The chemical machine

The mechanical concept of nature spread very quickly in seventeenth century Europe, but not without conflict. Opposition came from virtually all quarters, and it was violent. Apart from the rejection by Aristotelian academics, there was a new science that was slowly 

Swiss inventor Pierre Jacquet-Droz, is abeautiful automaton sitting at a writing desk that dips his pen into the inkwell, shakes off the excess ink, and writes Descartes famous motto Cogito ergo sum. The automaton is still fully operational and survives in a Neuchatel museum. 

The third objection of Stahl, the idea that machines do not suffer, has never been overcome, and even today is a major obstacle on the road towards artificial life. Descartes wrote that only human beings suffer because only they have a soul, while animals are merely mimicking the expressions of pain, but very few took seriously such an extravagance. It became increasingly clear therefore that an organism cannot be a mere mechanical machine, and eventually the concept of the chemical machine was universally accepted. 

In the nineteenth century, the study of the steam engine was pushed all the way up to the highest level of theoretical formalism, and culminated with the discovery of the first two laws of thermodynamics the principle that energy is neither created or destroyed, and the principle that the disorder (or entropy) of any closed system is always on the increase. This second principle had a particularly traumatic impact, because it appeared to expose an irreducible difference between physics and biology. In any closed physical system disorder is always increasing, while living organisms not only preserve but often increase their internal order. 

The standard reply that organisms are not closed but open systems is of little comfort, because one needs to understand how they manage to keep their highly organized state. Eventually however the answer was found and came from two hypotheses  

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