Entropy and Hubris = Disaster.

What We Don't Know We Don't Know is Sometimes More Important than What We Think We Know. Processes That Meddle But Fail To Anticipate This Cause Destruction.

This is a fascinating and correct article:

Why “∆G = ∆H – T∆S” is the most important equation in biochemistry

The capture and release of energy from orderliness is indeed essential for life.

The movement of molecules in ion fields across cellular membranes, as elementary as it appears, is analogous how mass cannot "resist" gravity.

If one truly understands the "mechanics", both are examples of necessary consequences of circumstances, not "forces".

Cells do use ion pumps to establish and maintain ion gradients, so even "passive transport" is not energy-free.

Once established, though, the transfer is downhill.  Just like the work to walk up the slope of hill causes a matter location displacement - in a gravitational field, sledding down the hill then becomes inevitable.

The work to establish the gravitational field was done in the initial picoseconds of the universe, and, haphazardly yet inevitably, with the outcome of processes that form the earth as we found it.

Natural selection - a consequence of conditions that emerges as a process that interacts with other processes - requires no work to establish a gradient.

We use terminology loosely, given our industrial age legacy - "selection pressure", "force of gravity"...

Models of consciousness that do not include how neurobiology traps information and energy in order and disorder at many scales are by definition incomplete.

These relationships are to consciousness and the sociological processes (including the emergence of society) what the skeleton is the body.

We just learned about them in backwards order.

Learning is a necessary consequence of conditions that tends to increase orderliness in the representation of relationships among entities and processes.

What is a full grain bin but a temporary bit of orderliness in an otherwise increasingly disordered world?

This hearkens Christine Nelson's great quote:

Civilization is just a temporary failure of entropy.

Whether these processes occur in a close or open system - and the timeframe in which gradients of order are established -  tends to influence our opinion on matters of cause & effect.

None of this is tautological - I agree 100% with the author of the article that life cannot exist with systems that lead to the storage of orderliness (enthalpy).

In fact, that's what we search for when we hunt - patterns of orderliness in relatively improbably arrangements (tracks in the soil, well-organized edible beasts).

The storage of orderliness is what we seek when we hunt for communications from aliens.

And when we want to avoid being hunted, we hide behind patterns matching disorder (camouflage).

Sometimes we believe we can control aspects of nature by sheer will - and when we forget how systems answering to the rules of entropy interact, we create disasters.

We might race a red light, forgetting for the moment what 2-3 tons of racing, highly organized metal, plastic, glass and fuel does to other 2-3 tons of similarly organized materials.

We might set up an artificial selection experiment against a spike protein, forgetting for the moment that sending people home to get sick without treatment causes them to incubate new variants that will inevitably mismatch the vaccine.

This has now left billions who believe they are immune exposed to infection risk with inexact immune defense - or worse.

Knowing this outcome from Feb 2020 has been agonizing.  A train wreck in the making.

We cannot propagandize our way out of this.

The truth is out.

If you are vaccinated, seek to prepare your immune system: check with your doctor, find the Brownstein maintenance protocol, and ask them if you should follow it.

They might learn a thing or two.

Image credit: Pete Flint