Salon Embarrasses Itself Yet Again

Salon:

God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified
by Paul Rosen

The article waxes scientistic in an almost poetic paean to a minor scientist and science. The science can be called "crystallization", although it is not; it is referred to as a new thermodynamics, which it also is not. The article iconizes MIT physicist, Jeremy England, who is engaged in what is called "A New Physics Theory of Life", by Quanta magazine. It is neither new, nor a physics of life.

What the theory involves is the fact that, while in open systems entropy exists, it is overwhelmed with the new energy which is injected into the system from external sources. The theory claims three things: first that organization into "order" is possible with the injection of energy; second, that the order will decay in the path of most efficient dissipation of energy; third, that creating replicas of the system is the most efficient process of dissipation of energy. This is what is being referred to as a "theory of life".

But even the bulk of the respondents to the Quanta article are not impressed. Not only did England not invent the concept, but the concept itself is, as one commenter puts it, based on a fallacy. There are numerous predecessors going back at least half a century who have published on this idea, including equations. And the fallacy is this: "... there is no principle that says “entropy should be created as efficiently as possible”."

But there is another, more fundamental issue which is not even addressed. If DNA and RNA and all the associated and necessary proteins for life are somehow crystallized into existence for purposes of "efficient energy dissipation", how is it that these "crystals" contain non-algorithmic, non-compressible, meaningful information which pertains - not to thermodynamics - but at a minimum to all the complexities found in a single cell, including all the functions of metabolism, and the sets of communicators which are necessary for life (code-cogent transmitters, com-channels, code-cogent receivers which act on the transmitted information and feed back both actions and information to the transmitters).

For basic life, cellular metabolism contains dozens of categories of such communicator groups, which use different codes, different channels and perform different but necessary functions to create and maintain life. Even cell death is caused and managed by communicator groups (!) This is basic cellular life science. [Cooper, and Hausman; The Cell, a molecular approach; 6th Ed.; Boston University; Sinauer Assoc. Pubs; 2013; p379, etc.; a textbook for molecular biology of cells]

This is not even considered.

When Scientismists wax teary-eyed and breathless about "new science of the origin of life", one may ask immediately "what issues does this science resolve?" In this case, nothing is resolved beyond what is already known: crystals form when the atoms are reduced from one state of energy to a lower state; the appearance of order is actually the degraded form of atomic existence which requires bonding into lattices in order to maintain atomic character after the loss of energy.

There is a claim of the addition of many bits of information when energy is added to a system. But the energy added is photonic solar energy and/or local heat energy. There is no reason to assume that such energy contains or creates the many codes for metabolism or the creation of a living being, certainly not resulting in the addition of sentience, consciousness or agency to clumps of atoms. The implication is merely an artifact of ideology, not deductive reasoning or scientific discovery.

All Scientism outbursts must be examined under rational, critical analytical thought. That is not available from Salon, and possibly not from Quanta Magazine.