Abstract
There is a striking similarity between thermodynamics and the study of biological evolution. Both are concerned with the time development of complex systems, and in both cases there is a definite trend to be explained. One of the many workers who have commented on this was Waddington (1), who wrote. “A few authors have tried to formulate a concept of a general parameter which will always change in one direction during evolution, as entropy always increases in physical systems, and as Fisher seems to have thought his fitness would always increase. If such a parameter could be defined, one could deduce from it the nature of the ‘evolutionary force’ which keeps evolutionary processes on the move …”
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References
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See also (24).
and (25).
It is precisely for this reason that the neo-Darwinist program fails, since it makes the claim that the evolution of organisms can be adequately explained by studying the genes, which are at most part of the initial conditions.
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Saunders, P.T., Ho, M.W. (1986). Thermodynamics and Complex Systems. In: Kilmister, C.W. (eds) Disequilibrium and Self-Organisation. Mathematics and Its Applications, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4718-4_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4718-4_18
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