Entropy and information of human organisms and the nature of life.

Abstract

We determine for the first time the entropy content of human beings. The energy contained in the radiation within the human body is utilized to decrease its entropy. Therefore, not in itself but in its effect, the entropy of radiation in vivo may be regarded as negative. Calculating the negentropy of radiation in vivo and the entropy of materials, we found that the sum entropy of the human organism is effectively negative. This result does not contradict any law of thermodynamics since environment is not involved, and reflects the experience that human beings are able to control their behavior. We point out how the calculated dynamic information flow of human organism is related to the principal nature of life.

Introduction

The nature of life is "the mother of all questions." (1) Today, the development of thermodynamics and information theory offers us new tools for our understanding. Biological interactions are related to the degrees of freedom extending from microscopic to macroscopic ones. There are [10.sup.11] stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and there are [10.sup.11] galaxies in the universe; therefore, there are [10.sup.22] stars in the observable universe. Since there are ~[10.sup.22] water atoms in a sip of water, we may also say that there are so many atoms in a sip of water as stars in the observable universe. Our aim here is to make some initial steps in shedding light on the nature of organization, entropic conditions and source of information present between the microscopic and macroscopic levels in the case of living organisms.

Thermodynamics concerns dissipative processes; therefore, its scope is primarily related to sinks of nonconservative fields. On the contrary, life is based on sources of nonconservative fields, since life is related to self-initiated behavior of macroscopic bodies that builds up internally, from the microscopic (quantum) to the macrolevels. All living systems manifest energy transformations from numerous microscopic motions converging into macroscopic behavior, e.g. when we write with our hand. (2) The control processes of living systems act at the molecular scale. (3) Moreover, thermodynamic state functions are macroscopic at the global level of the system; therefore, they cannot determine the complex behavior of the cells and of individual molecules. But if there is a relation between energy and biological information, then the astronomical amount of information present in living organisms still needs thermodynamically significant energies, and so thermodynamics can be really efficient in the study of the nature of life.

Entropy Relations of Human Organisms

There is a significant interest in understanding the nature of life and evolution. From time to time, the idea shows up that there exists an "upward" tendency in evolution, from simplicity to complexity, from algae to man. (4) Therefore, it seems that there are two main trends in evolution: one is the thermodynamic, evolving downwards towards higher entropy, and one is upwards, towards higher organization, life and consciousness. Unfortunately, although the idea seems to be well founded, the mathematical evaluation of the rate of the upward process is missing yet. Determining the entropy and information content of human organism would offer a quantitative basis for a more detailed elaboration of this idea. It is a basic common knowledge found in most textbooks that the increase of physical entropy is a universal law, and the fact that life is highly organized is possible only because living organisms are not closed systems. Now the question may arise: what is the entropy of the living organisms? Without an answer, the usual reference to the openness of biological systems remains a mere subterfuge. In this paper, we attempt to make a step in filling this gap, and try to determine the entropic conditions and information content of human organism.

Physical entropy is related to the amplitude of thermal motions and vibrations of atoms and molecules. Its zero point is fixed as being zero at T=0 K. Its scale is fixed with the absolute entropy scale. The absolute physical entropy of graphite is 5.69 J/K/mol, [CO.sub.2] 213.64 J/K/mol, [H.sub.2]O (liquid) 69.94 J/K/mol. (5) This entropy scale is suitable to follow …