Origin of extremely complex chemical reactions on earth?

1)According to the common viewpoint, life is an open system that interacts with external energy. The mainstream viewpoint is that this causes a decrease in its entropy, enabling life to emerge on the first place and to sustain itself, thus avoiding chemical chaos. In return, the system releases entropy to its surroundings so that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not violated.
 
The common view that the origin of life is characterized by accumulation of order, as order means lower entropy.
 
However, the term order can be very subjective, as an object non involved in life such as a rolling stone can say that it sees no order or no meaning in living systems’ chemical reactions. Just chaotic chemistry. So lets just leave order on the side and calculate entropy changes directly.
 
Does the entropy in living systems actually increase or decrease? If it increases, is it doing so in a pattern that suggests an arbitrary system? Although I am not a physicist I will welcome suggestions on how to calculate changes in the entropy of life over time.
 
Here are some simple approaches: Forgive me for any mistakes…
a)Does the life-associated heat production increase or decrease over time and how? Can life-associated changes in temperature be calculated?
b)Since chemical systems with higher entropy are characterized by increased gas production, does a life-associated gas production increase over time? In a system of decreasing entropy, one would expect a declining life-associated gas production…


Question: And someone might say that if living beings are only a sum of complex chemical reactions then what prevents them from degrading into chemical chaos? For instance, if there is not a major adverse event or a catastrophic external factor, how can a human maintain its body structure at a viable state for nearly 100 years instead of spontaneously degrading towards a higher entropic state? If we let alone a cell in an isolated box, the result will eventually be a chemical mixture and not the organized cell. The final disordered mixture is more entropic than the the organized cell. Doesn’t this prove that lowering entropy is a hallmark of life and every organism spends an amount of energy to increase its order??

Answer: Not necessarily. The story of any individual living being actually is a journey towards gradual decay into disordered chemistry. In the beginning it’s a zygote in which so much information is disclosed about future events, patterns, etc in a very small space. So we can say that a zygote has less entropy compared to later stages. This entropy gradually increases as we become infants, childs, teenagers, adults, etc, because less and less information is carried over time…
A simple cell in isolation will indeed decay quickly, but don’t forget that cells never exist in isolation, and higher organisms are much more complex and they interact with external energy. So the fact that they don’t instantly decay doesn’t necessarily mean that they use energy to decrease their entropy. Never underestimate our inability to fully comprehend the value of huge numbers.
 I will explain:
Lets assume that a human body everyday degrades towards a higher entropic state. Lets assume for this reason, that after each day, the body loses, lets say 100 thousand of chemical reactions. Suppose we have an 80 years old man. He has lived 29200 days. This means that he has lost nearly 3 billion reactions during his lifetime. If the total amount of chemical reactions he has is, lets say 1 trillion, then after 80 years he will be composed of 997 billion reactions, which means virtually still 1 trillion. So the impact of the whole process on the chemical reaction count will be almost negligible.
Of course, if we stop giving him food, he will degrade faster, but this is an example how can life can be compatible with a gradual loss of entropy.


Question: Isn’t a cell is much more ordered than its components?

Answer: A cell is much more ordered than its components, but what you forget is that a cell never exists in isolation. It owes its existence and its properties to the fact that it belongs into a more generalized phenomenon that is called life, which is an open system and interacts with external energy.
Imagine you have a flask with water that is heated with fire. The molecules of water will start speeding randomly toward various directions. Virtually, what you are doing here with the cell argument is ignoring the fire and the majority of other water molecules and focusing only on subset of 2 specific molecules. These molecules will be perceived as gaining speed without an obvious reason, thus seeming to decrease entropy, as well as other known laws is such a way that it has to be characterized as an independent phenomenon that has to be studied….

Question: How can random reactions, no matter how good they were selected through the centuries, can lead from a tiny spore or a sperm, etc to the creation of extremely complex organisms (plants, animals, human) in relatively predictive ways?
Answer: Don’t get confused by the complexity of the grown up organisms. Don’t forget what happens with fractals. That is, seemingly complex structures emerge as the result of very simple initial conditions (equations). Similarly, complex animals can arise predictively from the flourishing of much simpler entities over time, such as zygotes, spores etc.All the information needed is already there. This is simply perceived by us as embryology.

Question: What is the different that this approach in general adds?
Answer: It adds a new perspective with many applications in Medicine, and generally a new pathway for approaching biological phenomena and experiment.

For instance:
If the phenotype of an organism is the sum of its chemical reactions, one thing is obvious. That these reactions become different as we age. However, we don’t know whether the initial reactions are programmed to change and lead to the latter ones, or the transition is a result of other events. In other words, is it possible to maintain the same composition of reactions for a long time, thus preventing changes in phenotype, thus preventing further aging?
 
Answer: In the case our reactions are programmed to change, then things are more complicated. However, in the case that the reactions can be maintained as they are, then it can happen. And below is a possible way to achieve it.
 
The most important thing is to prevent changes. This can be achieved by providing a certain amount, composition and pace of initial substrates to the reacting system in the form of food. We are only interested in maintaining the system unchanged. We don’t care about the composition of this system, as long as it remains unchanged. This means that any diet that repeats itself every day,( that is providing everyday the same nutrients, in the same manner without any deviations in the routine) can cause the maximum of phenotype preserving in an organism, providing that the diet is viable and supplies all essential elements for life.


In a system in which living beings are mechanistic systems of chemical reactions, actually what is there is extremely complex (and complicated) chemical automatons. Aging comes as a process that involves a change in chemical systasis of the system over time, as the phenotypes of  younger and older organisms are different.
As we said, this implicates that we can theoretically control the change rate, by controlling the initial substrates of the system (e.g. food, gut bacteria). In theory you can have a certain combination of initial substrates and environmental factors in which changes in the living system are reduced to a minimum.
But, how do we know how to reach this state of stability?
Answer: By analyzing the end products of the system. If they have constant synthesis, this means that the chemical reactions are repeated as they are, and no changes occur. If their synthesis changes, it is an indicator that we must modify the initial substrates.
This method can also serve as a way to experimentally test this theory, because if the rate of stability of the gut content is correlated with aging delay, it means that actually living beings are in fact chemical automatons, and it would open new ways to approach human diseases…