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by gukjoon
5691 days ago
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I don't think this is complete nonsense. At the root of all this, he's weirded out by the concept of entropy. Entropy exists, yet the complexity on this infinitesimal speck of dust in the universe is increasing. Why is that? tmsh, I wrote a equally disparaged blog entry a while back that you might be interested in:
http://www.jierenchen.com/2009/10/memory-and-evolution.html |
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Complex configurations have more entropy than simple configurations. Life causes entropy to increase more quickly. You can think of living beings as agents of entropy if you like, but that implies that entropy acts with purpose, which it doesn't.
I remember having an argument at college with someone who argued that the laws of thermodynamics conflicted with the theory of evolution. So asked him what entropy was. He gave a bunch of different layman's definitions, such as comparing it "disorder" or "chaos". I wrote down for him, "S = k log N" and told him that if he doesn't know Boltzmann's equation, he has no business lecturing me on thermodynamics. This person also said that there was no natural process that created information. I wanted to tell him that the laws of thermodynamics, combined with Boltzmann's equation, and used in combination with Shannon's definition of information, imply that the amount of information in a closed system must always increase. Interpreted physically, mutation increases the entropy/information in genetic code.
If you want to know more about entropy, talk to a chemist. Chemists have to know entropy or they can't do their jobs.
As for the linked blog post, the idea of applying theories from evolutionary biology to the study of information is usually attributed to Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene". This is the book that coined the term "meme", and I recommend it.