The Science and Philosophy of the "Thermodynamic School" of Evolution
This paper was written by Walter B. Langbein and Luna B. Leopold and published in 1962. It was a geological survey paper written for the United States Department of the Interior. H.T. Odum wrote that Leopold and Langbein describe how the steepness and meander of streams develop in ways that help “maximize the power of…
This paper was written by Hossein Farajollahi, A. Salehi, and F. Tayebi and published in 2011. The abstract states: “In this paper, we investigate the validity of the generalized second law of thermodynamics in flat Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker chameleon cosmology where the boundary of the universe is assumed to be enclosed by the dynamical apparent horizon. It…
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This paper was written by Alfio Bonanno and Martin Reuter and published in 2011. The abstract states: “The Asymptotic Safety scenario predicts that the deep ultraviolet of Quantum Einstein Gravity is governed by a nontrivial renormalization group fixed point. Analyzing its implications for cosmology using renormalization group improved Einstein equations, we find that it can…
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This paper was written by Hiroshi Serizawa, Takashi Amemiya, and Kiminori Itoh and published in 2011. It appears to be the first effort to use the principle of maximum entropy production in sociology. The abstract states: “Entropy of the system is controlled by two fundamental laws: one is the second law of thermodynamics that is…
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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…
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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…
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