Entropy and the Biological Connection

Around 1850, physicists Sir. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Rudolf Clausius established both the First Law of Thermodynamics—while the diverse energy forms within a system are interchangeable, the total energy of a closed system is conserved—and the Second Law of Thermodynamics— over time, the energy convertible to work in a closed system irreversibly decreases leading to a state of maximum inert uniformity (heat death). As physicist Niels Bohr observed, “The first principle is a direct result of the mechanical law of conservation of energy, while the second principle, the entropy law, can, following Boltzmann, be derived from the statistical behaviour of a large number of mechanical systems.”^[1] As scientific knowledge of entropy advanced, it became natural for this term to be “applied to a wider field of scientific study” which included biology.[2] Yet, at the time of Darwin, the implications of these physical laws were yet unknown so he continued to advance the theory of uncreated biological life which naturally-evolved over billions of years and is ever-advancing toward perfection.  In 1859, just a scant decade after the laws of thermodynamics were established, Darwin wrote in his seminal work Origin of the Species:

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.[3]

Darwin’s a priori assumption that “Natura non facit saltum (Nature does not take leaps)” forced him to reject all other theories as unintelligible.[4] Yet, within a few decades, the weakness in Darwin’s theory of life’s uniform progress toward perfection was exposed by the implications of the second law of thermodynamics and the increase of entropy. The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was himself a philosophical naturalist, worked to integrate his knowledge of physics with what he believed to be the grand experiment of nature through natural selection. Schrödinger recognized that some 20^th century biologists, following the reasoning of Darwin, continued to ignore the implications of the second law of thermodynamics when applied to biological forms. He noted that biological life was a localized anomaly that only avoided the appearance of decay toward inert equilibrium by metabolizing energy through eating, drinking, and breathing.[5] Given the advancements in both physics and genetics, Schrodinger recognized the failure of Darwin’s theory of “continuous accidental variations” to provide a legitimate mechanism for evolution.[6]

Schrodinger, seeing the fatal flaws in Darwin’s reasoning, looked instead to scientists like Dobzhansky whose 1937 book, Genetics and the Origin of Species, sought to reconcile Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics through the mechanism of random mutation.^[7] This new rescue mechanism was less than a decade old and relied on the observations of Hermann Muller that X-rays could “mutate” the genetic composition of fruit flies. For Schrodinger, Dobzhansky’s mechanism of biological evolution through mutation was a parallel to the physics of quantum jumps.[8]Just as the ill-fated steady state theories of continuous energy transfer in physics (notoriously advanced by Fred Hoyle until his death in 2001) were supplanted by quantum mechanics, both Schrodinger and Dobzhansky reasoned that the old Darwinian system of random variations was replaced by neo-Darwinian (ND) mechanism of genetic mutation (or what is commonly referred to by population genetics today as the Primary Axiom). Mutational advance through natural selection, Dobzhansky theorized, was necessary to counter the increasing homozygosity within each organism:

The loss of some allelomorphs and the increase of the frequency of others will go on in further generations as well, until the population will ultimately become homozygous for one of the allelomorphs, all others being lost…. But as soon as these random variations reach the values q = 0 or q = 1, a certain gene allelomorph is lost from the population genotype. A finite population left to its own devices must, therefore, suffer a progressive decay of its hereditary variability and sooner or later must reach a complete genetic uniformity. This, of course, disregards the occurrence of new mutations.[9]

Recognizing that increasing homozygosity, like entropy, leads to extinction, Dobzhansky hoped to rescue the ND hypothesis through mutation theory as proposed by Fisher. Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selectionfrom the 1930s held that the bell curve was an accurate representation of how mutations were distributed: half beneficial and half deleterious. According to Fisher, the mutation frequency versus the effect on reproductive fitness was evenly split and the net effect on the organism was neutral. This view allowed Neo-Darwinians, like Dobzhansky, to posit that natural selection removed some bad mutations and amplified other positive ones resulting in evolutionary progress. Mutations, Dobzhansky argued, had their greatest impact on heterozygous organisms (an organism that carries two distinct alleles for the same trait) who dominate wild populations but have a competitive disadvantage for survival to the homozygous mutant.[10] Still, the mechanism by which one system could harness the energy to change from one discreet state into another remained a mystery[11] which even Dobzhansky realized presented a “limiting factor” for the Primary Axiom.[12] As Schrodinger observed, the problem of increasing entropy in biological systems could not be overcome:

Every process, event, happening—call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus, a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may say, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death.[13]

Later studies published in the 1970s by Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura would expose Dobzhansky’s “limiting factor” as an impossibility. Kimura’s curve replaced Fisher’s bell shape with one of exponential decay on the negative side of the 0-axis showing accurately that most mutations are overwhelmingly negative or nearly neutral between 0 and -0.001 and no mutations reach the 0 point in this graph because there are assumed to be no absolutely neutral mutations. Kimura introduced a minimally estimated “zone of neutrality” on both the positive and negative end of the spectrum where mutations are so subtle that they could not be selected through any evolutionary process. Of note is that Kimura’s graph showed 0 mutations on the positive side with the implication that these are extremely rare. Consequently, continued biological research has demonstrated that no matter the mechanism invented by ND theorists, the law of entropy has denuded the Primary Axiom of any explanatory power for either the existence or persistence of life.

Recent advances in theoretical physics demonstrate that the attempts by men like Schrodinger to rescue the Primary Axiom using Quantum Mechanics seem to be nothing more than building on foundation of clay.^[14]Additionally, Schrodinger’s quantum leaps cannot overcome the genetic discovery that random mutations consistently destroy information.[15] As Stephen C. Meyer observes, “Since the late 1960s, however, mathematicians and molecular biologists have argued that producing new functional genes (new genetic information) and proteins via a random mutational search is improbable in the extreme.”^[16] Meyer’s assessment is affirmed by non-theist biologist Peter T. Saunders who concluded in 1979 that the Primary Axiom is insufficient to produce population diversity and speciation,[17] and 37 years later finds hope because more scientists are beginning to accept the need for a better explanation for human life.[18] As an alternative to the failed ND Primary Axiom, some scientists have posited the Adam and Eve hypothesis—two humans as the fountainhead of all mankind—which accounts for the observations of genetic entropy and provides a testable, falsifiable and verifiable hypothesis.