Barry Goldman
2001
sow_thistle@yahoo.com
EVIL AND THERMODYNAMICS 19JAN90
I'm a biologist. I think of living creatures, cells, people,
ecosystems, nations, Europe.
People talk about evil, the inherent corruptibility of nature.
Well, I see it this way. You've got patterns. Some, like
crystals, are in static equilibrium. Some, like flames, are in
dynamic equilibrium. Candle is always flowing through the stable
pattern that we call flame. Some, like fog, have no pattern. A
gas is what we call a system that is in 99.999999999999999999999%
of the possible patterns that that system could take. It's the
other .00000000000000001% of the patterns that we find interesting.
It takes a lot of careful work to keep a system in that small range
of patterns. It's so much easier for it to end up in one of the
random gas patterns.
Now, you can beset a gas with all kinds of stupid random
accidents and all that will happen is that you shift it into
another of those 99.9999999999999999% of the patterns that we don't
distinquish as different, so nothing much happens to it. Gasses
don't die.
Crystals are a little more delicate, but you have to hit them
pretty hard or torch the hell out of them to do any damage. Even
if you shatter one, it hasn't realy changed its static pattern
much. Anyway you wouldn't call it death.
A flame is a little more interesting. Flames are pretty
sturdy and can even jump from one food source to another, but a
slight gust of wind and, poof, it's out. Then again they are
easily revived. Is it the same flame? It seems a little like
death to put out a flame.
Now when the systems get more COMPLICATED and maintain
themselves in DYNAMIC EQULIBRIUM (a flame is in dynamic
equilibrium), things start to get scary. If, for instance you have
ever written and run computer programs, you've noticed how a very
minor accidental, random change in even one bit of computer memory
can have what WE could call disasterous effects - sending the
system into a sometimes bizarre, lurching dive from its
.00000000000000000001% of the interesting patterns into chaos and
eventually DEATH, where most things eventually end up anyway.
The more complicated the system, the more bizarre and drawn
out that lurching dive can take. When you have a system as
complicated as a grandmother (an integrated community of
10,000,000,000 cells each as complicated as our finest computers)
and you flip one gene in one cell accidently with a stray
ultraviolet ray, or the wrong virus (there are right viruses),
or a stray dioxin molecule, the system
takes a grotesque trip through that state space, doing things that
don't make SENSE in grandmothers, and finally after a few years
returns to the soil and the air.
The point is, that 99.99999999999999999% of the possible ways
that our local part of the universe can be in don't make sense. To
make sense, parts of the system have to be correlated with each
other, patterns have to match, and that is unlikely. What we take
for granted as the normal way of things here in our life on Earth,
are in fact highly unusual. Studying evolution, the history of
Earth, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, gives us the perspective
of just how unusual our situation is, how delicate it is, how
difficult it is to maintain. The situation requires a
greatfulness, and awe that we are not capable of. I think it is
incredibly rude of us to expect that God has set it all up this way
with the flick of his bick. That this is the normal state of
affairs, that we deserve it, that we should expect it.
Creationists, etc, are apalled at the idea that they are the
product of merely four billion years of random trial and error.
Rather they would like to be the product of six days of work by a
super-powerful being. Work of that nature is CHEAP. It could
probably be snuffed out and reinstated at the drop of a hat, like
a flame. No one goes to the funeral of a flame. I can't imagine
holding more precious work that took six easy days to complete than
work that took four billion years of touch and go balance! Death
and life are necessarily brother and sister. Horror and delicacy
are necessary to define each other. [Is this why fresh innocent young
girls and sensless destructive monsters ALLWAYS go together in so many
stories and movies?]
There are sentiments to the effect that you have to be realy
sick to think that events like the holocaust are merely the results of
accidental lacks of goodness... The belief is, rather, that they
are the results of the work of some EVIL FORCE. But that is the wrong
side of the coin. The horror of the Holocaust is that it took four
thousand years of sustained nurturing FROM accidents to bring the
living Jewish people that far. Or, a more detailed analysis, will
bring us to wonder that all of Europe hasn't strangled itself yet,
the balance between so many different greedy, stupid, and excitable
peoples being so difficult to maintain.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, it is 10 to the 10
to the 26 times easier for the universe to be what we would call a luke
warm glob of random gasses and cold dead star cinders, than for there
to have been a Jewish community of Homo sapiens surviving for four
thousand years at all! And it has taken a hell of alot of hard work in
the way of an Earth engine driven by millions of giga watts of sunlight
to create and sustain that people, and alot of miracles, besides.
It is the nature of things that just the wrong anti-miracle
can send the whole tennuous balance tumbling down.
That possibility, or reality does not move me to postulate an
inherent evil reality lurking around back there, unless you want to
call the second law of thermodynamics evil. It does move me to
great awe that such patterns can appear and be sustained for as
long as they have been.
And this gives us the responsibility to learn how to nurture such
COMPLICATED systems amidst this flux of miracles and accidents. To
learn how to thread our way through the complicated ecosystem of
interactions that is Europe in order to heal her. And not to hide in a
corner and make pacts with simplistic fairy tale characters named God
and Satan.