WHAT DOES LIFE WANT?

Autopoesis

by jeremy lent

The story of life’s deep purpose begins, ironically, with death. A certain kind of death: the ‘heat death’ that scientists tell us is the likely ultimate fate of the universe. In the nineteenth century Lord Kelvin formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which describes how the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy. Order inevitably becomes disordered and heat always flows from hot regions to colder regions. We see entropy in our daily lives every time we stir cream into our coffee or break an egg for an omelette. Once the egg is scrambled, no amount of work will ever get the yolk back together again. It’s a depressing law, especially when applied to the entire universe, which according to most physicists will eventually dissipate into a bleak expanse of cold, dark nothingness.

This law is so all-encompassing that Albert Einstein once declared it was the only theory in physics that he was certain would never be overthrown. It’s so universal that it’s even used to explain how time can only ever flow in one direction. But wait! There’s a loophole to this dismal law. It’s called life.

This loophole was first described in 1944 by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum theory, then ventured into the fundamentals of biology. In his seminal book What Is Life? Schrödinger explained that living organisms exist by converting the entropy around them into order, creating temporary eddies of negative entropy, which he called negentropy. They’re not exactly repealing the Second Law because, as they organize the energy and matter within themselves, they’re increasing entropy in the universe as a whole. But it’s a local loophole to the law that’s maintained itself on Earth for billions of years. Wherever there is life, entropy is being reversed – at least for a while.

How does life perform this amazing feat? Schrödinger described how all living entities turn entropy into order. They ingest it in the form of energy and matter, break it apart and reorganize it into forms that are beneficial for their continued existence. It’s a process that goes by a common name: metabolism. While you’re sitting here reading this page, your own body is taking part in the age-old process that life began billions of years ago. Whatever you ate earlier today is diligently being broken down by cells in your gut, turned into molecular components for the proteins, lipids and other crucial ingredients your body needs, then transmitted to other cells so they can perform their work of self-regeneration. It’s a process you share, in one way or another, with every living entity on Earth.

It’s interesting that it took a physicist to identify such a fundamental feature of biology, but perhaps not surprising. The moment that a set of molecules first sucked in entropy to organize itself was the moment that physics and chemistry combined to give birth to biology. As we’ve seen, the emergence of life on Earth was most likely a process of autopoiesis – a stunning feat of self-organization performed by non-living molecular structures. The first step toward life occurred when sets of molecules began to catalyze each other’s reactions – an autocatalytic set – and formed a semipermeable membrane around themselves, using other molecules from outside to maintain the process. This momentous event marked the first time that matter began to reverse entropy on Earth.

It was also the moment when teleology first appeared on our planet. Some autocatalytic sets would have absorbed the wrong types of molecules which interfered with their internal processes and caused them to dissipate. Others would have developed a primitive detection system to keep out harmful molecules and only assimilate those that helped catalyze their reactions. Those were the ones that survived and maintained negentropy. Though they had no language to express what they were doing, those autocatalytic sets had crossed a threshold of value: they began making judgments about what was around them. The molecules out there held meaning to them: one molecule was harmful, another was beneficial because it permitted them to continue converting entropy into order.

As these molecular sets became more complex and formed the first real cells, each constituent part had a purpose that related to the cell as a whole, just as Aristotle had observed. The membrane existed for the sake of protecting the interior, ingesting what was beneficial and expelling what was harmful. The interior processes existed to generate chemical reactions and keep the membrane healthy. Demonstrating reciprocal causality, each part acted for the benefit of the whole, while the whole entity acted for the benefit of all its parts. In the words of philosopher Hans Jonas, ‘There is no organism without teleology.’

Billions of years later, single-celled amoebae or bacteria still act like sophisticated versions of these original protocells, continually evaluating their environment for what is beneficial or harmful. When a bacterium in a tank senses sugar is more concentrated in a certain direction, it will turn around, rotate its flagella like a propeller and swim toward what it wants. It’s driven by the same sense of purpose that has urged life forward in an unbroken flow from the days of the first protocells: a desire to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics, to ingest nutrients, metabolize them, regenerate its parts and pass its particular form of negentropy on to the next generation. We’re back to Weber’s First Law of Desire: ‘Everything that lives wants more of life. Organisms are beings whose own existence means something to them.’

