Entropy in Biological Processes?

Actually the early universe was in a very low state of entropy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28arrow_of_time%29

It may just be a case of misunderstanding. Entropy has units of energy/temperature and has to be calculated as it cannot be observed. The SI units are Joules/Kelvin and I do not know the value of entropy shortly after the big bang.

When we speak of entropy we use words like 'randomness and disorder' albeit these words can be used in different ways for different definitions.

For example, if someone were able to observe what the universe looked like shortly after the big bang, someone may say "look at all the randomness and disorder, this place must be full of entropy". But as has already been stated, Entropy cannot be observed, it must be calculated.

So I think since the same words are used in explaining entropy and the order of the initial universe, some may think they are/were the same thing when in fact they are not.

I could use words like 'randomness and disorder' to describe how winning lottery numbers are selected but I doubt it has much to do with Entropy.

To talk about how perceived order has emerged from total chaos one should think about ideas such as Time, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Creationism and Ancient Aliens.

I admit I do not understand entropy in a deep fashion,so perhaps you can help me

understand how order arises from randomness and disorder in a system,and how

"perceived" disorder is different from "real" disorder.

Are not all actions a product of previous actions;"For every action there is an equal

and opposite reaction",thus there need only be one initial reaction from which all

others resulted(the big bang),that in fact all actions are really reactions?

Sorry I don't have any good information to share on the topic, my understanding of entropy has already been shared and I'm tapped out on the subject.

I also don't know the difference between real and perceived disorder. I do not know what disorder really is or who would define it, how do we know. We are like fish in a lake that do not even know they are in the water.

Since there is some entropy 'created' with every reaction, and it cannot be observed: maybe that is what all the Dark Matter of the universe is that they keep finding everywhere they look. So it follows that if the Universe is becoming more orderly all the time then more entropy is being created thus more dark matter so when the universe is perfect it will be gone.

Here is a humorous take on dark matter.

I have discussed "Dark Suckers" before:

Light bulbs are really dark suckers,instead of light emitters.

They suck the dark out of the area.

You can even see residual dark at the ends of fluorescent tubes.

When they can no longer suck out the dark,it accumulates at the ends of the tubes.

If you trace the wiring back to the power plant, you will see all of the dark being

emitted via smokestacks.

Stars also suck light from the surroundings,and emit it as dark matter,and dark energy.

Dark matter is really just condensed dark energy (DE=-MC2).

Every galaxy has dark matter at it's center,a result of an accumulation of dark

energy.

The universe is expanding because the dark matter is atrophying into a less energetic

form:Dark energy.

GA! Exactly! Perspective of the observer is everything!

Since every decision and opinion we humans come up with depends on how we perceive audible, visual, and sensory experiences whether as subjective and/or objective, then all theory presented must be tainted in some way by the human agenda, whims, and desires of the presenter/writer. (Tailored outcome.)

If everything in the Universe was determined by random then; Why do we have and are bound the Laws of Physics? Who/What created them? (Or are they changing and we are not aware of the changes?) Who/What keeps these powerful laws from changing or is making them change? If it were all random, wouldn't these laws be in constant evolutionary change?

And why would any organism with the ability to choose their evolutionary path arbitrarily decide to be at the bottom of the food chain instead of at the top?

I see that recently there is a significant number of "those in the know" stating that they believe the "big bang" theory is not correct and instead are pushing: " the universe that is always was therefore infinite".

Me thinks anyone can postulate a theory nowadays and publish it without suffering any consequences.

Me? My theory?

I think no human being alive has progressed mentally to the point that they/we can truly understand even 1% of what really has gone on in the past nor what is happening everyday in our world much less in the universe.

And for anyone to predict the future with any semblance of accuracy?

We are just now scratching the surface of understanding our world and our relationship with it and the impact we are having on it.

Except that we know that light is actually emitted, as light can exert pressure on a surface in vacuo, causing it to move. I am sorry to blow up your pet theory. By the way, what did you name it? Bob?

As I said,it was a humorous take on light.

I call it the TON theory.

The "Theory Of Nothing"

When the Big Bang happened it was not total randomness that emerged, but an unbalanced matter-antimater situation that resulted in unbalanced distribution of matter and energy....this imbalance is what drives creation of galaxies, planets, stars and ultimately human life...the imbalance in forces has caused an anomaly in the perfection of total randomness that has created the universe...entropy as I understand it is the conversion of energy to matter, from the undefined to the defined...Energy from a higher dimensional plane of existence to a lower dimension, the one we occupy...So we might say the entropy in biological processes is the conversion of energy, the sun, to matter, plants...simply put...

