Second Law of Thermodynamics: My view

Introduction:
The second law of thermodynamics says that total entropy of any system always increases. In very simple terms, entropy can be defined as the degree of randomness in a system. It indirectly means that how much ever we try to keep a system in order, it always moves towards randomness. But does this rule apply to human behavior, society, evolution, genes etc? This is what I would try to analyze in this post.

First Impression:
In my opinion second law of thermodynamics (SLoT) applies to everything living or non-living including our thoughts and emotions. Actually our existence is a struggle to keep this entropy in control. But till now probably none of us have succeeded because nobody around us has claimed that he/she is immortal :) In short, forces of nature are at work to destroy whatever we build (including our body) and our job is to keep it intact. In technical terms, we are trying to reduce the entropy of our things but somehow the entropy is bound to rise whatever we do. In philosophical terms, whatever has been created is bound to get destroyed.

There is one more perspective to it. Without SLoT in action, even creation itself is not possible. In effect, this whole universe is governed by very generic principles and what we see are only infinite variants of it. We start with a basic single substance and keep dividing it to create multiple things. One example of this could be building 1000 stone houses made from the stone blocks taken from a single hill. So, one mountain gets converted into thousand stone houses. So, in principal there was a system with higher degree of order (hill) and the degree of order in it was reduced (randomness increased) to construct many houses. Overall, degree of order in the system (hill + houses) was reduced and randomness increased. According to the big bang theory, this universe started with the primordial matter. If we take the primordial matter as our hill, all the galaxies, stars etc are houses. Thus, without increasing the entropy of universe, it is not possible to create anything. So, we can conclude that without SLoT, it is not possible to define the process of creation itself.

In other words, SLoT sets this universe in motion.

It would be interesting to think about a world where the overall entropy of a system always decreases. For us living in an ever increasing entropy scenario, it is like always going back in time. So, for us it is possible to reduce the entropy of the universe only if we turn the arrow of time by 180 degrees :)


SLoT In Action:
Around us, there are many practical examples of this theory in action. A house (system) is built and it always needs to be repaired. It can not keep itself static or it can not improve itself over time. No matter how much hard we try, a kid always tends towards lying (degradation). Till now we have not been able to keep ourselves always young. Our clothes always get dirty and we have to clean them (if I am allowed to take this as an example). All in all, we are surrounded by numerous examples of SLoT everywhere.

Analogies:
Now it is clear to all of us that reducing the entropy of a system is possible only at the cost of increasing it for the environment. Let's apply this principle to few things like human body, chromosomes etc.

Human Body:
Are the human beings also under the control of SLoT? Certainly, yes. As discussed earlier, I think the fundamental requirement for us to stay alive is to keep our body in good health (in correct order) which means we have to keep reducing our body's entropy. Somehow we know that as soon as we stop following this principle, our body starts degrading and slowly it gets destroyed (we die). But how do we keep reducing our body's entropy? The only way is by increasing our environment's entropy by extracting food, air, water from it. But how does entropy of the environment increase if we extract something from it? This question can also be answered with the same hill-house example stated above. Would it be possible for us to survive by keeping our body's entropy constant. Theoretically, yes. In physics, the systems for which entropy is constant are called adiabatic systems. These imaginary systems do not interact with their environment. Going by this example, if we turn our body into an adiabatic system, we would not be able to interact with this world. We would not be able to see, hear or feel this world. We would be totally isolated from this world. So, if we become immortal by becoming an adiabatic system, we would be out of this universe anyways (which is equivalent to dying). So becoming immortal in terms of our body is of no use according to SLoT.

Human Evolution and Genes:
Can we apply SLoT to Human evolution in terms of genes? I think, Yes. It is already known that life on the Earth started with a single cell. If this was the case then we can safely consider this first cell as the most ordered system with all DNA information contained in it. It is also known that the zygote contains only half of the genes from both mother and father. So, in effect the system gets degraded by a factor of two in every generation. And so on. This whole theory of life formation on the Earth is actually the story of genes getting divided into halves and combining together with other genes to create a life form. In this whole process, it is very easy to figure out that the degree of randomness from genes point of view is increasing. The ordered system of the first cell is getting divided again and again to add randomness and orderlessness in us. We are actually a degraded form of the first cell! So, in this case also we are following the pattern suggested by SLoT. If a couple decides not to reproduce, they stop the process of entropy increase from the point of view of genes system. This means that as soon as we stop disordering the gene system, we would not be able to produce the next generation and the human race would cease to exist. In order to survive, we have to keep increasing the entropy of genes system (reproduction process). This could be one of the reasons why our population is growing so rapidly. We as a race want to doubly make sure that our 'genes system' entropy is increasing :).

So, as long as we are disturbing the environment or in other words as long as we are interacting with the environment to keep our entropy decreasing, we exist. Otherwise we would cease to exist. In some other words, as long as we are acting/reacting with this world, we exist. As soon as we stop all our actions (even at the minutest level, be aware that a person in coma also is acting in a way) and become an adiabatic system, we cease to exist. That means we can not perceive this world which is as good as we are out of this world. So, we can take this as a motivation to keep working :)

Society:
This theory can be applied even to human society. All our lives, we have seen how important it is to keep the law and "order" maintained in the society. As soon as it is left alone, disorder starts cropping in. At the social level also the total entropy of the system has to be reduced in order to survive. So, as long as some of us are working towards bringing order into the system or in other words reducing the entropy of our social system, we are sure that we are safe and the social order is maintained. To further explain the entropy increase at social level, consider an individual as the basic unit of society. When we know that entropy of the individual keeps increasing, it has to increase at the social level also.

But at the social level it is not guaranteed that entropy of every individual in it is decreasing. Every individual keeps fighing for resources and he/she makes sure to keep the effort at minimal level so that the spending in terms of effort is not more than reward (resources). This is necessary to keep decreasing the entropy. In social terms, it comes at the cost of entropy increase of some other individual. But as a system, we have to make sure that the sum total of the reduction/increment in entropy at individual level leads to overall decrease in social entropy. Actually this fight for entropy reduction at individual level is the reason of lawlessness in the society. So, we can conclude that lawlessness is a hard fact of life and it will be there as long as we are here.

Conclusion:
Life is all about reducing the the overall entropy of the human system. But at the same time, it is also known that it is impossible to prevent the overall entropy of a system from increasing as long as it is not an adiabatic system. May be this is the explanation of "struggle of life" in terms of Physics. But we should note that black holes add a new dimension to this conclusion.

Note - This is not a scientific paper and I have only tried to correlate Second Law of Thermodynamics with my observations.