It raised a point I hadn't ever considered - I'd be interested to hear your thoughts: How does the instinct for self-preservation comport with the Second Law?PMFJI, but my reading of the 2LoT implies that all living things must eat. This is because we must do physical work to keep chaos at bay within our bodies. But all physical work requires energy. The 2LoT says that you get usable energy by tapping into the natural tendency of energy to flow from a concentrated to a dissipated state. So we eat things that are made up of organic chemicals, and then our metabolism releases the energy in these chemicals in such a way that we can tap into the flow of energy as they're transformed into what we call "waste" products.
There's also a theory that since living things need to produce this flow of energy to survive, we are more effective promoters of the universe's drive towards total entropy than nonliving things, and so the 2LoT actually encourages life to exist.
I think this idea is implicit in Swenson's "fecundity principle," jennyp, in connection with/furtherance of the law of maximum entropy production. Thank you so much for your observations.
The theory you are talking about is the theory developed by the author of this paper and that is just what the "law of maximum entropy production" specifies. The law of maximum entropy production states that in all real world systems potentials (energy gradients) or minimized (or reduced) by the pathway or assembly of pathways out of available pathways that minimize the gradient (increase the entropy) at the fastest rate given the constraints. The development of increasingly more highly ordered (further from equilbrium) living things as well as the cultural systems (including the explosive gobalization going on now on our planet) is the consequence of this fact, namely that such states are more and more efficient (effective) at producing entropy (or dissipating energy gradients).
This solves a major paradox that existed in the relation of life to physics and biology to physics for many years. I've read the paper and agree with the original poster it makes a fascinating read. We studied Swenson's work in graduate school and I found it amazing then. You have to read the whole paper though, I would think to get it. There are some others online as well that one can find by searching Rod Swenson and evolution, or Rod Swenson and physics or even Rod Swenson and psychology. There's also a current article in Physica Scripta (the journal of the Royal Swedish Society that does the Nobel Prize) that features his work (the last issue I believe and for the more technically minded there's an abstract at http://philosophyofscience.net/PhysicaScripta.html)
By the way as a final note, for those few who have apparently only read a part of the excerpts that have been posted and taken this to be an 'anti-evolutionary" paper, nothing could be further from the truth. It does criticize validly the limitations of orthodox Darwinian theory though.