The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
This paper was written by Jeremy L. England and published in 2013. The abstract states: “Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by…
This paper was written by Karo Michaelian and Oliver Manuel and published in 2011. The abstract states: “All irreversible processes arise and persist to produce entropy. Entropy production is not incidental to such processes, but rather the very reason for their origin and persistence. Here we take such a thermodynamic perspective on the origin of…
This paper was written by R. Morel and George Fleck and published in 2006. It applies the maximum entropy production principle to chemistry. The abstract states: “Classical thermodynamics, based on conservation of matter and energy and on the increase of entropy accompanying every natural event, reliably predicts equilibrium properties of macroscopic systems, regardless of the…
This paper was written Axel Kleidon, P. Porada, and S. J. Schymanski and published in 2011. The abstract states: “Hydrological processes are irreversible and produce entropy. Hence, the framework of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is used here to describe them mathematically. This means flows of water are written as functions of gradients in the gravitational and chemical…
Read More “Entropy production of soil hydrological processes and its maximization” »
This paper was written by Axel Kleidon and James Dyke and published in 2010. The abstract states: “The Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) principle has been remarkably successful in producing accurate predictions for non-equilibrium states. We argue that this is because the MEP principle is an effective inference procedure that produces the best predictions from the…
This paper was written by Axel Kleidon (pictured), Yadvinder Malhi, and Peter M. Cox and published in 2010. It serves as the introduction to a theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences (volume 365, Issue 1545) that includes 16 articles. The authors include Kleidon, Adrian Bejan, Ralph Lorenz, and Roderick…
Read More “Maximum entropy production in environmental and ecological systems” »
This book was written by Axel Kleidon and Ralph Lorenz and published in 2005. It studies the application of concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to a variety of research topics. Emphasis is on the Maximum Entropy Production (MEP) principle and applications to Geosphere-Biosphere couplings. Written by leading researchers from a wide range of backgrounds, the book…
Read More “NET and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth and Beyond” »
This paper was written by L. M. Martyushev and V. D. Seleznev and published in 2006. The abstract states: “The tendency of the entropy to a maximum as an isolated system is relaxed to the equilibrium (the second law of thermodynamics) has been known since the mid-19th century. However, independent theoretical and applied studies, which…
Read More “Maximum entropy production principle in physics, chemistry and biology” »
This paper was written by Roderick Dewar and published in 2005. In this paper and another he published two years earlier (2003), Dewar provides a theoretical basis for the maximum entropy production principle and derives a provisional proof of it for non-equilibrium, steady-state systems, both biotic and abiotic. The abstract of this article states: “Recently…
Read More “Maximum entropy production and the fluctuation theorem” »
This paper was written by Roderick Dewar and published in 2003. In this paper and another published two years later (2005), Dewar provides a theoretical basis for the maximum entropy production principle and derives a provisional proof of it for non-equilibrium, steady-state systems, both biotic and abiotic. The abstract for this paper states: “Jaynes’ information…