The New Gay » The Meaning of Life

It's Easy Being Green: The Meaning of Life

1 June 2009, 12:00 pm 3 Comments

This post was submitted by michael

meaning-of-life1

In the comments to my introductory post in this new column, I was asked whether I feel like environmentalism is a moral issue, and what the common and uncommon moral rationale I might have for my personal passion for the planet. Interestingly enough, I do feel that environmentalism is a moral issue, and I hold both common and uncommon rationale for it. The common rationale is that it’s “the right thing to do”. The uncommon rationale is “it’s in accordance with the meaning of life.”

Yes, you read that correctly. I not only implied that I know what the meaning of life is, but that it’s a primary rationale for living a green lifestyle. Instead of leading you down a long and winding road so that you can come up with the same conclusion as me, I’ll just tell you out front here: the meaning of life is to create order out of chaos.

The second law of thermodynamics states that, in a nutshell, that systems in nature tend towards chaos. Ordered systems become disordered, things fall apart. Imagine a wooden bench left out on a porch for years, exposed to the elements. Eventually, all the atoms that had organized into the wood and metal nails let go of one another and spread out into the wind assisted by sun, rain, cold, heat, termites and the like. That’s what happens in nature without life.

Enter in the concept of “life.” All living things are highly organized combinations of things: atoms organized into molecules; molecules into amino acids and fatty acids; those acids into proteins, carbohydrates, etc. And at the core of all life is DNA and RNA, some of the most fascinating and complex structures every discovered. Life, all life, is the creation of order out of chaos.

Now, we life forms are examples of order. We have these strands of DNA in each of our cells conducing a biological symphony, telling which cells to do what when, organizing the components of the food, water and air we take in into complicated structures that sustain our bodies. Simply by living, breathing and eating, we are fulfilling the meaning of life. Granted, when we die, our bodies fall apart, and tend towards chaos, as we would expect. But clever thing this life, it has figured out a way to replicate itself. Bodies produce other bodies. All forms of life know how to make copies of themselves, in one way or another, to perpetuate the order, the organization, the motion away from chaos.

Think about this: nearly all life forms tend to create more order than disorder. It might seem surprising, but it’s not. An oak tree generates thousands of acorns over its lifespan, many of which turn into other oak trees, many of which end up as food for animals who turn those molecules into other, more complicated structures. Eventually the tree dies and tends towards chaos, but over it’s lifespan it’s contributed to the ordering of countless other molecules in the form of other trees and animals who have perpetuated its order. This is what life does: it creates order out of chaos.

Now, think of human life forms. Do we create more order in the world than disorder? We have babies, we make artwork, we build cities, we manufacture iPhones and computers and cars. We make a lot of order in our world, a lot more than other lifeforms ever could. However, we make a lot of disorder while we’re doing it. We create so much waste: fast food wrappers, styrofoam peanuts, plastic grocery bags, discarded steel-belted radials, barges full of garbage floating around the world. We take inert substances from deep within the Earth and convert the energy into motion, disbursing carbon dioxide and other chemicals into the atmosphere.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that human beings are the only species on this planet that creates more chaos than order. If you compared all of the things we make, the order we create, to the mess we make while doing it, I think the chaos would come out ahead. And that’s not even considering that nearly everything we create in our society is disposable. How did we get so out of whack with the natural balance of the universe? And how can we fix it? Good questions to be explored in this column in the future.

In order for us to survive as a species, we need to start living more in concert with the planet, more in sync with the reason we exist. We need more order and less chaos. With any luck, we’ll get there.

3 Comments »

Alex said:

The second law of thermodynamics concerns entropy: not “disorder”, not “chaos”. Entropy as a concept deals with probability and microstates, and is at best vaguely analogous to the colloquial usage of “disorder”.

While you do not explicitly reference back to the second law, your statements concerning the actions of lifeforms on order/disorder following the butchered quotation of the law certainly implies that you see a logical continuation from one to the other. In fact, you come very close to stating that life violates the second law, which, if you didn’t know, is a favourite canard of the anti-evolution creationist crowd. (For a good time, search “thermodynamics” on talkorigins.org.)

You are free to believe whatsoever you wish, but when you attempt to rationalise it with misunderstood science it makes it difficult to take you seriously.

1 June 2009 at 4:30 pm

Jake said:

I’ve been thinking about this post (and the response) for much of the day, even though I probably should have been thinking about class and/or work. But I just couldn’t help myself. This is a topic that I’ve spent quite a lot of time on lately.

My bottom line on the topic is very different from Michael’s and I’d be happy to talk about the models I use and the conclusions I’ve come to… but we’re not really talking about that here.

The inexact articulation of the Second Law is actually not as damning as I think Alex tried to make it seem. Michael’s intention was to illustrate the fact that aspects of human society which most consider separate from the models which we scientists try so hard to describe are no different from any other universal system. I applaud his ability to make that step and recognize that humans follow the same rules as all of our experiments.

If the reader is not interested in thermodynamics, move on to the next paragraph. There are really only one and a half scientific points that need clarification. The first is a common misconception; Michael seems well read enough that he probably left it out for stylistic purposes. But it is worth saying that of course it will “seem” that most organisms generate more order than disorder. It is just easier for us to see it. For example, we don’t (can’t, actually) measure all of the energy generated from a combustion reaction that we calculate should be there. So we generally let all that “wasted” energy escape under the radar and take it for granted.

Sorry, still on thermodynamics. Skip one more if you’re not ready to jump in. The other half-point has to do with Michael’s insightful realization that humans produce (seem to, anyway) more disorder than order. The truth is that in any system the universal entropy will increase. Energy may be conserved, but Joule for Joule, entropy wins.

Now to the actual point(s) of the post. I won’t unpack all of the ideas I’ve generated since reading this morning. This isn’t my blog :). But I’ll say that Michael makes a crucial observation that humans are apparently unique in their appearance of generating more disorder than order. I could go for pages on just that.

The other point is what I believe was Michael’s main idea. Sorry it took so long to get around to! I absolutely agree that it is in accordance with nature’s tendencies (lazy as she is) to streamline and make processes more efficient. To this end, humans are special (not unique, however) in our ability to mentally experiment and “evolve” our adaptations without having to wait for generations of failures to die off.

Unfortunately, millions of years of nature’s tinkering are still better than a few billion brains. The most efficient automobile is still nowhere near the energy efficiency of cellular mitochondria. But we learn fast, and Michael has come to a conclusion that I think most would do well to contemplate:

Humans are animals with the amazing ability to evolve much more rapidly and efficiently than other organisms. It is time we put it to better (read: conscious) use and started thinking about the “human” living system instead of the “individual” one.

Sorry if I missed the point of the post as well, but I won’t have friends like Alex using contextually blind science to hit other people with. We have religion for that. :)

I’m interested to see where you go with this, Michael.

2 June 2009 at 5:43 pm

Anne said:

I’m with Alex on this one. It’s not just that he stated the law wrong, it’s that the entire idea that humans are the only species that create more disorder is based on nothing. Nothing. Baseless. You believe it, and that’s fine; a lot of people believe a lot of things. Just don’t say “science says” because it doesn’t.

8 June 2009 at 2:32 pm

It's Easy Being Green: The Meaning of Life

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