• Science
• Dorion Sagan
• Mathematics

Snow famously remarked that an inability to describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics was a form of ignorance comparable with never having read a work of Shakespeare.This is an impressive work that ranges across disciplinary boundaries and draws from disparate literatures without blinking. It’s also a book that (much like Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics) requires effort on the reader’s part—it’s not for casual reading.”— Publishers Weekly “In Into the Cool, the authors unravel the intricacies of cosmology, meteorology, chemistry, ecology, and even the mysteries of human aging in an unexpected but accessible and entertaining manner. It's all very simple. It's all very complex. The book careens between these poles like a pinball in urgent play, until the reader is forced, willy-nilly, to think in terms of energy flow, gradients, and the Second Law. This turns out to be something of a delight, like using a new tool specially sharpened and specifically made for that job that we all assume when we first ask 'Why?'

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”—Tim Cahill, author of Hold the Enlightenment and Lost in My Own Backyard “ Into the Cool is a dazzling exposition of an idea: that life is fundamentally not a noun, or a thing, but a verb. Building upon the beautiful subtleties of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan take us on a tour de force through biology, touching upon the origin of life, sex, evolution, ecology, and even economics. Along the way, they dethrone the idea that the gene is the central actor in the drama of life and put the focus properly back on the plot—the organized flows of matter and energy that make life what it is. This book is destined to be a classic.”—J. Scott Turner, author of The Extended Organism. Energy is the only life.—William Blake Confessions of a Government Worker In 1971 one of us, Eric Schneider, was haunted by two simple questions: Do laws exist that govern the behavior of whole ecosystems? If so, what are they?

At the time there may have been no one in the world for whom an answer to these questions would have proved more useful. As the director of the National Marine Water Quality Laboratory of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Narragansett, Rhode Island, Eric's mission was to provide scientific data to protect coastal water quality and estuaries. Water-quality laws specifically gave the EPA the responsibility of protecting human health, commercial fisheries, and ecosystems within these coastal waters. Eric was expected to measure the health of ecosystems without definitions of ecosystem health and without adequate measuring tools. It was a difficult job. Upon his arrival in 1971 as a new director at the EPA laboratory, Eric found that most of the data from the facility consisted of very simple toxicity tests done on algae and small fish.

In a typical protocol, adults of the small bait fish mummichog ( Fundulus heteroclitus) were submitted to toxins until measurable percentages of them died. Numerous tests were administered on organisms such as these that 'kept well.' Not to put too fine a point on it (and the EPA didn't), the organisms selected were those that could survive alone in aerated pickle jars. The EPA experiments were completed within ninety-six hours, a four-day span that allowed them to be set up and dismantled within a government workweek.

If not rigorously scientific, the protocol was bureaucratically convenient. The main problem is that such tough species are not necessarily representative of the health of their surrounding ecosystems.

For example, some of the hardiest organisms belong to pioneer species that repopulate damaged ecosystems. Such organisms thus may signify not health but ecosystem illness. Counting how many members of a poisoned tough species died in aerated pickle jars within ninety-six hours: such was the basis of our national water-quality standards throughout the 1960s and the early 1970s. Even though Eric's expertise was not in biology—he had graduated with a doctorate in marine geology from Columbia—it seemed clear to him that the laboratory's task should not be to protect just hardy bait fish dosed with high levels of poisons. It should, rather, be to protect whole marine ecosystems. What good was it, he reasoned, to develop a water-quality standard for a species of fish if the organisms they ate were poisoned to death at much lower toxin concentrations? What if the lives of these tough guys depended on those of weaker, more easily poisoned beings?

If that were the case, then the hardy beings could be tough today and gone tomorrow. In truth, very little seemed known about the linkages among species. Weren't members of healthy ecosystems, like happy people, well connected to a vibrant, interdependent community of other beings? When Schneider asked coworkers the obvious—why they were not testing whole ecosystems—they made comments such as, 'You cannot bring a whole ecosystem into the laboratory.' Or they would say, 'You cannot replicate a natural system in the laboratory.' Nonetheless, a few years later, these same researchers did just that: they studied, in careful miniature, whole marine ecosystems.

The scaled-down ecosystems, or mesocosms (middle-sized worlds) as they were called, were miniature versions of the Narragansett Bay. The interdependent systems consisted of many representative species living in seawater that filtered into tanks from outside the Rhode Island EPA laboratory. And they mimicked the real bay ecosystems with amazing accuracy. But it still remained nearly impossible to carry out toxicity experiments in the natural environment: understandably, the EPA and the state pollution-control officials were against spreading toxins such as mercury in the oceans or in natural salt marshes, even for the loftiest of scientific purposes. At the same time, 'naturally' polluted areas such as oil spills or areas poisoned by mercury from paper production became makeshift laboratories where scientists attempted to gauge the movement of toxic materials and the recovery, if any, of damaged ecosystems. To make a long story short, in 1971 it became clear to Eric that ecosystem toxicology—a subdiscipline of ecology, and the science the EPA needed if it was to protect the environment—was in its infancy. And this held true of ecology in general.

