EVOLUTION AND HUMAN DESTINY 



solar system from the view point of its change in en- 

 tropy one finds that the total entropy of the entire sys- 

 tem has increased. However, curiously enough, it ap- 

 pears that the entropy of certain portions of the matter 

 constituting this system has been decreasing. As solidifi- 

 cation of the crust of our planet took place, processes 

 such as crystal formation became possible. The struc- 

 tural complexity of a crystalline solid is certainly 

 greater than that of an equivalent quantity of liquefied 

 matter. Now conditions over the surface of a planet 

 such as the earth could not have been fully uniform. 

 Different substances consequently accumulated at vary- 

 ing locations. This varying abundance of different ma- 

 terials must be expected to have given cause to further 

 interactions between the then existing elements and 

 compounds. Some of these interactions produced com- 

 pounds of increased complexities with their cor- 

 respondingly more intricate crystal structures. At spots 

 where the crystals of such compounds formed, a very 

 pronounced local increase of extropy can be postulated 

 to have taken place. This local increase of extropy can 

 be considered to have been especially great in such lo- 

 calities where the compounds forming and interacting, 

 included those of the element carbon which, because 

 of its atomic structure, tends to form compounds of 

 great complexity. 



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