Speaker
Description
Traditional thermodynamic views describe organisms as dissipative systems maintaining low internal entropy by exporting disorder, yet this fails to explain how complexity and information increase under the second law. We propose that growth and evolution arise from regulating the rate of exploration—the import of matter and energy from the environment. When exploration adapts to environmental conditions, maximum entropy expands faster than actual entropy, increasing a system’s thermodynamic information upper bound.
The proposed model describes an open non-equilibrium system with exploration rate α and dissipation rate β and defines environmental information ε as available structure. The rate of thermodynamic information change follows I ̇= αNε-βI. Simulations show that thermodynamic information grows only when exploration is adapted to environmental information (ε). High exploration rates in structured environments increase complexity, while the same in information-poor environments causes informational decay. Evolution thus emerges as adaptive entropy management—life grows by regulating exploration according to its environment.
Bibliography
@book{BrooksWiley2008,
author = {Brooks, Daniel R. and Wiley, E. O.},
title = {Evolution as Entropy: Toward a Unified Theory of Biology},
edition = {2},
series = {Science and Its Conceptual Foundations Series},
publisher = {University of Chicago Press},
year = {2008},
url = {https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo5970569.html},
note = {Accessed: March 15, 2026}
}
@article{Landsberg1984,
author = {Landsberg, P. T.},
title = {Can Entropy and ``Order'' Increase Together?},
journal = {Physics Letters A},
volume = {102},
number = {4},
pages = {171--173},
year = {1984},
month = {May},
doi = {10.1016/0375-9601(84)90934-4},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/0375-9601(84)90934-4}
}