I'm feeling so small now.

I need to go shoot something.

Can someone explain entropy in biological processes
Getting old then die.

Sure,the biological object decays eventually,but it was more organized from chaos previously.

There has to be something,some unidentified force that organises random molecules into an orderly system to produce a biological mechanism.

A "life force" ,for want of a better term.

Has anyone ever enclosed a dying animal within a spherical coil and tried to detect an

energy release at the time of death of the animal?

Perhaps it is non magnetic in nature,and cannot be measured conventionally,like dark matter or energy.

Only the effects can be measured.

Just curious.

Has anyone ever enclosed a dying animal within a spherical coil and tried to detect an

energy release at the time of death of the animal?

I will try it with a lawyer.

The problem with that is:

Lawyers never die,they just lose their appeal.

I dunno, but if you build the coil just right, it might cut off the lawyer's air just long enough to overrule his objections.

Has anyone ever enclosed a dying animal within a spherical coil and tried to detect an

energy release at the time of death of the animal?

An equivalent experiment by Dr Duncan Macdougall of Massachusetts in 1901 determined that the weight of the soul leaving the body was three-fourths of an ounce.

On that basis the soul would have mass.

That was a very flawed experiment and I don't think it ever withstood peer review.

Of the six patients tested only the results of one patient was used to support his hypothesis because the data from the other five were deemed not to support his hypothesis.

Had that physician been born 100 years later he would have been an excellent Global Warming Scientist. ;-)

Quite so. My tongue was so far wedged in my cheek that I lost my balance.

Look up telomeres, then you will be even more impressed, or depressed. When the telemeres wear down to a frazzle, then your cells stop reproducing themselves.

Peter W. Atkins's "The Second Law" may be helpful. IIRC, it was one volume in the Life Magazine Library of Science around 1970.

In short, increasing order in part of a system is paid for by greater disorder elsewhere in the system. Also, the earth is not a closed energy system; it receives energy from the sun.

I understand that part,like a refrigerator for instance,but the components of a

regrigerator were put together by a biological mechanism that originated from random

interactions of atoms and molecules. It is not a biological,natural occuring mechanism.

My basic question was how do random molecules assemble into a living biological

organism,in effect,order from disorder.

Where does the sun get it's energy?

Are not molecules of hydrogen becoming ordered instead of scattered in it's core?

Sure,they fuse into denser elements, and emit energy in the process,but at first,they

were diffused as a gas.

Is the universe an open or closed system?

I can talk about the first part. It sounds like you are asking how evolution can produce more and more complex organisms from less complex ones, and how the process got started in the first place.

You already understand that energy is required for living things to live and reproduce. If you have a simple system, it doesn't take anything remarkable to evolve into a complex one. All it takes is to have mistakes in the reproduction system. LOTS of mistakes.

There are three kinds of mistakes.

1. Some will harm the reproduction. There will likely be a lot of these.

2. Some will have no effect. There will likely be a lot of these too.

3. Some will improve the reproduction. There are likely to be very, very, (very, very?) few of these, but it does not take many to change a system. (How many decimal points of probability does a "very" add?)

Mistakes in category 1 will be less likely to reproduce. They are likely to be removed from the system because they don't reproduce very well, maybe not at all. Mistakes in categories 2 and 3 are what is left. Over long periods of time, the category 3 mistakes are likely to increase over the category 2 mistakes, because they reproduce better, until there is nothing left except them.

That is simply the process of natural selection. You can demonstrate it in your own kitchen using bacteria and hand sanitizer.

The harder question is how did it start to begin with, and maybe that is what you are really asking. We already know that on primordial earth the atmosphere of high methane and CO2 and no oxygen created lots of organic compounds using energy from UV light, lightning, volcanic vents, etc. Some of those compounds were fairly complex. Some of them were the compounds found in nucleic acids. Somehow these compounds came together and formed the first molecule that was able to reproduce itself. (You may cite Divine Intervention here, but that would be difficult to prove.) There was a very cool experiment recently that showed that likely the first molecule to reproduce was a single stranded RNA strand, the direct ancestor of ribosomes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150107101405.htm

Apparently DNA came later, as a method of storing the sequences that the RNA consisted of.

If that RNA molecule was not the ancestor of modern DNA, then it would be difficult to explain how remnants of all the genes needed for performing all the functions of reproducing itself are found in modern ribosomes, but not in a functional or active form.

There is more to life than chemical mixtures.

An animal is alive one second,and dead the next.

Chemically,they are the same,yet one lives,one does not.

The "life force" is present or absent.