Teleology is so fundamental to life that each of its defining characteristics can ultimately be understood by how it serves the purpose of negative entropy. While controversy remains over the exact details of what constitutes life, most biologists have converged on a small set of essential attributes. First, there must be a boundary between the organism and the rest of the world – between the entropy out there and the order within. Whether it’s a cell wall or skin, the boundary must be semipermeable, with the ability to ingest what’s needed from outside and expel waste from within. Second, a living entity must actively persist in a continually dynamic metabolic flow, repairing and rebuilding its constituent parts to resist the wear and tear that entropy relentlessly imposes. When this active flow ceases, that’s the moment of death. Third, a living being must be capable of self-reproducing. The Second Law dictates that, after some time, in spite of its best efforts at self-repair, a living system will begin to degenerate. Whether by cell division or by procreation, it must have a way to pass on its unique capacities for negentropy to future generations.

Underlying these three essential criteria for life is a deeper principle: the purposive self-organization that permits it all to happen. As we’ve seen, life is a self-constructed process. There is no programmer writing a program, no architect drawing up a blueprint. The organism is the weaver of its own fabric. It sculpts itself according to its own inner sense of purpose, which it inherited ultimately – like all of us – from those first autocatalytic cells: the drive to resist the Second Law of Thermodynamics and generate a temporary vortex of self-created order in the universe.

A cascade of negative entropy

Here we are discussing the fundamentals of life, and there hasn’t yet been a single mention of genes or evolution. How, you might wonder, does this description of life self-organizing to resist entropy relate to the theory of natural selection? An increasing number of leading biological theorists have been pondering this question, and have begun to assemble a coherent answer.

It begins up in the heavens, with the sun. Early civilizations around the world worshipped the sun as the giver of all life. The ancient Egyptians called their deity Ra, the Aztecs worshipped Tōnatiuh, but for all their differences in myth and ritual, they agreed that the sun was the ultimate source of nature’s bounty. They weren’t wrong. From the earliest times on Earth to the present day, virtually all the energy that life consumes derives ultimately from the sun. Through photosynthesis, plants and algae absorb the sun’s energy, which eventually cascades through entire ecosystems, animating every animal, fungus and most bacteria that form the harmonic dance of life.

Back in Earth’s earliest days, those autocatalytic sets also needed the sun’s energy to perform their feat of negentropy. The molecular assemblies that produced the most stable and efficient cycles of chemical reactions were the ones that persisted. Here, even before life appeared, was a basic form of selection based on energy optimization. The molecular sets with the most effective ways to resist entropy were selected – simply by virtue of the fact that they survived while others did not.

From this perspective, the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be seen as the foundation for natural selection. From the first protocells onwards, all living entities are energy transformers, converting energy around them into their own unique form of negentropy. The most successful energy transformers persevered and passed their particular tricks on to the next generation. This radical idea was first suggested a century ago by mathematician Alfred Lotka, who proposed a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, which stated, ‘Evolution proceeds in such direction as to make the total energy flux through the system a maximum compatible with the constraints.’ In recent years researchers in principles of self-organization have validated Lotka’s vision and elaborated it into a broader framework.

This understanding of evolution moves the locus of natural selection away from the gene. Once you start seeing living entities as patterns of energy flows, there’s no reason to draw artificial lines separating them. Symbiotic relationships can be understood as the inevitable consequence of different organisms working together to resist entropy more effectively. The vibrant complexity of a healthy ecosystem is the natural result of a multifaceted, glorious cascade of negative entropy. Plants absorb solar energy, transforming it into cellulose; herbivores convert cellulose into flesh and blood, which are then consumed by carnivores, all of whom bestow their waste on fungus which transmutes it back into nutrition for the plants. Entropy is kept at bay so successfully that many ecosystems can thrive, if undisturbed by humans, for millions of years. Through this lens, evolution itself may be understood as life developing increasingly sophisticated ways to maximize the conversion of energy into negative entropy.

The beautiful fractal patterns that indicate self-organized behavior in nature, which appear in everything from tree branches to neural networks, have been shown by complexity theorists to be the most efficient configuration for facilitating the flow of energy through a system. We can understand life itself as a fractal: a series of natural attractors exhibiting similar principles at different scales, from microscopic cells to organisms and entire ecosystems. The stunning complexities of life’s self-organization have expanded from within a tiny cell to the vast interactions of the entire planet we call home, all the while developing ever more intricate ways to maintain life’s defiance of the dark force of entropy.

An excerpt from The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Spirituality to Find Our Place in the Universe (Profile Books, 2021).

Jeremy Lent , described by Guardian journalist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Read more about his work at: https://www.jeremylent.com/