Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
People
Sex-Ed Trendsetter
For many of us, sex education consisted of half-truths whispered in the school cafeteria or movies in health class that suggested abstinence and heterosexuality were our only options. In 2009 Tani Ikeda, a new graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) film program, posed the question What would happen if young women took sexual health education into their own hands? Read more>>
The Silver Cloud
In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, media outlets too often portrayed survivors as helpless victims or barbaric looters, not only propagating public fear and panic but also painting a distorted portrait of disaster-stricken areas. When an earthquake devastated Haiti five years later, reporters followed the same narrative thread. Activist and author Rebecca Solnit is telling a different story, a story of strength and resilience. Read more>>
Teacher of the Years
The curriculum for K-12 education looks like a vast encyclopedia of human knowledge, notes Kieran Egan, a professor of educational theory at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University. Unfortunately, the information students learn often fades away after only a few years—even if they manage to do well on tests. He posits that this is a result of an education system that values breadth over depth. In his new bookLearning in Depth, Egan offers a solution, arguing for an ambitious but simple change in curriculum. Read more>>
Intellectual Pollinator
When it comes to developing the technical infrastructure of the 21st century, economists tend to look to upscale R&D labs, high-tech universities, and big-buck venture capitalists. Business professor Anil Gupta has a radically different vision, one he calls G2G, or “grassroots to global.” Read more>>
Free-Range Capitalist
Woody Tasch believes that local, sustainable food is a good investment: in our communities, our land, our health, and, if all goes well, our pocketbooks. Tasch is the founder of the Slow Money Alliance, which aims to get a million Americans to invest 1 percent of their assets in local food systems in the next decade. Read more>>
A Scientist’s Scientist
Every year, U.S. research facilities spend billions on equipment—and dump last year’s models in the landfill. Many of the castoffs are perfectly usable, according to Nina Dudnik. “Equipment upgrades are not so much key functionalities as bells and whistles,” she says. Meanwhile, university labs in developing nations are starved for basic equipment. As a student at Harvard University, Dudnik founded Seeding Labs to address the disparity. Read more>>
Conscientious Fashionista
More than 8,000 chemicals were used to make the clothes in your closet. Approximately 1,800 gallons of fresh water were used to manufacture the jeans you’re wearing right now. All-too-commonplace numbers like these make it clear that the fashion industry needs an eco-makeover. Natalia Allen is up for the challenge. Read more>>
War Empathizer
In 2004 Americans gaped in shame and anger at images of nude, hooded prisoners heaped on top of one another, menaced with dogs or forced to masturbate by members of the U.S. armed forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Major media outlets soon settled on an angle for the story: Those responsible for the abuse—keen to exploit Islamic taboos on public nudity and homosexuality—cruelly crafted methods of torture to disgrace conservative Muslims. In her recent book Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler retells this story but boldly revises the conclusion. Read more>>
Judge Advocate
At the beginning of 2010, about 10 percent of all U.S. home owners with a mortgage were at least one month behind on payments, according to statistics compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association, with the percentages far higher in some counties and among subprime mortgage holders. And the number of new foreclosures remains roughly double the rate of five years ago, according to the New York Federal Reserve. All of this serves as a backdrop to a successful foreclosure diversion program launched in 2008 and led by Annette Rizzo, a judge in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas. Read more>>
The Virtual Patron
Creative artists typically have just three methods for funding projects: They can attempt to infiltrate the marketplace through gatekeepers like galleries, publishers, or recording labels; they can appeal to nonprofits and foundations that superimpose their own agendas on artistic goals; or they can wait tables. With Kickstarter, Perry Chen envisions a fourth paradigm. The idea is simple: Artists pitch their idea with a video on the Kickstarter website. Read more>>
Local Food Lovers
Excited about the burgeoning local foods movement, Michelle Ajamian and Brandon Jaeger took a close look at the food they ate. To figure out how to build a regional system for staple foods—including storage and transportation—Ajamian and Jaeger established the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative in 2008. This year they opened Shagbark Seed and Mill, a prototype processing facility, at the Appalachian Center for Economic Networks in Athens. Read more>>
The Commoner
Sharing is one of the first things we learn as small children, yet capitalism suggests that we set it aside as a naive notion: It’s every man for himself.Elinor Ostrom is one of the first social scientists to specifically study the things we share—from oceans and forests to roads and money systems—and breathe fresh life into an old term: the commons. Read more>>
Home Health Advocate
Essential Entrepreneur
Sustainability Trainer
Eco–Rabble Rouser
Virally Minded
The Confrontationalist
Dramatic Opportunists
Alex Gibney: The Smartest Guy in the Room
In the eye-popping visual vocabulary of Client 9, for instance, Gibney likens Spitzer, the former New York governor turned sex scandal pariah, to a leopard on the prowl—scary and sympathetic, hungry and vulnerable.
