Livings systems will be considered as dissipative structures - mechanisms which flatten out energy gradients in the environment - by degrading sources of potential energy into heat.

Ecosystems evolve by accumulating technology which assist them in:

• identifing sources of potential energy and...

• utilising those resources for reproductive ends.

In a competition between two similar populations the group with greater ability to locate and utilise sources of energy is likely to prevail. Consequently we might expect to see a greater rate of utilisation of resources as time passes - and organisms get better at using environmental energy sources - and turning potential energy into offspring.

They wrote, for example:

ecosystems develop and select energetic pathways that strive to degrade as much of the energy available to them as possible.

Another supporter seems to be Michael J. Russel [4]:

What does Life do?

It responds electrochemically to geochemical and photochemical tensions on Earth by attempting to resolve them, remaking itself in the process that it might create a greater overall disorder. Or in the words of Simon Black (2000) -"energy uses an organism as a mechanism for self- dissipation."

This example is one of the illustrations of the "gradient reducing nature of self-organizing systems" used by Kay and Schneider.

Dribble

Vortex

Anyone who's spent much time getting liquids out of bottles is already intuitively familiar with the phenomenon illustrated above.

If you give the liquid a slight spin then a vortex forms - and the liquid comes out much more rapidly.

The turbulent flow finds that it can best dissipate energy if it forms an air channel from the surface of the liquid to the exit hole. This air channel allows air to flow in in a continuous stream - so the pressure differential which would otherwise ect to hold the water in the bottle is minimised.

In my experiments, creating such a vortex reduced total drainage times by a factor of three - representing a large rise in the rate of entropy increase.

As Kay and Schneider point out, much the same phenomena plays a role in dissipating energy in the atmosphere - in the form of real tornadoes and hurricanes.

In particular the work of Hisashi Ozawa [3] is well worth examining more closely.

The following quotes from the abstract should give the general flavour:

Previous works on thermodynamics of the climate system are reviewed in the light of a thermodynamic concept presented here.

It states that entropy of thermal reservoirs connected through a non-linear system, in which materials interact mutually, will increase along a path of evolution with a maximum rate of entropy increase, among a manifold of allowed paths. [...]

Consequently, it is found that Paltridge's suggestion on maximum entropy increase by turbulent heat transport in the earth's climate system, as well as Malkus-Howard-Busse's suggestion on maximum energy dissipation in turbulent flows, is rigorously explained by the single thermodynamic concept.

While it is interesting that phenomena such as turbulent fluid flow naturally migrate to states where they are dissipating energy as rapidly as possible - I feel that such simple self-organizing systems only represent the beginnings of what is possible.

In order to really dissipate energy properly you need a living system, so that sources of potential energy are actively sought-out - and it should really be capable of evolving intelligent life - since intelligence is the route to developing most technologies for locating and utilising potential energy sources.

If two populations expand into an environment which has plentiful resources, the population that can most rapidly translate the energy into offspring is likely to wind up with a significant weight of numbers - and this can easily translate into a competitive advantage in any battle for what remains.

Overall efficiency can also be relevant - in times where food is scarse, the future may belong - not to the population that attemps to turn its food into increased population as rapidly as possible - but rather to those that maintian a low population size and conserve their food supplies.

These strategies are usually mutually exclusive - burning brightly is usually not going to produce a light that lasts for such a long time.

I believe these strategies can usefully be seen as the result of optimising over different time periods. The first is more short sighted - while the latter takes a more long term view.

In the context of this essay the question of whether nature is "burning bright", or is "burning long", boils down to the question of whether she is maximising burn rate - or is creating maximal eventual disorder. It seems likely that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes.

In thermodynamic terms, that can be seen as a rather simple approximation of the quantity of order condensed from the environment into its own tissues.

The approach here suggests another metric - namely the extent to which a feature contributes to degrading the various sources of energy in the environment - increasing overall entropy - and creating disorder.

These metrics are clearly closely related - since in the process of creating the order present in those genomes, a great deal of disorder will inevitably need to be created somewhere.

Imagine you have a fridge, which you want to keep cool. The colder you make it, the more energy it takes to maintain its temperature in the face of ambient heat from the environment. Similarly if you want to make the fridge larger, it will take more energy to keep it cool - since the rate of heat loss through the surface will increase - due to the increased surface area.

In this analogy, the cool fridge represents the order in a living system. Attempts to increase this appear to inevitably result in more disorder elsewhere.

It seems that any dynamical system that attemps to create order in one region will inevitably wind op doing so by increasing the total entropy. The more order it attempts to maintain, the greater rate at which it depletes the available energy sources.

Often, counting genes, genomes - or any other reproductive unit - would be a rather pointless exercise - since comparions between species would make little sense.

To those unfamiliar with the idea, it might seem odd to describle the "purpose" or "function" of a "designoid" system in thermodynamic terms - rather than in terms of making more copies of genes - but it seems to me that such a description more accurately represents what is fundamentally going on.

