This paper was written by Motoyosi Sugita and published in 1951. Odum writes that Sugita “uses examples such as stream capture in land drainage” to suggest that “systems tend to maximize power in their organizational work” (Odum, 1983, p. 118). Sugita was one of the top theoretical physicists in Japan before, during, and after World War II. He explored the existence of a “Fourth Law of Thermodynamics,” which suggested that life exhibits a tendency toward increased order and complexity, seemingly defying the increase in entropy described by the second law of thermodynamics, and he tried to prove this law throughout his life.
Sugita, M. 1951. Maximum principle in transient phenomena and its application to biophysics. Bull. Kobayasi Institute 1: 88-101.
H. T. Odum. 1983. Systems Ecology: An Introduction. New York: John Wiley & Sons.