The Second Solution

There are certain topics I circle around and around in fascination. Each different angle brings out a new perspective that amplifies the topic’s dimensionality, making it more real, more palpable within my mind. But for some of you, it might feel like I’m writing the same basic essay over and over again. I lose track. Anyway, once again I want to write about the Second Law of Thermodynamics and what I have started calling the Second Solution – the Second Solution to the question of “How is life, with its ability to decrease entropy (disorder), possible within a universe shaped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

The Second Law is basically a mathematical capturing of how energy flows; it flows in a direction that physicists would call towards greater entropy. However, flow (including the Second Law) is not simplistic. The First Solution depends (as will the Second Solution) on some of these subtleties. If you have ever floated down a river, you probably encountered upwellings and eddies. Though the overall flow of the river is downsteam, there are places and times where some of this downward momentum spins off and pushes some of the water upstream. In an eddy, the water will carry you back upstream for some distance. This water moving upstream does not violate the Second Law. The Second Law allows parts of an overall system to move towards less entropy as long as the summation of the whole system is towards greater entropy.

Life capitalizes on this allowance by creating membranes that allow harvesting. This part of the system moves towards less entropy by harvesting the energy from another part of the system, sending that part even faster towards greater entropy. This strategy underlies the biological hierarchy of organelles, cells, organs, bodies, and populations as well as the ecological patterns of food chains and food pyramids.

This first solution is our classic textbook answer to the Question that gives it an intellectual momentum that allows it to be the template for much in our history and culture. Humans have created non-biological equivalents of membranes (such as boundaries and slavery) that maintain harvestable distinctions between “us” and “them”. The membrane lies at the heart of the economic mantra: externalize costs, internalize profits. Unfortunately, the First Solution can spiral culturally down into an Enron darkness where a few executive officers draw the membrane around just themselves and thus see their employees and their pensions as outside their membrane and harvestable.

Whereas the First Solution tends to create divisions, the Second Solution tends to create resonance. The Second Solution depends on another subtlety of the Second Law. Technically, the Second Solution does not say a system must spontaneously flow towards greater entropy. It says that the system can not spontaneously flow towards less entropy. The important consequence is that there is nothing in the Second Law that stipulates how quickly a system must flow towards greater entropy. Dead and down wood, for example, can rot slowly over years or burn in a few minutes. What life tends to do collectively is create ways to slow down the rate at which parts of the system flow towards greater entropy. If such rates can be made slower than the rate at which energy flows into the system from the sun, then flows will “back up”, energy levels will “rise”, and some aspects of the world will exhibit the “magical” qualities of seeming to move away from increasing entropy.

The Second Solution does not replace the First Solution. Instead, it asks the questions “now that you got some energy from harvesting some other part of the world, what are you going to do with it?” Those species that use this energy to slow flows so that flows back up will tend to experience a more favorable environment. Those species that only harvest the system without doing any stewarding work will tend to run their environment down and encounter increasing resistance to their presence.

One of the lessons my erosion work teaches me is “offer a new path before opposing the current path.” The Second Solution offers such a path. The first solution is not the only model for our actions. Awareness of this second strategy can help diverge some of our life energy, helping more of our power soak in to nourish good work rather than run off to erode the body politic.