I've heard that before, and it's really quite fascinating. How much of that existed pre-cultivation and how much is due to human tampering, I wonder?

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24 hours with no posts? Jesus, people.

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Exactly.

Sunday OP's on this forum tend to hang around for a bit before anyone picks them up. The sinners are all recuperating from post Ar-kansas hang overs, and the Jesus people are going to church...

...and recuperating from post Ar-kansas hang overs.

In all seriousness, though, Astros, it's a very interesting topic.

To me, it really illustrates the difference between life and all other matter in the Universe. The vast majority of matter in the Universe seems perfectly "content" to merely exist. Life fundamentally "desires" to be more. Life didn't need to rise up out of the oceans, or one day travel to the moon. It's almost like it "wanted" to, even before man was cognizant of that desire.

I know it's a tendency of the way we think to anthropomorphize seemingly mundane processes, but I think we can all agree, regardless of our worldview, that there is definitely something fundamental to the intrinsic properties of life the push it towards expansion. Towards repurposing dead space towards living space. It did this for 3.5 billion years with out even "knowing" what it was doing.

Maybe it's just fortuitous that 10 billions years of dead matter just stumbled across an entirely new, and seemingly purposeful, way of existence.

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I've heard that before, and it's really quite fascinating. How much of that existed pre-cultivation and how much is due to human tampering, I wonder?

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It's a good question. Presumably all the genetics were in place since cultivation has been very recent in evolutionary terms. Humans just selected for certain traits. Dogs are the same of course, but to me at least, the difference between kale and broccoli seems more stark than the difference between a greyhound and a chihuahua.

It's also kind of crazy what corn looked like just a few thousand years ago.

Cultivation is a little off topic from the OP, although it's fair to note that from the plants perspective it's just selection by a different environmental force.

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from the plants perspective

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from the plants perspective

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They are evolving, living organisms. Actually, for anyone who denies speciation, we have examples from botany of new species emerging from hybrids.

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Life doesn't work towards an end, it sets out in all directions and usually fails.

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It's filled every single nook and cranny imaginable of a once dead, molten, rock with itself.

I don't consider that a failure at all.

If we could somehow look at the very first biological molecules and predict their projectory, no one would have predicted they would be as effervescent and pervasive as they are today.

What's truly remarkable is it's strongest asset is it's imperfection relative to most macro systems in the universe. It replicates imperfectly. If it didn't, it probably wouldn't have lasted.

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The pile of dead limbs on the ground dwarfs the tree of life itself 100-fold.

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I just view that as a part of the overall process. A process that has had astounding success given the way the universal deck was stacked against it.

However, this is all getting away from my initial point. You can disagree on what the fundamentally different nature of life actually means, or if it really "means" anything at all. However, you simply can't disagree that life is fundamentally different then anything else in the universe. There is a reason it stands on the other side of a clear dividing line in chemistry.

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Similarly, a population of organisms sends out "tendrils" consisting of mutant individuals. Most fail, but some reach a more favorable state, which survives, which we can then see. It may look like life wants to be complex, but those are just favorable states. It doesn't know or care where it's going.

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Right, but the tendency to do so is, itself, remarkable. It accidentally, randomly, does things to itself that ultimately promote it's existence. All in a Universe that exists on fundamentally different standards of operation that are generally not conducive to the perpetuation of life.

Just hit my funny bone a little bit from a philosophical perspective. Astro caught it.

My personal opinion on why life exists at all is that living things are exceedingly efficient at increasing entropy.

Admittedly, that's not a terribly hopeful explanation.

Picture a photon leaving the sun (that should appeal to the physicist in you )

High energy photons are probably the lowest entropy entities in the universe. They are compact highly ordered energy. How many billions of years will it take that photon to bounce off bits of rock and gas in the universe before all of the energy is converted into heat (the most disordered and highest entropic state) ?

Now picture that photon hitting a plant leaf.

This is my own crazy idea (although like anything else I doubt I'm the only person to think of it) , but if you think in terms of gibbs free energy living things are astoundingly good at increasing entropy.

The irony is that it takes so much order to efficiently increase entropy, but I'm sure the balance in a huge net increase.

Sure, no chemical reaction (or dumb child falling down a well) no matter how favorable can happen without all the components being present.

Liquid water, a diverse collection of elements, a massive source of energy. Those were all present. But looking at the free energy equation, which factor on the right side has the most potential to make delta-G negative? I see the entropy argument against the origin of life, but I think that can be viewed as an activation energy easlily overcome by the massive amount of energy coming from the sun.

Philosophically, how could you tell if life exists to increase entropy or entropy exists to facilitate life? Seems to me it would just be a matter of how you approached the question.

I agree that both of my statements are loaded, but I think it's just stating the issue more clearly.

To flesh out: He's postulating that maximum entropy is an end-goal, and life can exist because it is a superior mechanism to increase entropy than other processes.

I was just saying that it seems philosophically equivalent to me to say that life is an end-goal, and constantly increasing entropy is a mechanism to promote that.

Good post on your long reply. I would only really quibble with a couple of things.

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Life usually fails, in that regard. Macroscopically, an extinct species is a failure. The vast majority of species are extinct.

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I wouldn't use the word failure, here. Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective, but the number of species that no longer exist seems irrelevant to me in the big picture. Life still exists, and not only does it exist, it's thriving in some unimaginable ways. It's fixing, in all likelihood, to spread from it's home planet.

And, possibly more importantly, you could make the argument that it wouldn't have gotten this far if previous species hadn't failed.

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Maybe slight changes to early conditions would have resulted in more fit, better adapted organisms than us. We don't know.

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I find that pretty unlikely, and I think we can wisely speculate much more accurately then you suggest. We can see how life has adapted to vastly different circumstances and environment over a 3.5 billion year time span. That seems like a suitably large sample size to inform at least an educated guess on the subject.

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My issue was with your implication that evolutionary processes have agency. It's an uncaring process.

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It was pour wording on my part, but that's not what I was intending to imply. I merely use the language to highlight the fact that the basic structure of the system is so intricately balanced that it almost seems to have agency. You'll see leading biologists use agency sounding terminology all the time. I don't think that most of them literally mean that life is willing itself in a certain direction, but they all seem to identify the sense of purpose, rather than a literal purpose.

Now, of course, personally, I believe the reason why we sense a purpose is because life was in fact designed with a purpose in Mind, but that's not the argument I was trying to make.

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My personal opinion on why life exists at all is that living things are exceedingly efficient at increasing entropy.

Admittedly, that's not a terribly hopeful explanation.

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I really think you're on to something, here. Believe it or not, it was my Lutheran pastor, many moons ago, that first mentioned such a theory to me. Brilliant guy, and one of the most well rounded and articulate religious leaders I've ever met personally. Anyway, he felt that entropy itself was one of the central divine mechanisms and hints at the divine purpose. It's been awhile, but it was something along the lines of, without entropy, you couldn't have individuality, and without individuality, you couldn't have agency filled communion.

Obviously not the direction you would take things, but it's an interesting perspective from a believer's standpoint.