This is the difference between life and death,a presently non measurable energy form

that takes chemical combinations to the next level.

Perhaps the life force will one day yield to scientific scrutiny,by meanwhile, it is

The Great Mystery.

Much like a software program with a file that has been corrupted...or an engine with a fouled spark plug...we are, all of us, one fouled spark plug away from death....

Perhaps you could view (sub)atomic particles as asymmetrical pop beads with "barbed" projections that are easier to insert than to part. Random interaction would then result in joinings that are stable; i.e., a random process with a non-random result.

It is actually called negative-entropy and it refers to a biological system and not the global entropy of the universe, which is always increasing.

Negative-entropy is explained by the process of autopoiesis or the ability for a system to self-repair and reproduce - thus negative entropy.

Any living cellular creature is autopoietic in its living form, but on a grand scale the conservation of energy is still observed in the universe and entropy increases.

Buckminster Fuller described living organisms as a self-interfering knot, but they also must meet the requirement of autopoiesis, too.

I think Rixter has the closest to what I understand as entropy in biology. But first here is what google gave as the definition of entropy:
a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
I am not sure Entropy is the definition you are thinking of, I think you are meaning the application of the Laws of Thermodynamics where energy moves from an area of high potential to an area of low potential.

As Rixter stated, biology is used to convert the energy of the sun and environment from one level to a lower level. I saw a documentary on the origin of life that proposed living organisms resulted by being the most efficient method of moving energy to lower potential. But then, as life evolved a trend to replicate and developed a tendency to reproduce using fewer resources we have early biological life like bacteria and microscopic organisms that compete for resources. That competitive drive eventually grew into larger and more complex organisms like lawyers.

Drew K

Rixter is correct, but somewhat incomplete. The Sun is not the only source of energy for the biological process. Thermal vents, as one example, also supply energy in areas where the Sun is not available. There are also chemical reactions that supply energy, too. ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) is the carrier for energy and energy does not have to originate from solar power for that mechanism to work.

However, the general premise is that biology will utilize external forms of energy, convert it into what it needs to function, and that the conservation of energy is always observed in the universe.

That means that while there is a localized change in the state of entropy, on a global scale it is still increasing.

The only order I have ever observed happening is when an engineer or someone with some desire and intelligence has created it. And, I have watched a lot of disorder being created by grandkids. I have no evidence that the universe or anything else has ever become ordered or disordered by itself.

Yes, Prof Brian Cox can and has, explained it for you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonders_of_Life_%28TV_series%29

He is a physicist who wondered about entropy and biology and went further and asked about how physics works in biology. From his curiosity came the BBC series.

I hope you can get DVD's of the series in Never The Same Color so you can see it. Or do you have PAL?

Jim

My understanding of entropy is that a difference in temperature,or energy, is required to produce work.

Nature hates a difference in anything,and attempts to create equilibrium.

A mountain will eventually erode to level,valleys will fill up,as nature seeks a perfect sphere.

Hot objects will dissipate heat and cool to the same temperature as the ambient,and likewise cold objects will absorb heat to acquire equilibrium.

It seems that everything is headed for a state of equilibrium,where there will be no differential left to perform any work;

Not necessarily absolute zero,but a state of balance where there can be no further entropy.

It seems to me that life forms are a temporary diversion of the process.

My question is: Why?

Nature is an expert in efficiency,so why take a circuitous path,instead of the path of least resistance?

"It seems to me that life forms are a temporary diversion of the process. My question is: Why?"

There is no scientific explanation for your question as it lies outside the realm of science.

You might want to explore the field of ontology, which is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of being.

Biological organisms seem to be the equivalent of water running uphill, to me at least.

There would have to be an heretofore undiscovered principle or force involved.

Undiscovered does not mean non-existent.

Is that a question for philosophers or physicists?

You could say that about stars, too.

There are many strange things in the universe:

A star has negative specific heat;remove energy,it becomes hotter.

A flame has all the criteria to be classified as living;

It consumes oxygen,emits carbon dioxide,can reproduce itself,and as some fire fighters can attest,sometimes displays intelligence with escape tactics.

1. How do you remove energy from a star?

No way does a star violate the conservation of energy.

2. No. Life is another matter. Fire does not reproduce itself, it simply consumes fuel as part of a chemical reaction.

From wikipedia:

According to the virial theorem, for a self-gravitating body like a star or an interstellar gas cloud, the average potential energy UPot and the average kinetic energy UKin are locked together in the relation

The total energy U (= UPot + UKin) therefore obeysIf the system loses energy, for example by radiating energy away into space, the average kinetic energy actually increases. If a temperature is defined by the average kinetic energy, then the system therefore can be said to have a negative heat capacity.[13]A more extreme version of this occurs with black holes. According to black hole thermodynamics, the more mass and energy a black hole absorbs, the colder it becomes. In contrast, if it is a net emitter of energy, through Hawking radiation, it will become hotter and hotter until it boils away.