Although human habitats were increasingly endangered, the science required to understand exactly how they became endangered—and thus how they could recover—barely existed. Since then ecology has made great progress.

Ecologists study the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms. Most of what we know about this comes from hundreds of years of careful observations of changes in species, populations, and landscapes. Only in the last 150 years have these observations begun to be organized. Ecology branched out into many specialized theories: today there is population-abundance theory, predator-prey theory, niche theory, autecology, synecology, ecosystems ecology, microecology, ant ecology, human ecology, elephant ecology, as well as lots and lots of modeling. But where, Eric wondered, was the general theory that could predict actual whole ecosystem behavior?

Where was the theory that would say what would happen to a given lake ecosystem if its ambient temperature were increased by 5°C? How about if this ecosystem became more acidic? What would happen then? And what would another ecosystem, with different organisms, do under the same conditions? Marine chemists had found that pollutants such as DDT, radioactive elements, and mercury were moving through the global ecosystem and taking their ecological and human toll. But what routes did these toxic materials take, what were their rates of movement, and where did similar materials accumulate in natural systems?

It seemed to Eric that what the EPA really needed was a theory that explained the flow of material and energy through whole ecosystems. Perhaps due to his training in the physical sciences, Eric was attuned to look for patterns and laws that might apply across the board, to all ecosystems. In particular, he was drawn to investigations by earlier researchers on energy flow. Might simple physical principles underlie the complexity of biology, from ecosystems to the biosphere?

The relevant researchers seemed to be at least trying to deal with whole ecosystems rather than with their constituent parts. There were a few groups, mostly the students and graduate students of G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University, who had made significant inroads in tracking energy's flow through, and effect upon, whole ecosystems. Hutchinson and his colleagues, first at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology in 1957, and later at the Brookhaven Symposium on Diversity and Stability in Ecological Systems, raised ecology's sights beyond a narrow focus on the distribution and abundance of individual species. The insights of Hutchinson and his colleagues led beyond the quantification of interacting nutrients and their effects. It was to lead Eric Schneider and a few others to the bigger question of why ecosystems behave as they do, a question directly related to the fascinating question—some would say the question of questions—of why (from a material and physical perspective) life exists. The answer had to do with energy, and it would eventually shed light not only on ecosystems, but also on organisms and nonliving systems—the entire field of what has come to be called the sciences of complexity.

Indeed, as Eric was to find out with delight and surprise, he was not alone: a most promising research program linking biology to the physics of energy was already under way. It was like finding a buried treasure: gems lingered in past theoretical work, and the energy-flow characteristics of a handful of ecosystems had already been enumerated. To his great excitement, Eric found out that there was already a young but sophisticated science of thermodynamics that specifically studies energy flow and transformations in natural systems.

Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all sought to answer the questions of why we are here and where we are going. Finding this natural basis of life has proved elusive, but in the eloquent and creative Into the Cool, Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan look for answers in a surprising place: the second law of thermodynamics. This second law refers to energy's ine Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all sought to answer the questions of why we are here and where we are going. Finding this natural basis of life has proved elusive, but in the eloquent and creative Into the Cool, Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan look for answers in a surprising place: the second law of thermodynamics. This second law refers to energy's inevitable tendency to change from being concentrated in one place to becoming spread out over time.

In this scientific tour de force, Schneider and Sagan show how the second law is behind evolution, ecology,economics, and even life's origin. Working from the precept that 'nature abhors a gradient,' Into the Cool details how complex systems emerge, enlarge, and reproduce in a world tending toward disorder. From hurricanes here to life on other worlds, from human evolution to the systems humans have created, this pervasive pull toward equilibrium governs life at its molecular base and at its peak in the elaborate structures of living complex systems. Schneider and Sagan organize their argument in a highly accessible manner, moving from descriptions of the basic physics behind energy flow to the organization of complex systems to the role of energy in life to the final section, which applies their concept of energy flow to politics, economics, and even human health. A book that needs to be grappled with by all those who wonder at the organizing principles of existence, Into the Cool will appeal to both humanists and scientists. If Charles Darwin shook the world by showing the common ancestry of all life, so Into the Cool has a similar power to disturb—and delight—by showing the common roots in energy flow of all complex, organized, and naturally functioning systems.