What makes Gibney unique in this era of rampant first-person documentary is that, without his actual presence on screen ingratiating him with the viewer, the director nonetheless establishes an authorial personality as big as Michael Moore’s. His storytelling is uncommonly cinematic among documentary makers, and his themes are fall-of-Rome epic, more anthropological than psychological.
“You can see in my films that I get worked up about abuses of power and authority,” says Gibney. “Most corrupt individuals get away with their crimes by saying ‘trust me’—like the Enron guys, for instance. You act regal and you’re not questioned.”
Questioning the unquestionable has been Gibney’s stock-in-trade for longer than the 10 years he has been directing nonfiction films. His gifts as an interviewer stem not from his tenure at UCLA film school, he says, but from his childhood.
“My mom was a wild character, something of a writer; my dad was a journalist; and my stepdad was a political activist,” he says. “They encouraged me to be curious, to ask tough questions and not to kneel before authority.”
Perhaps on the strength of his past work, including the unusually somber Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side(2007), Gibney persuaded Spitzer to allow himself to be grilled in Client 9 to a degree that the politician has never before experienced, not even under the hot lights of scandalmania.
“It was hard for him to sit for some of those questions about his involvement in prostitution, because it meant having to confront some stuff that I’m not sure he’s ever properly confronted,” Gibney says. “He was reckoning with those questions, though, in a way he couldn’t fully articulate or even understand.”
Believe it or not, Client 9 and Casino Jack, a typically cockeyed look at disgraced überlobbyist Jack Abramoff, constitute less than half of Gibney’s recent and upcoming work. He directed My Trip to Al-Qaeda, which premiered on HBO in September. He shot one chapter (the best one, incidentally) of the bookFreakonomics, newly released to theaters after a run on cable. Nearly completed are Gibney’s feature-length documentary portraits of writer Ken Kesey and bicyclist Lance Armstrong.
“It does become all-consuming sometimes—much to the chagrin of my family,” the filmmaker says. “Sometimes I feel I should be committed.”
Does that mean the documentarian’s life resembles that of Spitzer, a self-described “relentless” prosecutor?
“It does to some extent, yes,” he confesses. “Just don’t tell my wife about the hookers.”
There again is the essence of Gibney: Entertain your audience and you can say almost anything you want.
Extras:
Read a New York Times profile of Alex Gibney; read Gibney’s blog for The Atlantic, where he writes about subjects including politics, human rights, and the arts; and see the trailer for Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.
Julian Assange: The Sunshine Kid
The official response: Just another afternoon of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
It’s likely that the 2007 incident wouldn’t have registered more than a blip in the nightly news except that two of the men killed were a Reuters photographer and his assistant. (The American helicopter crew mistook the camera for a weapon.) Even so, the chilling video footage of the incident would remain classified except for the extraordinary efforts of the website WikiLeaks.
Launched in 2007, WikiLeaks publishes classified documents—like the Apache helicopter video film of the shooting of the Reuters newsmen—that would otherwise never see the light of day. The volume of leaks on the website is overwhelming. Notable among them are Sarah Palin’s hacked e-mail messages, a banned report on assassinations and torture enacted by Kenyan police, and tens of thousands of classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan.
A notorious Australian ex-hacker, Julian Assange is only one of a dozen, mostly anonymous, people who helped set up the site, but he’s become the face of WikiLeaks and a tireless proponent of exposing the ruling class’s dirty secrets. “It is impossible to correct abuses,” Assange told the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2010, “unless we know that they’re going on.”
