Complexity science is about complex systems. A complex system is a highly nonlinear system, usually comprised of a large number of interacting components, the interactions often leading to structures and properties which cannot always be foreseen or predicted using the methods adopted in conventional, reductionistic, science. Two apples plus two apples is not always just four apples. New, unexpected, properties or phenomena can ‘ emerge’. Life from nonliving origins is one such example of emergence.
Complex systems are dynamical systems. A dynamical system is one which changes or evolves with time. So, evolution is a defining feature of any dynamical system. Biological evolution is a subset of dynamical evolution.
Darwin and Wallace gave us the insight about natural selection and the resultant biological evolution. This must rank as perhaps the biggest game-changer idea to have occurred to any human. The idea was used for explaining, among other things, the underlying link among all life forms. Recently, Pope Francis made a valiant attempt to come to terms with science when he said: ‘God is not... a magician, but the Creator who brought everything to life. . . . Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve’.
Complex systems are usually ‘ open systems', in the thermodynamic sense. What this means is that they are able to exchange energy and/or matter with the surroundings. This, when considered along with the second law of thermodynamics for open systems, explains why order can emerge in a complex system: Entropy can decrease locally, so long as there is an overall lowering of the free energy.
Biological evolution was preceded by chemical evolution.
This prompts me to point out another aspect of evolution, namely nonbiological or chemical evolution. The Pope is accepting biological evolution after life had been created by the Creator. Even Darwin’s book did not deal with how life was created (or got created); it only discussed what happened after life had emerged. The fact is that, as complexity science tells us, biological evolution was preceded by chemical evolution.
Chemical evolution is nothing but dynamical evolution occurring in the domain of chemistry rather than physics. It is about natural selection and survival of the fittest in the world of chemical reactions, leading to the emergence of ever more sophisticated and information-laden molecules. This is how DNA emerged, without the intervention of any Designer. Ever since the Big Bang our universe has been expanding and cooling. This means that gradients of various types have been getting created all the time. And the second law of thermodynamics says that phenomena occur so that some gradient or another may get annulled. This is how atoms emerged.
No miracles there. No Creator needed
Our Earth condensed out of interstellar dust and gas ~4.6 billion years ago, and life emerged ~4 billion years ago. The 0.6 billion years before the appearance of life were the years of chemical evolution on Earth, leading to the gradual appearance of life as an emergent phenomenon. Lightning and UV rays from the Sun broke up the simple hydrogen-rich molecules and the fragments combined into increasingly complex molecules. These dissolved in the oceans and moved around, interacting in various ways. Given enough time even a rare event may occur. One such event was the chance emergence of a molecule that could use the smaller molecules floating around in the organic soup to make crude copies of itself. This was the ancestor of DNA, and the rest is history. The important message here is that with reproduction, mutation, and selective elimination of lest efficient types of molecules, (chemical) evolution was occurring all the time, and is still occurring in the oceans and perhaps elsewhere. This was the mechanism for the emergence of life from nonlife. No miracles there. No Creator needed.
With the further passage of time, molecules with specialized functions got together, resulting in the emergence of the first biological cell. The coming together of single-celled organisms into multi-cellular conglomerates was the next big development, culminating ultimately in the emergence of humans.
I came across an internet meme recently, which said something to the effect that atheism is the belief that ‘there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything, and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense . . . matter of faith . . . ’.
No. Such a definition of atheism is from a person who has a vested interest in ridiculing and demeaning atheism. As I said before, an atheist is one who says that the God hypothesis is unnecessary and therefore superfluous, because it explains nothing and simply shifts the fundamental question to a different fundamental question. The God hypothesis stems from the causality argument: There must a cause for every effect, so there must be a cause (God) for the existence of the universe. But by this logic there must also be a cause for God. The people who oppose atheism say that God is an uncaused God. But if they are willing to accept that, they may as well accept that the universe is an uncaused cause.
Vinod Wadhawan
Is a condensed-matter physicist who is currently researching complexity. He has been active spreading the message of science and the scientific method. He writes a weekly blog post with the label 'Understanding Natural Phenomena', promoting rational thinking. His aim is to emphasize the fact that the origin of life, and of much else, has a rational and natural (rather than supernatural) explanation in terms of the evolution of complexity in Nature. Vinod has written four books: Introduction to Ferroic Materials (2000); Smart Structures: Blurring the Distinction between the Living and the Nonliving (2007); Complexity Science: Tackling the Difficult Questions We Ask about Ourselves and About the Universe (2010); and Latent, Manifest, and Broken Symmetry: A Bottom-up Approach to Symmetry, with Implications for Complex Networks (2011). |
