This is the usual problems you try to understand something considering only half the story which unfortunately is all most are armed with by the end of their school days.

Lets start with chemistry which as a discipline derives laws based on observations under defined conditions. The problem with this, involves the words "defined conditions". Unfortunately chemistry does not cover the full range of energy (missing things like electromagnetic, nuclear energy and thermal energy) and so it has limited range of defined conditions. It is ill equipped to try and tackle situations that involve energy outside the discipline and at best all you can try and do is fudge the energy into it's laws. You will often see chemical equations written with an energy term but there is no careful description of the energy even it's basic type is often missing (heat, light, electric etc), it's just a basic energy number.

Biology sciences developed because it was realized that chemistry had other flaws such as organisms having the ability to change "defined conditions" under their self control. They needed to cover stimuli, growth and reproduction. So biology developed as a discipline that derives laws based on observations of organisms.

So both of these disciplines are of limited use when trying to tackle world or universal wide situations.

Lastly lets deal with the horrible and often misused term negentropy, you have chosen to use. First Biology is not about negentropy it is about observation of organisms. Negentropy is a ill defined horrific term, unless used in the context of information theory which at least realizes the Neg part of it is a misnomer (as the value must always be positive and it is never actually negative). For anyone who would like to argue then get them to define negentropy ... so lets give you an example

I see some religious pseudo-scientists argue for example that life leads to a decrease of entropy, because it involves things getting more organized over time and so they like the term negentropy because it backs this view. This is complete garbage what they are leaving out is the products of the process which aren't chemical. For you and me as humans it is water and vapors, excretions and tons and tons of heat which is not fully covered under our chemical description and discipline. Taken from a proper physics point of view, you and I have positive entropy on the world and to argue against that is to say we could live without ever eating. You have to eat because you are pouring energy into your surrounds in every direction and your entropy contribution to the universe is most definitely positive.

Even plants take a nice uniform energy source from the sun and messes it up into multiple other energy things to grow and like living things excretes and radiates different energies. From a chemical discipline you might see chemicals joining together BUT look from the energy point of view. The only perspective to view the entropy of the universe is from the universe. Chemistry and Biology can say nothing on the matter for the universe as they don't describe the universe and are very incomplete.

There is only one framework that completely describes energy of the universe and that is Information Theory. Most layman won't recognize their universe in that framework because it needs to treat every measurable change as a bit of information. Layman understanding aside there are no known violations of the theory. Your next best choice would be Quantum Mechanics, which as a framework will describe energy correctly everywhere excluding gravity. You can described QM inside Information Theory as the two theories are completely compatible (pretty amazing since they developed independently) and that is sometimes called Quantum Information Theory.

So now we get to what you said
Originally Posted By: minas
If biology wasn't about order and negentropy, then all our problems would be solved

Well Biology isn't about order and the butchered term negentropy it's about observation of organisms.

Originally Posted By: minas
because organic chemistry everytime would evolve into something like life, due to selection of chemical reactions and everytime the result would have the same.

No it wouldn't because chemistry is not a complete description of the universe, there are massive areas of energy exchanges it does not cover. It fares little better than biology in understanding entropy of an organism.

The lesson here is understand what discipline you are using to tackle a problem and what the limits of that discipline are.

Last edited by Orac; 01/20/16 01:31 AM.

I believe in "Evil, Bad, Ungodly fantasy science and maths", so I am undoubtedly wrong to you.