“Whether one is considering the difference between heat and cold or between inflated prices and market values, Schneider and Sagan argue, we can apply insights from thermodynamics and entropy to understand how systems tend toward equilibrium. The result is an impressive work that ranges across disciplinary boundaries and draws from disparate literatures without blinking.”— Publishers Weekly. What is the source of the complexity which surrounds us, and of which we are exquisite examples?

And why does such complexity exists at all, given the inexorable descent into chaos and heat death sanctioned by classical thermodynamics? The answer, according to Schneider and Sagan, is given by science, and specifically by thermodynamics itself - by the same Second Law that is invoked to justify the entropy increase in the universe. One of the authors (Schneider) has proposed a generalized version What is the source of the complexity which surrounds us, and of which we are exquisite examples? And why does such complexity exists at all, given the inexorable descent into chaos and heat death sanctioned by classical thermodynamics? The answer, according to Schneider and Sagan, is given by science, and specifically by thermodynamics itself - by the same Second Law that is invoked to justify the entropy increase in the universe. One of the authors (Schneider) has proposed a generalized version of the Second Law (which everyone should know just like Shakespear, according to C.

Snow) which can be stated as: 'Nature abhors gradients'. All complexity comes from this innate tendency of Nature. It subtends the continuum of forms, structures, organizations and entities that span from trivial heat convection to ecosystems. The book unfold to decode this synthetic statement. It starts with Schroedinger's What is life? Thoughts on 'order from order' and 'order from chaos' which defined the two leading trends of genetics (information transfer in reproduction) and energetics of recent decades.

Classical thermodynamics is reviewed in its focus on isolated systems - that is, unrealistic and exceptional ones, and yet root of the main results of the discipline which were too early extrapolated to foresee the destiny of the entire universe and which are accordingly engraved in everyone's imagination. But, again, classical thermodynamics is dedicated to exceptions: real life is instead based on interconnected open systems out of equilibrium, animated by energy and material flows.

This is the object of non-equilibrium thermodynamics (NET), which is unveiling new exciting and astonishing scenarios for life and sustainability. From examples of archetypical self-organized systems like Benard cells and Taylor vortices, the book goes up the hierarchical ladder of complexity to trees, ecosystems and even economics. The lietmotif is always the same: the main source of complexity, and even of selection and variation, is the avoidance of gradients in Nature. Particularly, the Earth is posed between the Sun and the cosmic background, so it has a huge gradient to dissipate. And it does thanks to the deeply-entangled and wonderfully efficient structures we see around. The book climaxes unveiling that life has a function (passed as purpose) which is nonetheless simply thermodynamic in origin: it is here to efficiently dissipate gradients. Throughout, the book touches upon many topics which are of evident interest for the matter at hand.

The reviews of physics fundamentals are not deep though adequate for a general readership, definitely shallower in comparison to (as a main reference, I would say) Progogine and Stengers' The new alliance. If more, they share the same holistic fervor and sort of anxiety to extrapolate toward life postulates even from simple features of systems, but the present book luckily lacks the bergsonian obsession of late Prigogine (whose role in the development of NET and elucidation of dissipative structures is nowhere in question, of course). We have discussions on the preeminence of genetic reproduction versus metabolism, the role of ecosystems as extended hypercycles, the importance of exercise as single best way to improve personal health and longevity, and more. Interestingly, the overall perspective of thermodynamics roots of life may be hard to accept, apart for creationists and theologists, also by hardline biologists who do not accept physics to have claims or any relevance to 'their' discipline - a position more and more out of space and time, frankly. Nonetheless, this book has some limits.

Personally, I was drawn to it, I realize, because of the topic - which I believe should be compulsorily embedded in biology and thermodynamics courses. You know some books just do not stand up to the target or the great idea they set for themselves.

Science

This one scores ok, but it might have done even better. First, the murdered is revealed since the beginning: life is not only not in opposition to the Second Law of thermodynamics, it derives from it. Now, making a book-long corollary to a sentence is a hard task in itself, and indeed this book derails often into boredom because of its repetitiveness (that sentence is declined when not restated verbatim, together with the variant 'complexity comes from gradient dissipation', hundreds of times). Long pages comes and the reader may suspect no essentially new information is revealed - and this happens often, indeed. Second, their generalization of the Second Law is interesting, but it turns out to be not-so-out-there when compared to the work done in NET in recent decades - which is, to their merit, well documented and cited in the book.

