Flamboyance and Entropy
What Howard Bloom Gets Right and Wrong
Howard Bloom's recent book, The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong, makes bold, provocative claims about nature, creativity, and entropy. Bloom suggests we should discard the Second Law of Thermodynamics—entropy—as outdated or wrongheaded. While his literal suggestion is scientifically incorrect, his underlying philosophical message remains valuable and insightful.
What Bloom Gets Right
Bloom1 rightly challenges the pessimistic narratives often derived from entropy. The common cultural understanding—that the universe is inevitably sliding into disorder and chaos—is technically true at a cosmic scale, but often misapplied to smaller, open systems like ecosystems, human societies, or individual organisms.
Bloom vividly highlights life's creativity, resilience, and inherent flamboyance. Nature, he argues persuasively, thrives precisely because it isn't cautious or conservative. Life throws energy at the wall, generating extravagantly wasteful yet incredibly successful strategies—from billions of sperm cells competing for a single egg, to the endless variety of flowering plants evolving flamboyant strategies to attract pollinators.
In this, Bloom taps into a genuine biological truth: apparent wastefulness is often an evolutionary strategy that ensures survival and creativity through redundancy, variability, and flamboyant experimentation.
Where Bloom Goes Wrong: Entropy and Thermodynamics
Bloom's literal suggestion—that we "throw out" the Second Law of Thermodynamics—is a rhetorical flourish rather than valid science. The Second Law, stating entropy always increases in closed systems, is fundamental, deeply experimentally verified, and integral to physics, chemistry, and biology.
Bloom's error lies in confusing closed systems (the universe as a whole) with open systems (Earth, organisms, ecosystems). Earth is open—constantly absorbing low-entropy energy from the Sun and radiating high-entropy energy back into space. Thus, life's local complexity and reduction in entropy is completely consistent with the Second Law.
For example, plants convert dispersed solar radiation (high entropy) into structured organic molecules (low entropy). This local decrease in entropy doesn't violate thermodynamics—it’s precisely enabled by our planet’s open exchange of energy with its environment.
Interpreting Bloom Constructively
If Bloom's literal statements on entropy are scientifically indefensible, his metaphorical stance—that we should rethink how we interpret nature—is valuable and insightful. Bloom calls for optimism about life’s capability for innovation, adaptability, and abundance rather than pessimism rooted in entropy.
Bloom’s most valuable contribution is reframing biological and cultural exuberance as a core strategy of nature itself. Recognizing that wasteful flamboyance can be adaptive doesn't deny entropy; it instead enriches our understanding of how life's creativity works within the constraints of physical laws.
Final Thoughts
Howard Bloom's provocative message is best appreciated as a call to embrace life’s abundant creativity—not as a literal refutation of physics. By clearly distinguishing between Bloom’s valuable philosophical insights and his rhetorical missteps on entropy, we can appreciate his broader point: nature is exuberantly creative precisely because it skillfully navigates—and never escapes—the constraints of thermodynamics.
Full disclosure: I’ve known Howard for decades and consider him a dear friend, so this critique comes from a place of admiration and good will.