> He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might foster self-replication. (As he explained it in 2014, “A great way of dissipating m

> He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might foster self-replication. (As he explained it in 2014, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”) Then the atoms will become happy and try to do more of that to become more happy? My BS detector is screaming loudly. First, this stuff about the second law of thermodynamics leaves me cold: > the second law of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly spreads and the entropy of the universe always increases. (The second law is true because there are more ways for energy to be spread out among particles than to be concentrated, so as particles move around and interact, the odds favor their energy becoming increasingly shared.) BS. That argument has a huge, hidden assumption, that we are looking at an inert gas in a bottle. So, there are no chemical reactions, etc. Then there are lots of possible configurations. Try that with some sticky ping pong balls and soon will have just a solid clump with only configuration. Try that with a lot of billiard balls, and soon they will arrange themselves on the bottom of the container with a lot of hexagons and tetrahedra, that is, with a relatively few number of configurations. So, to discuss how life began, let's f'get about the second law. Instead, we know that we can cook chemicals and get amino acids. Why? Because get chemical reactions where the atoms stick together, and it would take energy to split them apart again. Then if we cook for a few hundred million more years, we can get a configuration that can consume energy from its environment and reproduce itself. Then we are off to the races because what took a billion years to do the first time now just takes the time to reproduce. Then with small errors in the reproduction process and lots of reproduction, we get forms of life that are better at extracting energy from the environment and reproduce faster; soon that life form becomes relatively common, in that sense, dominates. Eventually we get a very creative farmer and expert with domestic animals, stone, wood, and metal with a very fertile wife, and they have lots of kids who also do really well. There are some questions and issues, but IMHO the model for the second law of inert atoms of a gas in a bottle is nearly irrelevant.