Tim Tyler: God's utility function

This is a video about God's Utility Function - the idea that biology can be usefully seen as an optimisation process, and that evolutionary change acts so as to maximise some utility function.

Transcript: http://originoflife.net/gods_utility_function/

Category:

Science & Technology

[petkish]

Hmm.. I seriously doubt this one.

Living creatures are very complex phenomena, in fact they fight the entropy, making its growth slower. Life is using the solar energy to produce complex organized structures, which are the organisms, and it does not waste the energy by reusing the matter in food chains.

I think Dawkins was wrong.

[tmtyler]

I don't think that point is up for debate. See "Contribution to the Energetics of Evolution", Alfred J. Lotka, 1922.

[TheClumsiestNinja]

Oh Christ, I haven't slept for 24 hours. I found your videos watching reviews of cameras. I Don't understand why I'm still watching them, its over an hour now and I'm mesmerized for some reason... and now i'm telling you about it, maybe I should try and sleep..? this can't be normal. I do have a question though, why do you make these videos? I'm not criticising, but the answer alludes me. who are they for? Oh, and did you really bend your glasses into shape? I only ever bend mine out of shape.

[tmtyler]

Sorry! Some subscribers seem to be interested :-)

[MrAlexGTV]

@petkish Life is using the solar energy to "reproduce". Complex organization is not a common feature of all life. Reproduction is, and while Dawkins idea's are accused as reductionist, they are strong arguments as they can explain most life phenomena. From experience I can see that "beauty" at least in our species is functional. Symmetry, economy and efficiency of motion, speed and depth of thought.

[purpleproductionftw]

i hope you find your way back to God and his all warming love

[petkish]

@mijmijrm

No-no, I didn't mean that. Its not about reversing the laws of physics. See the 'negentropy' article on wikipedia. Also search about how NASA would detect life on planets by reduced heat radiation. Etc, etc.

[mijmijrm]

@petkish isnt that like saying: gravity may well affect small components, but a sophisticated object such as an aeroplane is constructed of a vast number of those components and is a different kind of thing entirely and wont be affected by gravity.

[petkish]

I see the article supports my thoughts - namely, life and evolution are consuming available energy as fast as possible, and storing it using highly organized matter. One thing I suspect wrong in the article - the emphasis on "maximum power principle" and "maximum energy throughput". Consuming as much energy as effectively as possible - that is what life truly does, but it does not waste this energy as fast as possible, contrary, it saves it, even recycles it! Where is the growth of entropy?

[petkish]

That is why transforming the EM energy into something conservable, like chemical energy, is a very nice thing to do, exactly this makes the whole thing last longer! Life is doing this.

We are building fusion reactors. But we also build structures, we meliorate the deserts (helping the plants to reduce entropy), and anyway we are not going to produce more energy than we can consume! We no different from other life, even more efficient in conserving energy.

[petkish]

What is entropy on universe's scale? Measure of chaos, measure of heat? Both not likely, cause there was more chaos soon after the big bang, and the higher heat too. Somehow all this heat and chaos then self-organized into our universe, as we know it now. How? Obviously, the universe has dumped the excess of electromagnetic waves outside, and continues to do so. The electromagnetic energy is the thing which has very short "good before" date, then it is lost, radiated outside.

[petkish]

The earth is more the black body than the moon? Yeh, maybe, but if you compare the ratio of received and radiated energy - the Earth will win, this is what life does. Moon will re-radiate everything it gets, and earth accumulates the energy, thus making the "global" entropy growth slower.