Structure, Design, Intelligence, and Creativity
Science writers seldom emphasize the connection between entropy, structure, and design. The steam engine is a cleverly designed structure James Watt (Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer, 1736–1819) invented. Heat is a highly disorganized form of energy. If we are out in the woods far from home some cold night we may build a fire to get warm. The fire will not help us to get home unless we have available a fairly complex, intelligently designed structure to convert some of the heat into useful work. For instance, we may be able to get home if we have an automobile. The engine has several cylinders where the mechanism injects fuel and starts fires repeatedly at just the right times to drive the pistons and transmit energy through the crankshaft, transmission, drive shaft, differential, and axles to the wheels. Magic or the random jumbling together of a lot of junkyard parts obviously did not make the car and its engine appear. The automobile’s very existence implies that there are creative designers, inventers, engineers, and machinists who worked together to create it. One designer can recognize the work of another.
There is a strong connection between information, entropy, and structure. Structure is needed to control physical processes to make them efficient and reversible. Anyone who reads through a text on thermodynamics will find frequent references to cylinders and pistons, semi-permeable membranes, valves, tubes, and constant-temperature baths. All such structures are artifacts with human inventors. All were created under the control of minds that processed information intelligently.
One may well wonder if there are natural structures for getting useful work out of heat. We don’t have to look far. Human bodies are heat engines that consume low-entropy forms of material called food, do useful work, use some of the remaining energy to keep warm, and expel heat along with three degraded, high-entropy forms of matter. Breathing ejects carbon dioxide, which is waste material for animals and people but useful to green plants. Certain insects and bacteria use our solid and liquid waste materials. All animals are also heat engines. People and animals rely on plants to manufacture their food.
Plants are a kind of heat engine run in reverse, to make fuel from energy. They take the energy of sunlight and use it to make carbohydrates, food for themselves and for animals. Some of the ingredients of carbohydrates come from soil. In the process of making carbohydrates plants also take in water and carbon dioxide, strip the hydrogen from the water molecules, and discharge the water’s oxygen into the atmosphere. To do this, plants use a complex molecular machine called chlorophyll.
Atmospheric oxygen enables animals to extract energy from food by reconstituting the water and carbon dioxide, molecules that animals then discharge into the atmosphere. A complex molecule called hemoglobin, similar to chlorophyll, carries oxygen in our blood to our cells as they burn food and work. The same hemoglobin removes the carbon dioxide. Many other complex molecules, called enzymes, control the manufacture of proteins. Proteins make up the working structure of our bodies. Long chains of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encode the information for making the molecular machines we find in living organisms. Where is the intelligence that designed these complex structures? Did they just come to be through random processes and the automatic design capabilities of natural selection? Or did some greater intelligence work to create life on Earth?
There is a strong connection between information, entropy, and structure. Structure is needed to control physical processes to make them efficient and reversible. Anyone who reads through a text on thermodynamics will find frequent references to cylinders and pistons, semi-permeable membranes, valves, tubes, and constant-temperature baths. All such structures are artifacts with human inventors. All were created under the control of minds that processed information intelligently.
One may well wonder if there are natural structures for getting useful work out of heat. We don’t have to look far. Human bodies are heat engines that consume low-entropy forms of material called food, do useful work, use some of the remaining energy to keep warm, and expel heat along with three degraded, high-entropy forms of matter. Breathing ejects carbon dioxide, which is waste material for animals and people but useful to green plants. Certain insects and bacteria use our solid and liquid waste materials. All animals are also heat engines. People and animals rely on plants to manufacture their food.
Plants are a kind of heat engine run in reverse, to make fuel from energy. They take the energy of sunlight and use it to make carbohydrates, food for themselves and for animals. Some of the ingredients of carbohydrates come from soil. In the process of making carbohydrates plants also take in water and carbon dioxide, strip the hydrogen from the water molecules, and discharge the water’s oxygen into the atmosphere. To do this, plants use a complex molecular machine called chlorophyll.
Atmospheric oxygen enables animals to extract energy from food by reconstituting the water and carbon dioxide, molecules that animals then discharge into the atmosphere. A complex molecule called hemoglobin, similar to chlorophyll, carries oxygen in our blood to our cells as they burn food and work. The same hemoglobin removes the carbon dioxide. Many other complex molecules, called enzymes, control the manufacture of proteins. Proteins make up the working structure of our bodies. Long chains of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) encode the information for making the molecular machines we find in living organisms. Where is the intelligence that designed these complex structures? Did they just come to be through random processes and the automatic design capabilities of natural selection? Or did some greater intelligence work to create life on Earth?