They draw, as explicitly stated, from so many authors (Lotka, Wicken, Jantsch, Morowitz, Ulanowicz, and more) that claimed very similar positions that it is difficult for the reader to distinguish where the authors' proposal novelty resides - sometime there is simply no proposal at all. I think they mainly want to present a mindframe, a framework, a perspective essentially thermodynamic in nature, which as important and even provocative as it may be is not revolutionary, so to say. It is provocative, nonetheless, because they essentially claim it is all-encompassing, as far as complexity and life is concerned, and - gladly so - because it further helps cleaning out superstitions, phantoms and reactionary approaches to the matter (not mentioning the 'irreducible complexity' unavoidably coming from divine intervention). Anyway (third), though I may think they may get a solid point in supporting the claim, they incur in the same risk common to systematic theories, which is the temptation to force the inclusion of eventually-alien facts into their beloved theory. Even so, they wisely refrain to state a supposed 4th law of thermodynamics (as done e.g.

By Kauffman) and reject few similar attempts by others along the way, though they may hide this (un)original sin in their generalization of the 2nd law. Finally, and mainly because of the redundancy of many paragraph and the aforementioned repetitiveness-to-death of the mantra, the book could have gained a lot in being shorter and more compact.

Within these limits, the book is to be recommended to vast sets of readers who want a good acquaintance with NET. NET, as fundamental and preeminent part of complex systems science, is so fantastically-interesting, important and pervasive in daily life that it needs to be part of anyone's culture. The Goodreads database only lists Eric Schneider as author of this book, but the other author is Dorion Sagan, who has through his several collaborative books with leading scientists addressed some difficult scientific questions.

Such as, What is Life? And What is Sex? Willing to speculate without losing track of the parameters of reason, Dorion Sagan is a great popular science author. I recommend anything he has co-authored. He happens, probably not coincidentally, to be the son of the late sci The Goodreads database only lists Eric Schneider as author of this book, but the other author is Dorion Sagan, who has through his several collaborative books with leading scientists addressed some difficult scientific questions.

Such as, What is Life? And What is Sex? Willing to speculate without losing track of the parameters of reason, Dorion Sagan is a great popular science author. I recommend anything he has co-authored.

He happens, probably not coincidentally, to be the son of the late scientist Carl Sagan. Part III: The Living, Chapters 11-16 convey a good sense of the assertion that thermodynamics underlies the emergence of life.

This book is both great and frustrating. Great in that it pulls together so much of the research into the physical bases for complexity and for life, and occasionally helps me see the fundamental truth. Frustrating because of some poorly written, nearly incoherent chapters, and repeated assertions presented as facts.

Dorian Sagan’s “Cosmic Apprentice” is a collection of speculative and celebratory essays on biology, life and the human condition. Some of these essays re-explore and extend arguments that were put forward in his 2005 book with Dr. Schneider entitled “Into the Cool”. The main thesis of “Into the Cool” is that life is a thermodynamic phenomena that thrives on the energy gradients that characterize systems far from equilibrium. The Earth, for example, bathes in a river of radiant energy wh Dorian Sagan’s “Cosmic Apprentice” is a collection of speculative and celebratory essays on biology, life and the human condition. Some of these essays re-explore and extend arguments that were put forward in his 2005 book with Dr.

Schneider entitled “Into the Cool”. The main thesis of “Into the Cool” is that life is a thermodynamic phenomena that thrives on the energy gradients that characterize systems far from equilibrium. The Earth, for example, bathes in a river of radiant energy whose source is the Sun.

Far from thermodynamic equilibrium the Earth evolves more and more complex ways to degrade this persistent energy gradient and find an equilibrium state that doesn’t yet exist. Sagan and Schneider point out that, like living organisms, even simple thermodynamic systems seem to display purposive behaviors as they seek equilibrium and maximize entropy.

Dorion Sagan

These passages, from the “Cosmic Apprentice,” express the perspectives of the earlier “Into the Cool.” “A streamer of air finds its way out through an electric outlet into a cooler cool. This is purposeful behavior.” “Our bodies are less temporary than a whirlpool; more long lasting than a match zoomed in on in a David Lynch movie, but still, we are essentially processes, not things.” I read “Into the Cool” in 2005 and was completely enraptured.

Mathematics

I highly recommend it to the interested reader. When I saw Dorian Sagan had a new book on the market, I ordered it on the spot.

He still writes masterfully and elegantly. But my recommendation for it is preceded by some hesitation. Whereas I have sympathy for his thermodynamic speculations on the nature of life, I have little or no sympathy for the deconstructionism of continental philosophers, dangerous speculations that HIV is not the causative agent of AIDS nor Otto Rossler’s silly suit to stop the Hadron Collider’s search for the Higg’s particle because it might create a black hole that will swallow the world. Nevertheless, there’s enough thoughtful observation in this short book to make the read worthwhile.