanted to design a bipedal spine from scratch, maybe you could get perfection.  If you have to start with a quadruped and raise it off the ground, then compromises are inevitable. 

On a level closer to the metaphysical marrow, Gregory Laughlin asks “Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?” 

William S. Burroughs, in his novel The Ticket That Exploded, imagined that beneath a planetary surface, lies “a vast mineral consciousness near absolute zero thinking in slow formations of crystal.” 

As it happens, I have been reading William S. Burroughs lately‑his letters and his novels Naked Lunch (like Moby Dick, an almost impossible read) and Junky (so good you won’t need heroin).  Laughlin thinks Burroughs is onto something.  Consider the speed of thought. 

The speed of neural transmissions is about 300 kilometers per hour, implying that the signal crossing time in a human brain is about 1 millisecond. A human lifetime, then, comprises 2 trillion message-crossing times (and each crossing time is effectively amplified by rich, massively parallelized computational structuring). If both our brains and our neurons were 10 times bigger, and our lifespans and neural signaling speeds were unchanged, we’d have 10 times fewer thoughts during our lifetimes. 

This explains what happened to the Amazing Colossal Man. 

If our brains grew enormously to say, the size of our solar system, and featured speed-of-light signaling, the same number of message crossings would require more than the entire current age of the universe, leaving no time for evolution to work its course.

Maybe our brain size, like Baby Bear’s porridge, is just right: bigger than a chimp but small enough to efficiently cohere. 

It may be that human brains specifically and living organisms generally must occupy a particular niche in the scale of physics.  Allison Eck puts the general point in “How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?”

The arrow of time points in the direction of disorder. The arrow of life, however, points the opposite way. From a simple, dull seed grows an intricately structured flower, and from the lifeless Earth, forests and jungles. How is it that the rules governing those atoms we call “life” could be so drastically different from those that govern the rest of the atoms in the universe?

In 1944, physicist Erwin Schrödinger tackled this question in a little book called What is Life?. He recognized that living organisms, unlike a gas in a box, are open systems. That is, they admit the transfer of energy between themselves and a larger environment. Even as life maintains its internal order, its loss of heat to the environment allows the universe to experience an overall increase in entropy (or disorder) in accordance with the second law.

I was insufficiently amazed by Erwin Schrödinger’s book when first I read it many years ago. 

Schrödinger pointed to a second mystery. The mechanism that gives rise to the arrow of time, he said, cannot be the same mechanism that gives rise to the arrow of life. Time’s arrow arises from the statistics of large numbers—when you have enough atoms milling about, there are simply so many more disordered configurations than ordered ones that the chance of their stumbling into a more ordered state is nil. But when it comes to life, order and irreversibility must reign even at the microscopic scale, with far fewer atoms in play. At this scale, atoms don’t come in large enough numbers for their statistics to yield regularities like the second law. A nucleotide—the building block of RNA and DNA, the basic components of life—is, for example, made of just 30 atoms. And yet, Schrödinger noted, genetic codes hold up impossibly well, sometimes over millions of generations, “with a durability or permanence that borders upon the miraculous.”

Living organisms are dependent upon physical processes that are small enough that they are not subject to the laws of averages.  This sequestering from larger physical processes is the first sequestering.  Before life could begin, there had to be a small space for it to begin.  Once it does begin, it sequesters itself in successively more effective ways.

But what can account for the “arrow of life”, that is, the direction of organic processes towards greater order (less entropy)?  Well, I guess I’ll blog on that tomorrow.