Fire is not truly alive,but fire has most of the 6 characterists of a life form.

A living organism is simply a chemical process in the most basic of terms.

So where is the chemical difference between 2 identical organisms,one dead and the other alive?

Let me guide you back to the physics of the real world. We have a hot star (potential energy) in motion (kinetic energy). So far it is correct to say that we have a system with energy, the sum of which is made up of the potential and kinetic components. That is entirely correct when we have no other system to consider.

But we do have another system to consider. Right next door we have another star, moving somewhat more slowly and rather cooler. Radiation from the first star warms the second star. They have not collided, so the individual kinetic energies remain the same. Nevertheless, energy has been transferred from one to the other.

Considering the two stars as a single system now, it continues to be true that the sum of their potential and kinetic energies remains the same. Individually, however, one has lost potential energy to the other, and it is nonsense to suggest that it necessarily gains kinetic energy as a result.

Phph001 answered your first question perfectly.

As to the other, the dead are not autopoietic.

Of course the dead organism cannot maintain or reproduce itself,but what is the

CHEMICAL difference between the two at the instant of death,or an instant thereafter?

The biological,chemical processes cease,and eventually the organism will decay,but at

the instant of transition,what changes?What chemical process flips the "OFF" switch?

The answer is that death is not to be compared with the flipping of a switch, more with the adjustment of a volume control. Each individual cell's activity is dependent on the provision of oxygen. As the supply fails, the cell switches from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism if it can (not all cells can). The lactic acid level rises, and eventually the metabolic processes fail, one by one. There may be an identifiable point at which death becomes inevitable, but there is no single moment of death.

On a cellular level you can look up apoptosis.

The long and short of it is the metabolic process stops, no more ATP transport takes place, and no more transport of proteins in and out of the cell wall. Eventually the cell undergoes lysis and breaks down.

On a human or animal scale death is a complex definition, as what is defined as clinical death does not mean all cellular activity stops. It takes time for that to happen and it happens in stages. Gut bacteria is pretty much the last to go and that can takes days or a week to finally stop.

So it all depends on what you define as the instant of death. It is easier and more meaningful to define it as the death of a cell, which can be pretty much defined as outlined in my second paragraph.

However, death is rarely instant (unless you are at ground zero of a nuclear explosion), it is a chain of events that leads from one state (living) to another (dead).

This sounds like some backhanded way of arguing religion.

Are you confusing life with consciousness? Life can come and go, some organisms meet the definition of death often in their cycles of life. There are animals that freeze or dry out but recover when thawed or re-hydrated. Consciousness also comes and goes, sleep, coma, concussions and drug induced altered states.

Drew K

I am talking about life,not consciousness,not religion,just scientific data.

For instance a living organism,comprised of a single cell,compared to an identical cell

that died an instant before.What are the chemical differences between the two

states?I understand that an organism can slow down metabolism in times of

stress,but there comes a time when the stress is too great for recovery.

For instance,the frogs that endure winter freezing and thaw and revive in the spring,

have not survived when placed in liquid nitrogen and thawed.

If there is no chemical difference,then what is the difference?

What makes the metabolism stop entirely,at some critical point between 32F and

- 321F.

Has anyone tried bringing the temperature down in very small steps to isolate the

point of no return,and what exactly occurs at that point?

That is the essence of my question.

You are trying to apply a dichotomous variable to a sliding scale with no clear-cut boundaries. Doesn't work.

AAAAAHHHHHH You've been watching the Princess Bride movie. So that's where you get your science. Dead, but only partly dead.

The essence of your question has an answer with too many areas of gray for your liking.

It's not like a transistor switch where life is alive at one threshold and dead at the other side of that threshold.

Even a transistor does not switch at exactly the same voltage potential every time, there is some variance.

Cell biology is much more complex than a transistor and variation will give you different results each time. It's like predicting rain. You can't be absolutely certain, but you can express it in the realm of probability and how narrow or wide that distribution curve is.

My question is not exactly when, but what, happens at the transisiton of "live" or "dead".

You can read my earlier posts, but it isn't just a single event, but a series of cascading events that leads to cell failure.

Also, there are many roads to cell death, so there is no single mechanism that is responsible.

Again, I already covered that, but keep in mind that even a single cell is an amazingly complex system and just like any complex system there a huge number of failure points and multiple failure points that can lead to cell death.

