Abstract
Humans as biological organisms must operate within the basic laws of thermodynamics. But starting with Ludwig Boltzmann in the 1880s, many great thinkers have delved more deeply to see that life itself, and all of biology, is essentially about obtaining and using energy. In other words, all of life is about making energy investments to gain more energy with the expectation of continuing their own life and sending genes into the future. To this end, I propose the iron law of evolution: organisms must extract more energy by exploiting their environment than they expend doing so. This expenditure includes the energy costs of maintenance metabolism, adaptation to environmental exigencies, resource exploitation, and reproduction.
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Hall, C.A.S. (2017). The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play. In: Energy Return on Investment. Lecture Notes in Energy, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47821-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47821-0_5
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