Does Complexity Increase Over Time?

When you say "complexity," what exactly do you mean? We understand now that HIV/AIDS drugs seems to lose its effectiveness, and new strains develop that makes drugs ineffective. This is only one example, but it would seem to answer "yes" to your question.

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I mean from living organisms, I am talking about biology wise

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Gold Barz wrote:

I mean from living organisms, I am talking about biology wise

Evolution tends to produce more capable creatures over time, which generally involves more complexity, just as a human is better at surviving than the tiny sea creatures is our ancestry.

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I agree because the less capable creatures gets eliminated. Well except for bacteria but I wouldnt really say they are less capable they were the first life on Earth and I am sure they will be the last.

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Complexity in information terms equates to less and less pattern as time goes on which means that it becomes more and more difficult to compress the information string required to describe something.
This is the same as Entropy.
Entropy always increases and so 'complexity' always increases too.
The problem is that in practical terms it becomes harder and harder to have any organised structures that can perform meaningful actions.

I think the question needs to be reframed with a timescale in mind.

At the proverbial End Of The Day everything will succumb to proton decay or vanish into a black hole which will eat all the other black holes and then when the universe cools below the horizon temperature the hole will evaporate so releasing it's information back into the now utterly barren universe as random quanta of radiation.
This is on a timescale of around about the 10^100 years mark.

If you're talking about shorter timescales like the pifflingly trivial amount of time this planet has existed then yes, complexity can increase over time. It does so however, at the expense of an increase in disorder somewhere else.
Entropy always increases.

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With the sunflower - the only that increases over time is entropy (or disorder). That is the the '2nd Law of Thermodynamics' - it is unrepealable.

However, there is plenty of room for more complex patterns of matter and information to develop. The example is the Earth, several billion years of the Sun running down and degrading has equalled enough free 'energy' to fuel just about ever sort of biological entity possible (and a bunch of impossible ones too!).

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Gold Barz wrote:

I mean from living organisms, I am talking about biology wise

It's a good question. I would say that biological complexity does increase over time, but I've seen some rather lengthy and educated arguments which disagree with that.

I started a thread on this same subject several years ago on Abuzz and I'm not sure I ever opened it here on A2K, but it had some pretty good links in it if I remember correctly.

I'll see if I can find it.

Good question Gold Barz.

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Yeh, here it is... A2K link

Here's a little extract from the linked document in the original thread:

Quote:

The Direction of Evolution
A more fundamental criticism of the idea of increasing complexity, formulated among others by Stephen Jay Gould (1994), is that such an increase implies a preferred direction for evolution, a continuing "progress" or advance towards more sophisticated forms. Recent advances in evolutionary theory (such as the theory of punctuated equilibrium) and observation of evolutionary phenomena seem to indicate that evolution is a largely unpredictable, chaotic and contingent series of events, where small fluctuations may lead to major catastrophes that change the future course of development. At first sight, this seems inconsistent with any constant "direction". Yet, an example will show that there is no necessary contradiction.

Consider a rock that rolls down from the top of a steep mountain. Given that the slightest irregularity in the terrain may be sufficient to make the rock fall either into the one or the other of a host of downward slopes or valleys, the exact path of the rock will be virtually impossible to predict. Repeated experiments are likely to produce final resting positions that are miles apart. Yet, one thing will be certain: the final position will be lower than the initial position at the top. Although we cannot know the direction of movement in the horizontal dimensions, we do know that there is only one possible sense in which it can move along the vertical dimension: downward.

To apply this metaphor to evolution, we need to discover the equivalent of the "vertical" dimension, in other words we need to define a variable that can only increase during evolution (like vertical distance from the top). Entropy plays the role of such a variable for thermodynamic systems, but this seems hardly useful to describe complexification. Fisher's (1930) fundamental theorem of natural selection has shown that another such variable exists for populations of living systems: average fitness. This follows straightforwardly from the fact that fit individuals by definition will become more numerous, while the proportion of less fit individuals will decrease. This reasoning can be generalized to cover non-biological systems too.

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If this is to become an argument about increasing order and the 2nd law of thermodynamics--which is disorder increasing in a closed system.

But the world (as we know it) isn't a closed system. We get energy from elsewhere (notably the sun). Consequently there can in an increase in system order as long as the Free Energy (aka Gibbs free energy) of the system is positive.

In Chemical Thermodynamics this is normally expressed as

G=H-TS

Where G is the Gibbs Free Energy
H is Enthalphy (normally heat of PV work)
T is Temperature
S is entropy

Remembering that G has to be positive, then if H is positive in an open system (able to absorb energy from somewhere), at some temperature T, S can be positive (e.g. decreasing entropy--the measure of disorder).

Now I don't know about information, but if you consider molecular structure to be akin to complexity (as in the creation of a polymeric chain) it is possible to drive an open system toward increasing order as long as the Gibbs Free Energy is positive.

Rap

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First world humans are likely devolving, but there are far more third world humans, so humans are likely becoming more complex on the average. Neil

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so rosborne979, do you believe that complexity increases over time?

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I agree with neil; with increased knowledge in many fields, subsequent generations are able to tap into that knowledge and develop food sources and drugs that impacts future generations in ways we are still unsure of, but more complex for sure.

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Gold Barz wrote:

so rosborne979, do you believe that complexity increases over time?

Yes. Most boulders roll downhill, even if we don't know what direction they will take to get there.

I'm also suspicious that there is some form of counter-complexity which is accumulating in the Universe somewhere which might offest complexity, but at the moment, I have absolutely no evidence to support that; it's just a feeling.

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"I'm also suspicious that there is some form of counter-complexity which is accumulating in the Universe somewhere which might offest complexity, but at the moment, I have absolutely no evidence to support that; it's just a feeling." - what do you mean by this?, like the opposite of complexity?

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cicerone imposter wrote:

I agree with neil; with increased knowledge in many fields, subsequent generations are able to tap into that knowledge and develop food sources and drugs that impacts future generations in ways we are still unsure of, but more complex for sure.

Im talking about complexity, biology-wise

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Gold Barz wrote:

"I'm also suspicious that there is some form of counter-complexity which is accumulating in the Universe somewhere which might offest complexity, but at the moment, I have absolutely no evidence to support that; it's just a feeling." - what do you mean by this?, like the opposite of complexity?

Yes.

You are asking about biology specifically, but I was extending the argument somewhat to address the seeming increase in complexity on a cosmologic scale.

But I'm moving into metaphysics with speculation on counter-complexity, so it's purely speculative, and may not be someplace you want to go with this thread.

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This link may also have some relation to your question on complexity.

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Quote, "Im talking about complexity, biology-wise." So am I. Do you know for sure what the long-term effect on humans of the genetically prepared drugs and foods? I don't think so; nor does the scientists that claim there are no long-term effects. I don't believe that for one minute.

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Do you also know what the future is on stem cell research? I don't think so.

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Does Complexity Increase Over Time?

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