Ho, her science and her credibility

Below is some text from a paper Ho M.-W. (1997) Towards a theory of the organism. Integr Physiol Behav Sci 32:343-363.

This document clearly demonstrates that Dr Ho has no understanding of a field (biophysics) she professes to be an expert in.

She is writing about a supposed contradiction between the laws of thermodynamics and the processes of life. What she calls the "the enigma of living organization" This supposed contradiction is explained in first year unversisty biology if not in School biology. An explaination can be found in most biology texts. Example

Ho's "Enigma"

The introduction to Dr Ho's article starts:

"Organisms are so enigmatic from the physical, thermodynamic point of view that Lord Kelvin, co-inventor of the second law of thermodynamics, specifically excluded them from its dominion (Ehrenberg, 1967, Scientific American 217:103-). As distinct from heat engines, which require a constant energy supply in order to do work, organisms are able to work without a constant energy supply, and moreover, can mobilize energy *at will*, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly coordinated way. Similarly, Schrodinger (1944 What is life? Cambridge UP) was impressed with the ability of organisms to develop and evolve as a coherent *whole*, and in the direction of increasing organization, in defiance of the second law. He suggested that they feed upon "negative entropy" to free themselves from all the entropy they cannot help producing. [Snip] "... the idea that open systems can "self-organise" under energy flow became more concrete in the discovery of *disipative structures* (Prigogine, 1967: Introduction to thermodynamics of irreversible processes. John Whiley) that depend on the flow and dissipation of energy, such as the Benard convection cells and the laser (Haken 1977: Synergetics. Springer Verlag). In both cases, energy input results in a phase transition to global dynamic order in which all the molecules or atoms in the system move coherently.

From these and other considerations, I have identified Schrodinger's "negative entropy" as "stored mobilizable energy in a space-time structured system" (Ho 1993 The rainbow and the worm: The physics of organisms, World Scientific; Ho 1994 Towards and indigenous western science - the organism as a coherent space-time structure In: New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Institute of Noetic Sciences; Ho 1995: Bioenergetics, S327 Living Processes, An open University Third Level Science Course, Open University Press) which begins to offer a possible solution to the enigma of living organization.

In this article, I outline a theory of the organism as a dynamically and energetically closed domain of cyclic nondissipative processes coupled to irreversible dissipative processes. This effectively frees the organism from thermodynamic constraints so that it is poised for rapid, specific intercommunication, enabling it to function as a coherent whole. In the ideal, the organism is a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-time domains, with instantaneous (nonlocal) noiseless intercommunication throughout the system."