Closures as life

Re:Closures as life by klodolph on Sunday November 14, 2010 @07:49AM (#1903139)

This seems like... total nonsense. I mean, I understand evolution, fourier series, closures, electron orbitals. But these words seem strung together in ways that make no literal sense, and the metaphors are so vague that they might as well be meaningless.

Once upon a time there were some molecules. Bumping into each other, these molecules formed into larger molecules. Some of these molecules bumped into other molecules in such a way that the other molecules formed into copies of the first molecules.

I don't see how this has anything to do with "periodic functions". And somehow closures "introduce this idea of 'time'." Time is merely the arrow that points towards entropy.

Conversations like these are why I transfered out of a certain college.

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Re:Closures as life by eru on Sunday November 14, 2010 @08:55AM (#1903214)

I guess it's just a phase that people go through. Like writing their first confused monad tutorials / explanations.

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Re:Closures as life by gukjoon on Sunday November 14, 2010 @08:52AM (#1903206)

I don't think this is complete nonsense. At the root of all this, he's weirded out by the concept of entropy. Entropy exists, yet the complexity on this infinitesimal speck of dust in the universe is increasing. Why is that?

tmsh, I wrote a equally disparaged blog entry a while back that you might be interested in: http://www.jierenchen.com/2009/10/memory-and-evolution.html

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Re:Closures as life by klodolph on Sunday November 14, 2010 @09:29AM (#1903262)

"Why is that?"

Complex configurations have more entropy than simple configurations. Life causes entropy to increase more quickly. You can think of living beings as agents of entropy if you like, but that implies that entropy acts with purpose, which it doesn't.

I remember having an argument at college with someone who argued that the laws of thermodynamics conflicted with the theory of evolution. So asked him what entropy was. He gave a bunch of different layman's definitions, such as comparing it "disorder" or "chaos". I wrote down for him, "S = k log N" and told him that if he doesn't know Boltzmann's equation, he has no business lecturing me on thermodynamics. This person also said that there was no natural process that created information. I wanted to tell him that the laws of thermodynamics, combined with Boltzmann's equation, and used in combination with Shannon's definition of information, imply that the amount of information in a closed system must always increase. Interpreted physically, mutation increases the entropy/information in genetic code.

If you want to know more about entropy, talk to a chemist. Chemists have to know entropy or they can't do their jobs.

As for the linked blog post, the idea of applying theories from evolutionary biology to the study of information is usually attributed to Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene". This is the book that coined the term "meme", and I recommend it.

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