Blocks and Building

 I once read an article about the thermodynamic likelihood of amino acids — not a full scholarly article, I'm sorry to say, but just the sensationalized write up on such an article that tends to find its way around social media.  Although the article itself was interesting (if not a bit exaggerated on conclusions and understated on actual information, as such articles tend to be), the thing I find I remember most is the first comment displayed at the bottom of the page.  The comment, apparently following the site's trend of sensationalized, hasty conclusions, declared that, if the building blocks of life were likely to form, there is obviously no need for a god to have formed life.

The first logical fallacy that struck me was that this conclusion relied on the assumption that any deity would be acting as simply some sort of mediator of activity within a universe.  To the contrary, if we assume that a deity were instead dictating the design of the laws of such a universe instead of simply acting within those laws to assemble together bits and pieces of matter, we could just as easily — and just as fallaciously — conclude that a universe likely to give rise to life in the wake of chaos suggests the existence of a creator.  Ultimately, though, the only thing that the likelihood of the appearance of amino acids dictates is that life, however it came about, used the building blocks that were available.  To assume that the formation of these blocks directly implies the formation of proteins or organisms is much like assuming the presence of any Lego bricks leads invariably to double-decker couches.  Certainly, it is a possibility that such things are formed, but the end product is dictated by the assembly and not the type of parts used in it.

Yet in a system with sufficient complexity, with pieces capable of acting on other pieces in so many varied ways as is possible in chemistry, self replication becomes possible.  Moreover, variances in conditions introduce imperfections, which in turn introduce variance into the replication and diversity into the population.  Although such variance is typically meaningless and often even detrimental to the process, any sufficiently random probability distribution will have individuals ahead of the average population, and if they successfully replicate, their advantage perpetuates.

In computer science, such selection of the best performing individuals of a population is exploited in genetic algorithms.  In a randomly generated population of possible solutions, some solutions will inevitably perform better than others.  These individuals are then replicated — not by their own means as in nature, but simply by the framework of the program created for them — and random variation further creates better approximations of the solution.  Although genetic algorithms by no means guarantee ideal solutions, with the right parameters they converge on accurate approximations, sometimes finding unexpected solutions to complicated problems.

In genetic algorithms, the advancement is just a probabilistic outcome of reproducing individuals that best meet some metric and introducing random variation to better explore possible solutions.  In life, the same probabilistic advancement holds true so long as there is sufficient capability for self-replication and diversification, but in the absence of an algorithmically imposed metric to compete over, survival and reproduction itself becomes the metric, further reinforcing the feedback loop that serves to perpetuate self-replication — the "circle of life".

If you try hard enough, any movie can be about information theory or heuristic algorithms.

Without much consideration, it seems unlikely that order can arise out of chaos.  It is difficult to fathom that every bird, tree, mushroom, person, and virus is just a clever arrangement of mud, digested and reorganized by fractal patterns dictated in the genetic instructions that are contained initially in a single cell.  "Dust you are and to dust you will return" — whether created by deity or probability.  Yet order underlies chaos, and just as the right conditions can rearrange the molecules of rocks to manifest that order on a larger geometric scale in crystals, so, too, can the right conditions manifest patterns in causality instead of geometry.

In the end, it seems, (or in the beginning, chronologically), it is not the building blocks that matter as long as they allow for sufficient complexity to produce imperfect self-replication.  From there, the nature of probability and causality will take its course.  Again, though, this does not presuppose neither that there is nor is not a creator.  Perhaps life is a pattern that forms in any universe where self-replicating causalities are possible, regardless of the underlying engine.  Or perhaps the existence of a universe where life is likely presupposes some sort of intentional creation.  Neither is certain.

Instead, this comments on how there are more complex patterns that arise from seemingly simple and chaotic patterns.  It suggests an interplay between things — an interconnectivity that gives rise to epiphenomena, or mechanisms that are far more than the sum of their parts, becoming patterns of higher order that, though composed of and mechanically driven by the underlying composition are ultimately dictated by something beyond them.  So, too, do the principles of interconnectivity and  diversity that drive the evolution of organisms or the growth of a seed into a tree resonate in methods for personal and societal growth.  Connections between us and beyond us are what will allow us to grow, both as individuals, and as a community.  Yet just as the fractal patterns that drive the complexity, diversity, and interconnectivity of life are dictated by far simpler rules replicated innumerable times across innumerable variations in the underlying conditions, it only takes little connections and cooperation, echoed across society, diverse as the people who participate in those connections, to create growth.