For example, the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago came close to wiping out all multicellular life. The geologic record tells us that the tree of life grows and then collapses in abrupt mass extinctions. We see this complexity accumulate in a 4.5 billion year history that has involved periodic reversals in the form of mass extinctions. Once there is a means to generate ordered complexity against the slow grind of entropy,ever greater complexity becomes possible: self-replicating crystals, prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells, multicellular plants, fungi and animals all evolving in a proliferation of organised complexity. This in turn allowed the conditions for metabolic life to evolve in the form of the first simple prokaryotic cells.
Scientists are still debating the origins of life but it is known that both clay (silicon) and carbon-based molecules can achieve non-metabolic, self-replicating complexity. Viruses are basically large crystals but self-replicating crystals. They get their energy from directly from their environment. Viruses, for instance, have no metabolism.
There are some forms of complex matter that have no metabolism. Metabolism describes the basic biological process that allows the complexity of Carboniferous life to emerge in a universe of ever-increasing disorder. 4 The carbon atom is capable of joining and combining with itself and many other elements to create all the complexity of pulsating life. 3 The Earth’s core is mostly composed of silicon but the crust is the domain of carbon. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.” 2Īll life on Earth is dependent on the carbon atom. alive, by continually drawing from its environment. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Any atom of nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur, etc., is as good as any other of its kind what could be gained by exchanging them?.What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. That the exchange of material should be the essential thing is absurd. the German for metabolism is Stoffwechsel.) Exchange of what? Originally the underlying idea is, no doubt, exchange of material. The Greek word (μεταβάλλειν) means change or exchange. Physicist Erwin Schrodinger explains “How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. Yet the surface of the Earth is teeming with ordered complexity. We live in a universe that follows the second law of thermodynamics: entropy (disorder) increases with time. Organised complexity requires some explanation. A “metabolic process”, in this sense, describes not simply the movement of matter or “Stoff” it is the movement and transformation of matter in a way that creates complex order and allows complexity to accumulate through time. From my reading, as a non-specialist, Marx was using the term in a broader sense as the material and ultimately purposeless means by which complex order emerges from disordered matter. I think Matt Cooper takes a too narrow definition of “metabolism” as a rather dull process of material exchange that occurs within a cell. AWL students (meetings, articles, more)Īt every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign power like someone standing outside of nature – but that we, n flesh blood and brain, belong to nature and exist within its midst, and that all the mastery of nature consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.” - Engels, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man.On Guard (Sheffield rail workers) (bulletin).Notts Off the Rails (Nottingham rail workers) (bulletin).Off the Rails (national rail workers) (blog).Off the Rails (national rail workers) (bulletin).
Tubeworker (London Underground) (bulletin).
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