> At 15:19 03/02/97 -0600, Ken wrote:
>
> >> I agree with "mutual interaction of the components" leading to a "previously
> >> non-existant order" being perceptible in the "system as a whole". I've just
> >> got reservations about the necessity of the mutation condition.
> >
> >I have reservations about "previously non-existent order": I'd prefer
> >"previously unobserved order" [Never mind that this isn't Quantum
> >Politically Correct].
>
> Well, sorry. But you can't have it. I'm talking about, just prior [if we're
> talking about time as in chronological time here] to DNA appearing on the
> scene, there being less order in the system than there was 1 billion years
> later, when there WAS genetic life. Sorry. It is of course because the Earth
> receives energy from the sun, it's not anti-entropic, but there IS an
> increase in the orderdness of the system. If I said to you "make the world
> less ordered", it'd be more likely to tend towards a soup of chemicals than
> towards a keenly balanced meta-ecosystem. More order!
I *can* have it! You enable an "entropy pump" [mythically DNA, above]
like that, apply it for 1 billion years, and "of course" there will be
"more order" in the system: the "disorder"/entropy that vanished got
converted into heat and radiated into vacuum.
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
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/ Kenneth Boyd
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