Such thermodynamic metrics - in common with the more familiar reproductive ones - can both be applied over different timescales.

Since different elements of a system may be attempting to optimise over different timescales - constructing a single function that is being optimised may prove challenging.

The relationship between created order and environmental disorder suggests a flip-side to approaches involving measuring reproductive success.

Rather than attemping to estimate the extent of the order created by a living system - you could see to what extent it has made use of the available energy sources.

Looking at the state of sources of environmental energy may sometimes be more practical than attemping to assess the order created by an ecosystem.

Or can we follow Kay and Schneider [1] - and say that ecosystems "strive to degrade as much of the energy available to them as possible"?

It seems established that attempts to create order will necessarily increase overall entropy.

Similarly it seems that one of the best ways to increase entropy - in the long term - is to introduce a complex living system into the environment.

The thesis that living systems are attempting to maximise total entropy is "paradoxically" very similar to the one that they are attempting to create maximum local order (by making many copies of their genome).

Overall, I'm inclined to state the goal of living systems in overall thermodynamic terms - and thus to talk about creating disorder - rather than (say) maximising the number of copies of genes created.

Though very similar, the two ideas expressed above are different from one another - and will make different predictions.

I think the thermodynamic expression will eventually be seen as more accurate description of what's going on under such circumstances.

Nuclear explosions might well create a rapid local entropy increase faster than a typical living system would manage - but the effect is localised - and short lived. A living system ought to be able to do a much better at increasing entropy in the long term than such an explosion.

Indeed, perhaps rather the opposite: it's been argued (by Lotka [9]) that the process of degrading available energy sources as rapidly as possible will inevitably involve a substantial degree of waste.

However, it can be argued that such "maximum power principles" will result in efficiency of a kind - and avoidance of some sorts of "pointless" waste.

One possible objection to the idea that populations come to utilise their resources with increasing efficiency is that populations are fundamentally lacking in harmony - by virtue of being divided into discrete individuals with conflicting objectives.

The tragedy of the commons, greedy predation, "driving genes", within-species conflict and runaway sexual ornamentation can all be seen as being counter-productive - from the point of view of overall efficiency - and it might be that barriers such as these will prevent energy from ever being utilised very efficiently.

While I don't regard this objection as very serious, I discuss it in more detail here.

I have a separate document discussing this matter - here.

The first organisms used chemical energy to operate. Over time a variety of technologies were invented, to allow organisms to capture energy from sunlight, from heat differences, from wind and the tides.

In modern times, technological advances have opened up new energy resources - and can be extracted directly from atoms.

Structural technologies were invented that facilitated the occupation of land.

Once such useful technologies are developed by living organisms they are widely transmitted via inheritance or symbiosis - and are rarely lost again.

The history of life thus has a progressive character - it is a history of progressive technological development.

There are those who argue that "Progress does not rule the history of life" [5] - but that is patently utter nonsense: in fact, living systems are characterised by cumulative technological development.

I don't mean to suggest that in the future there will also be such emphasis on maximum speed in the short term.

Life has been very short-sighted in the past.

Part of the reason for the historical short-sightedness is that until relatively recently, saying much about the future was very difficult because the equipment available for building models of the future were very primitive.

Now living systems are becoming much better at understanding their environment and predicting the future - though unfortunately a rapid pace of change is acting simultaneously to make the task more difficult.

I hope in the future living systems will do a better job of managing their resources based on future expectations - and think that it might well sometimes turn out to be a better stratgey for living systems to save resources for later - in the hope of persisting for longer.

If "maximum speed" does remain desirable then I do not know how rapidly future generations will be able to expand their horizons - or to what extent they will succeed in turning whatever resources in their path into background radiation - but I fully expect that very impressive feats on these fronts are possible.

1. "Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics" - Schneider, E.D, Kay, J.J., 1994, Mathematical and Computer Modelling, Vol 19, No. 6-8, pp.25-48.

2. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin - Stephen Jay Gould.

3. Entropy and Climate - Hisashi Ozawa et al. [all six pages]

4. The Origin of Life - Michael J. Russell, Allan J. Hall, Laiq Rahman & Dugald Turner

5. James Kay's thermodynamics page

6. James Kay's thermodynamic musings

7. Principle of maximum entropy production

8. Information theory explanation of the fluctuation theorem, maximum entropy production and self-organized criticality in non-equilibrium stationary states - Roderick Dewar

9. The Law of Maximum Entropy Production

10. The thermodynamics and evolution of complexity in biological systems - Toussaint O, Schneider ED.

11. Maximum Entropy Modeling

12. E T Jaynes Center

13. Maximum entropy production and the fluctuation theorem - Roderick Dewar

14. Contribution to the energetics of evolution - Lotka, A. J., 1922

15. Time's speed regulator: the optimum efficiency for maximum power output in physical and biological systems - Odum, H. T., and Pinkerton, R. C., 1955

1. I quote this (and some other terms) - and add this note - so that nobody accuses me of committing the teleological fallacy.