The rise of WikiLeaks comes at a crucial time, when daily and alternative newspapers—the traditional vehicles for exposing wrongdoing in government and business—are gutting newsrooms, disassembling costly investigative teams, and refocusing on profit. “When I look at the next ten years, investigative reporting is going to die in corporate settings,” Nick Penniman of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund recently toldColumbia Journalism Review.
WikiLeaks represents a ray of sunshine. By placing raw documents in the public domain, the organization not only leaps past the interpretive and gatekeeping roles of investigative reporting but also subverts the power of governments and businesses to censor the paper trail of their actions. (Reuters filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the video that captured the shootings of its newsmen. The request was denied. WikiLeaks never asked for permission in the first place.)
Predictably, the first wave of reaction from U.S. officialdom has been righteous outrage. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who reportedly leaked the video and other documents, has been arrested. Assange leads a semi-clandestine existence, avoiding the United States, where he could conceivably be arrested.
The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian recently blogged about the foolishness of the official response, likening it to music industry attempts to shut down file sharing. “The government has its own versions of WikiLeaks: the Freedom of Information Act,” he writes. “An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible, and that might even allow anonymous whistleblowers within federal agencies to post internal materials, after a process of review and redaction, could be a very good thing—for the public, and for the official keepers of secrets, too.”
Extras:
Despite the roguishly idyllic, anonymous digi-world of government transparency offered by WikiLeaks, Julian Assange is himself a mysterious character—when you piss off international governments, Swiss banks, and touchy religious groups it’s best to keep a low profile. After exposing covered-up injustice on a global scale, Assange has become a globetrotter, working in Kenya and Iceland, Washington, D.C. and his native Australia. Mother Jones’s David Kushner profiled Assange and criticized the tactics of WikiLeaks, enraging the hacktivist enough to call the muckraking magazine a “right-wing reality distortion field.” Regardless, if you want to know when Sarah Palin’s e-mail account is hacked again, follow the WikiLeaksTwitter and Facebook accounts.
Erdős number
To be assigned an Erdős number, an author must co-write a mathematical paper with an author with a finite Erdős number. Paul Erdős is the one person having an Erdős number of zero. For any author other than Erdős, if the lowest Erdős number of all of his coauthors is k, then the author's Erdős number is k + 1.
Erdős wrote around 1,400 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-written. He had 511 direct collaborators; these are the people with Erdős number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdős himself) have an Erdős number of 2 (8,162 people as of 2007), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdős number of 2 (but not with Erdős or anyone with an Erdős number of 1) have an Erdős number of 3, and so forth. A person with no such coauthorship chain connecting to Erdős has an Erdős number of infinity (or an undefined one).
There is room for ambiguity over what constitutes a link between two authors; the Erdős Number Project web site says:
- "(...) Our criterion for inclusion of an edge between vertices u and v is some research collaboration between them resulting in a published work. Any number of additional co-authors is permitted, (...)"
- "(...) Our criterion for inclusion of an edge between vertices u and v is some research collaboration between them resulting in a published work. Any number of additional co-authors is permitted, (...)"
but they do not include non-research publications such as elementary textbooks, joint editorships, obituaries, and the like. The “Erdős number of the second kind” restricts assignment of Erdős numbers to papers with only two collaborators.
The Erdős number was most likely first defined in print by Casper Goffman, an analyst whose own Erdős number is 1. Goffman published his observations about Erdős's prolific collaboration in a 1969 article entitled "And what is your Erdős number?"
See External links for the AMS online calculator of an individual's generalized collaboration distance, including Erdős number.The Erdős number describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.It was created by friends as a humorous tribute to the enormous output of Erdős, one of the most prolific modern writers of mathematical papers, and has become well-known in scientific circles as a tongue-in-cheek measurement of mathematical prominence.
Paul Erdős was an influential and itinerant mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board. He published more papers during his life (at least 1400) than any other mathematician in history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number
Friday, November 12, 2010
Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
-----
Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
-----
I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.
My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.
On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.
Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.
And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.
Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.
The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.
You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.
The good news is that they’re wrong.
The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.
I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.
You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.
Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.
So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.
Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.
I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.
After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.
Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.
That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.
If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.
What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.
Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.
What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.
Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.
The most important is this: do not work.
Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.
Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.
There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.
People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.
Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.
Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.
I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.
So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.
Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.
Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.
In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.
I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.
One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.
The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.
I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.
Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.
Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.
Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.
You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.
Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.
Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.
-Andy Warhol
Self-hypnosis
Philosophy of mind
Dualism and monism are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem. Dualism can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle and the Sankhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. Substance Dualists argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas Property Dualists maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.
Monism is the position that mind and body are not ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th century BC and was later espoused by the 17th century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. Physicalists argue that only the entities postulated by physical theory exist, and that the mind will eventually be explained in terms of these entities as physical theory continues to evolve. Idealists maintain that the mind is all that exists and that the external world is either mental itself, or an illusion created by the mind. Neutral monistsadhere to the position that there is some other, neutral substance, and that both matter and mind are properties of this unknown substance. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, thetype identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.
Consciousness
"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."—Schneider and Velmans, 2007
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Hypnosis
Systems theory
Systems theory, in this context, may be regarded as an extension of Braid's original conceptualization of hypnosis[106][page needed] as involving a process of enhancing or depressing nervous system activity. Systems theory considers the nervous system's organization into interacting subsystems. Hypnotic phenomena thus involve not only increased or decreased activity of particular subsystems, but also their interaction. A central phenomenon in this regard is that of feedback loops, which suggest a mechanism for creating hypnotic phenomena.
Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
When we think about the “meaning of life,” we tend to conjure ideas such as love, or self-actualization, or justice, or human progress. It’s an anthropocentric view; try to convince blue-green algae that self-actualization is some sort of virtue. Let’s ask instead why “life,” as a biological concept, actually exists. That is to say: we know that entropy increases as the universe evolves. But why, on the road from the simple and low-entropy early universe to the simple and high-entropy late universe, do we pass through our present era of marvelous complexity and organization, culminating in the intricate chemical reactions we know as life?
Yesterday’s book club post referred to a somewhat-whimsical vision of Maxwell’s Demon as a paradigm for life. The Demon takes in free energy and uses it to maintain a separation between hot and cold sides of a box of gas — a sustained departure from thermal equilibrium. But what if we reversed the story? Instead of thinking that the Demon takes advantage free energy to help advance its nefarious anti-thermodynamic agenda, what if we imagine that the free energy is simply using the Demon — that is, the out-of-equilibrium configurations labeled “life” — for its own pro-thermodynamic purposes?
Energy is conserved, if we put aside some subtleties associated with general relativity. But there’s useful energy, and useless energy. When you burn gasoline in your car engine, the amount of energy doesn’t really change; some of it gets converted into the motion of your car, while some gets dissipated into useless forms such as noise, heat, and exhaust, increasing entropy along the way. That’s why it’s helpful to invent the concept of “free energy” to keep track of how much energy is actually available for doing useful work, like accelerating a car. Roughly speaking, the free energy is the total energy minus entropy times temperature, so free energy is used up as entropy increases.
Because the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy increases, the history of the universe is the story of dissipation of free energy. Energy wants to be converted from useful forms to useless forms. But it might not happen automatically; sometimes a configuration with excess free energy can last a long time before something comes along to nudge it into a higher-entropy form. Gasoline and oxygen are a combustible mixture, but you still need a spark to set the fire.
This is where life comes in, at least according to one view. Apparently (I’m certainly not an expert in this stuff) there are two competing theories that attempt to explain the first steps taken toward life on Earth. One is a “replicator-first” picture, in which the key jump from chemistry to life was taken by a molecule such as RNA that was able to reproduce itself, passing information on to subsequent generations. The competitor is a “metabolism-first” picture, where the important step was a set of interactions that helped release free energy in the atmosphere of the young Earth. You can read some background about these two options in this profile of Mike Russell (pdf), one of the leading advocates of the metabolism-first view.
I was reading a bit about this stuff because I wanted to move beyond the fairly simplistic sketch I presented in my book about the relationship between entropy and life. So I did a little research and found some papers by Eric Smith at the Santa Fe Institute. Smith has taken quite an academic path; his Ph.D. was in string theory, working with Joe Polchinski, and now he applies ideas from complexity to questions as diverse as economics and the origin of life.
