Control Systems in the Living World - Building the Most Complex Structure on Earth - page 15

Figure 1.8 The Great Pyramid of Cheops.

eroding factors). By contrast, artificial structures, determined by the creator, are pre-
dictable; they are products of forces acting against the second law, in the direction of
the decreasing entropy.
Human civilizations created highly ordered structures. There are not only “seven
wonders of the world,” but inhabited centers, roads, cultivated fields, industrial pro-
duction centers, etc. For thousands of years, human civilizations around the world,
to encourage better living conditions and to exploit nature for their own benefit and
satisfy their aesthetic, intellectual, and religious needs, created a world of material
culture full of structures that could never arise naturally: homes, palaces, pyramids,
and other buildings.
Even the wildest human imagination could not dream of a pyramid sprouting
spontaneously by a fortuitous combination of the stones they are built from. Human
work and design have been indispensable in erecting these mystifying structures. The
Pyramid of Cheops (Khufu) ( Figure 1.8 ) was built more than 4,500 years ago. About
2.5 million stone blocks and 20 years of work of about 200,000 slaves were used to
erect it. However, the building blocks and the labor of slaves were not all that was
needed for erecting the pyramid; slave workers did not know how to build a pyra-
mid that would lead the pharaoh's soul to the realm of the ancient Egyptian gods. A
detailed construction plan by Hemon, the Khufu's architect and high official, was the
first step in the pyramid's construction. What essentially took to build the Khufu (or
any other artificial structure, for that matter) are building blocks (matter), work (free
energy), and knowledge (information).
Similarly, work and information were used for transforming rock (matter) into
Mount Rushmore National Memorial ( Figure 1.6 ) and for building Stonehenge
( Figure 1.9 ). What enables us to intuitively distinguish between natural artwork such
as the Balanced Rock ( Figure 1.7 ) and a work of art that is fashioned from rock?
We viscerally recognize that Stonehenge ( Figure 1.9 ) and the pyramids of Egypt or
Mesoamerica are improbable structures that could not have arisen by themselves.
What makes it easy for us to understand that the first is a natural formation and
the second is a product of human skills? It is not the degree of complexity, for the
Balanced Rock structure is just as complex as a stone in the Stonehenge monument.
Our intuitive ease at distinguishing an artificial structure from nature's artworks is a
prescientific “thermodynamic lore” that makes us feel that Stonehenge stones cannot
rise spontaneously at the top of other stones.