Cell death is more of a process than a simple state change. Where you choose to draw the line between living and dead is arbitrary and depends on your definition.

Your question is trying to pin down some discrete point along that process that qualifies as dead and that point is ambiguous until you define what dead actually means.

Dead is a moveable goalpost and depends on the context that it is used. For example, people have arrested and stopped breathing, sometimes for extended periods and have been necessitated. Were they dead? Not really as they recovered. Yet, a condemned prisoner or someone in hospice are considered dead when the heart stops and a doctor signs a paper form.

Notice that the goalpost for death in the terms of humans has steadily been pushed back further and further with advances in science, making the definition even more fleeting.

Nothing happens. It is a state of fact. Like I said, many cells can be brought back through repair and many cannot. What is your definition of life or live vs dead?

To me something is dead when it can no longer be made to live. A cell dies when it cannot function. On a cellular level the DNA or RNA or whatever chemical instructions cannot function to instruct the cell to function.

What happens? It stops functioning.

Drew K

You're discounting the forces that exist...Gravity creates stars that become creators of all forms of matter through forces...

Before matter was created,what did gravity act upon?

Energy.

Do you not have any idea how silly that statement is????

Entropy is also the reason we cannot create perpetual motion machines. Entropy is the Universes' cut for the cost of doing the business of reactions. It is unrecoverable lost energy every time a reaction transaction takes place. It is like the IRS taking taxes out of your check before you even get it. Not too much we can do about it. It happens.

So, all the junk emails and scams are really just the Universe's cut for using the internet?

That leads to the idea that maybe it should be called entropynet instead.

It's seems to be that the biological organization was a coping up or adaptation to entropy. Organism optimize in anyways it can to deliver its maximum potential.

Life thrives against all odds and darkness can not find the mystery of it.

In statistical view, by random independent probability - there is a very thin(nano small) probability Life came to existence. Considering the physical and chemical variables involved thereof. Odds are more than a chance in 6/49 lotto. But Wallah!!! It burst in existence.

Entropy is a thermodynamic term for the ratio of heat to temperature in a process, basically has the units of heat (energy) per degree (of whatever temperature scale), and is similar in this way to heat capacity. The initial entropy in the universe was exceptionally low, since the first "instant" of the Big Bang, the temperature was not millions, but probably hundreds of billions of degrees K. The amount of matter was very low, so the actual amount of heat required to change the temperature was quite low. Now we are much nearer the "heat death" of the universe than at that time.

Entropy in biological processes is seen in this way: ΔG = ΔH - TΔS (since virtually all biological processes are near as isothermal as we can find in the real world). This is the Gibbs Free Energy isotherm. Most biological processes are also somewhat electrochemical in nature (electrons being the ultimate reagent), thusly, ΔG = -nFE (where F is the Faraday constant relating coulombs to chemical moles/equivalents, and E is the electrode potential of said biochemical reaction at the temperature and activity conditions extant. What this tells me is that biological entities must utilize free energy (positive electrochemical potential) to produce intermediates that go on to produce things like protein, bone, etc. This is at the expense of increasing the net entropy in the surrounding environment, although "order" increases within the organism. Organisms are basically like small businesses. Inputs and outputs are required, and neither are closed systems. Does that help you understand better?

It will be thousands more years before we can evolve past biology, and survive indefinitely as a dis-embodied intelligence (unless we do in fact have eternal souls that live on after our death). Clearly, when an organism ceases to exist (is not alive), then there is a considerable general increase in entropy. But even this is the exploitation of another whole set of organisms feasting on the dead carcass. Sort of like the welfare system in America.

A local decrease in entropy is not limited to living systems. A puddle of water exhibits a decrease in entropy as higher energy molecules leave the liquid as vapor, leaving the liquid at a lower temperature than the surrounding environment.

The "drinking bird" toy utilizes this decrease in entropy to power a "heat engine" made of a volatile liquid that changes state and causes a shift in the center of gravity, causing the bird to bob into the water.

http://www.teachersource.com/product/850/energy?gclid=CP7W6JOphsYCFUs6gQodbX0AsA

Entropy is a very difficult concept to understand. You can measure voltage with a voltmeter, current with an ammeter, power with a power meter, temperature with a thermometer, etc...

Unfortunately, nobody has invented an entropy meter.

That's a good idea. Carnot cycle efficiency may be a kick start for the job of making one.

For pure substance by the way (although only limited) they sort it in tables and figures.

Generally speaking anything physical measuring tool could be considered as entropy meter, so long as a process exist.