On Saturday I was on a long plane ride from LA to Bozeman, Montana, via Denver. So I had pulled out one of Smith’s papers and started to read it. A couple sat down next to me, and the husband said “Oh yes, Eric Smith. I know his work well.” This well-read person turned out to be none other than Mike Russell, featured in the profile above. Here I was trying to learn about entropy and the origin of life, and one of the world’s experts sits down right next to me. (Not completely a coincidence; Russell is at JPL, and we were both headed to give plenary talks at the annual IEEE Aerospace Conference.)
So I explained a little to Mike (now we are buddies) what I was trying to understand, and he immediately said “Ah, that’s easy. The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” (See figure above, taken from one of Eric Smith’s talks.)
That might be something of a colorful exaggeration, but there’s something fascinating and provocative behind the idea. An extremely simplified version of the story is that the Earth was quite a bit hotter in its early days than it is today, and the atmosphere was full of carbon dioxide. At high temperatures that’s a stable situation; but once the Earth cools, it would be energetically favorable for that CO2 to react with hydrogen to make methane (and other hydrocarbons) and water. That is to say, there is a lot of free energy in that CO2, just waiting to be released.
The problem is that there is a chemical barrier to actually releasing the energy. In physicist-speak: the Earth’s atmosphere was caught in a false vacuum. There’s no reaction that takes you directly from CO2 and hydrogen to methane (CH4) and water; you have to go through a series of reactions to get there. And the first steps along the way constitute a potential barrier: they consume energy rather than releasing it. Here’s a plot from one of Russell’s talks of the free energy per carbon atom of various steps along the way; it looks for all the world like a particle physicist’s plot of the potential energy of a field caught in a metastable vacuum. (Different curves represent different environments.)
Here is the bold hypothesis: life is Nature’s way of opening up a chemical channel to release all of that free energy bottled up in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the young Earth. My own understanding gets a little fuzzy at this point, but the basic idea seems intelligible. While there is no simple reaction that takes CO2 directly to hydrocarbons, there are complicated series of reactions that do so. Some sort of membrane (e.g. a cell wall) helps to segregate out the relevant chemicals; various inorganic compounds act as enzymes to speed the reactions along. The reason for the complexity of life, which is low entropy considered all by itself, is that it helps the bigger picture increase in entropy.
In ordinary statistical mechanics, we say that high-entropy configurations are more likely than low-entropy ones because there are simply more of them. But that logic doesn’t quite go through if you can’t get to the high-entropy configurations in any straightforward way. Nevertheless, a sufficiently complicated system can bounce around in configuration space, trying various different possibilities, until it hits on something that looks quite complex and unlikely, but is in fact very useful in helping the system as a whole evolve to a higher-entropy state. That’s life (as it were). It’s not so different from other cases like hurricanes or turbulence where apparent complexity arises in the natural course of events; it’s all about using up that free energy.
Obviously there is a lot missing to this story, and much of it is an absence of complete understanding on my part, although some of it is that we simply don’t know everything about life as yet. For one thing, even if you are a metabolism-first sympathizer, at some point you have to explain the origin of replication and information processing, which plays a crucial role how we think about life. For another, it’s a long road from explaining the origin of life to getting to the present day. It’s true that we know of very primitive organisms whose goal in life seems to be the conversion of CO2 into methane and acetate — methanogens and acetogens, respectively. But animals tend to produce CO2 rather than consume it, so it’s obviously not the whole story.
No surprise, really; whatever the story of life might be, there’s no question it’s a complicated one. But it all comes down to the elementary building blocks of Nature doing their best to fulfill the Second Law.
Ian Stevenson
Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, (October 31, 1918–February 8, 2007) was a Canadianbiochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates theparanormal.
Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation might supplement those of heredity and environment in helping modern medicine to understand aspects of human behavior and development. He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years to investigate 3,000 childhood cases that suggested to him the possibility of past lives. Stevenson saw reincarnation as the survival of the personality after death, although he never suggested a physical process by which a personality might survive death. Stevenson was the author of several books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1974), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997),Reincarnation and Biology (1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).
There has been a mixed reaction to Stevenson's work. Critics have questioned his research methods and conclusions, and his work has been described by some as pseudoscience. Others have, however, stated that his work was conducted with appropriate scientific rigor. Stevenson's research was the subject of Tom Shroder's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999) and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).