Article by David Snoke: Spontaneous Appearance of Life and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Dr. Snoke’s recent article, published in Biocosmos, dives into the important topic of the link between the 2nd law of thermodynamics, information theory, and living systems. He explores the notion of physical law, similar to the 2nd law, that applies to information, and concludes that “there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life.”

It is natural to define information as an extensive physical property similar to heat and entropy. This approach has been used in the physics community for many decades, following the work of Szilard, Landauer, and others.

Information can be defined as the elimination of possibilities. The more possibilities that are eliminated, the more information that is gained.

The Second Law tells us that entropy cannot decrease. Is there an equivalent law for information? Dembski has proposed, as an axiomatic assertion, that information can never spontaneously increase. Can we do better, to create an information principle based on the Second Law?

Living systems are to all intents and purposes equivalent to Maxwell’s demons, in that they are information processors that perform selection processes. We may therefore conclude that there is a fundamental entropy problem with the origin of life.

Article available at Sciendo

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