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Author: Jeffrey S. Wicken
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195043181
Category : Evolution
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
This groundbreaking work approaches evolution as an expression of physical laws and thermodynamic theory. It explores the relationship between the molecular processes of evolution and the physical laws that govern biological organization, seeking to explain how the ability to change developed in the earliest organisms and how it is perpetuated today. Dr. Wicken explains how genetic information is organized, how it evolves, and how the chemical and physical properties of the genetic molecules control the type and extent of change possible. With broad implications for scientific methodology, the work outlines a research program that fuses thermodynamic and Darwinian concepts, and integrates literature on the origin of life with evolutionary theory within the context of developmental biology and ecology. Biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, and philosophers of science interested in evolution will find this book to be stimulating reading.
Author: Jeffrey S. Wicken
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195043181
Category : Evolution
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
This groundbreaking work approaches evolution as an expression of physical laws and thermodynamic theory. It explores the relationship between the molecular processes of evolution and the physical laws that govern biological organization, seeking to explain how the ability to change developed in the earliest organisms and how it is perpetuated today. Dr. Wicken explains how genetic information is organized, how it evolves, and how the chemical and physical properties of the genetic molecules control the type and extent of change possible. With broad implications for scientific methodology, the work outlines a research program that fuses thermodynamic and Darwinian concepts, and integrates literature on the origin of life with evolutionary theory within the context of developmental biology and ecology. Biologists, geneticists, chemists, physicists, and philosophers of science interested in evolution will find this book to be stimulating reading.
Author: John Scales Avery
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811250383
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
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Book Description
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. As the author shows, this paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources. Another focus of the book is the role of information in human cultural evolution, which is also discussed with the origin of human linguistic abilities. One of the final chapters addresses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bioinformation technology.This third edition has been updated to reflect the latest scientific and technological advances. Professor Avery makes use of the perspectives of famous scholars such as Professor Noam Chomsky and Nobel Laureates John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edward Moser to cast light on the evolution of human languages. The mechanism of cell differentiation, and the rapid acceleration of information technology in the 21st century are also discussed.With various research disciplines becoming increasingly interrelated today, Information Theory and Evolution provides nuance to the conversation between bioinformatics, information technology, and pertinent social-political issues. This book is a welcome voice in working on the future challenges that humanity will face as a result of scientific and technological progress.
Author: Robert U. Ayres
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780883189115
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Market: Those in economics, especially thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, cybernetics, information theory, resource use, and evolutionary economic behavior. This book presents an innovative and challenging look at evolution on several scales, from the earth and its geology and chemistry to living organisms to social and economic systems. Applying the principles of thermodynamics and the concepts of information gathering and self- organization, the author characterizes the direction of evolution in each case as an accumulation of "distinguishability" information--a type of universal knowledge.
Author: Bruce H. Weber
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262731683
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
One of the most exciting and controversial areas of scientific research in recent years has been the application of the principles of nonequilibrium thermodynamics to the problems of the physical evolution of the universe, the origins of life, the structure and succession of ecological systems, and biological evolution.
Author: Sean Carroll
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593186591
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Most appealing... technical accuracy and lightness of tone... Impeccable.”—Wall Street Journal “A porthole into another world.”—Scientific American “Brings science dissemination to a new level.”—Science The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables. No one else could so smoothly guide readers toward grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.
Author: François Roddier
Publisher: Primento Digital sprl
ISBN: 2917141891
Category : Science
Languages : fr
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Thermodynamique de l'évolution - Un essai de thermo-bio-sociologie - translated into English with the help of Steve Ridgway À PROPOS DE L'AUTEUR François Roddier est né en 1936. Astrophysicien, il est connu de tous les astronomes pour ses travaux qui ont permis de compenser l’effet des turbulences atmosphériques lors de l’observation des astres. Après avoir créé le département d’astrophysique de l’université de Nice, c’est aux États-Unis, au National Optical Astronomy Observatory (Tucson, Arizona) puis à l’Institute for Astrophysics de l’Université d’Hawaii, qu’il participe au développement des systèmes d’optique adaptative qui équipent désormais les grands outils d’observation comme le télescope CFHT (Canada-France-Hawaii), ou le télescope japonais Subaru tous deux situés à Hawaii, et les télescopes de l’ESO (European Southern Observatory), l’observatoire européen austral situé au Chili. Savant toujours curieux, il s’intéresse aux aspects thermodynamiques de l’évolution.
Author: Jeremy England
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541699009
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185
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Book Description
A preeminent physicist unveils a field-defining theory of the origins and purpose of life. Why are we alive? Most things in the universe aren't. And everything that is alive traces back to things that, puzzlingly, weren't. For centuries, the scientific question of life's origins has confounded us. But in Every Life Is on Fire, physicist Jeremy England argues that the answer has been under our noses the whole time, deep within the laws of thermodynamics. England explains how, counterintuitively, the very same forces that tend to tear things apart assembled the first living systems. But how life began isn't just a scientific question. We ask it because we want to know what it really means to be alive. So England, an ordained rabbi, uses his theory to examine how, if at all, science helps us find purpose in a vast and mysterious universe. In the tradition of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Every Life Is on Fire is a profound testament to how something can come from nothing.
Author: Daniel R. Brooks
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226075747
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
This second edition in just two years offers a considerably revised second chapter, in which information behavior replaces analogies to purely physical systems, as well as practical applications of the authors' theory. Attention is also given to a hierarchical theory of ecosystem behavior, taking note of constraints on local ecosystem members resul.
Author: Carl F Jordan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030851869
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383
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Book Description
Survival of the fittest” is a tautology, because those that are “fit” are the ones that survive, but to survive, a species must be “fit”. Modern evolutionary theory avoids the problem by defining fitness as reproductive success, but the complexity of life that we see today could not have evolved based on selection that favors only reproductive ability. There is nothing inherent in reproductive success alone that could result in higher forms of life. Evolution from a Thermodynamic Perspective presents a non-circular definition of fitness and a thermodynamic definition of evolution. Fitness means maximization of power output, necessary to survive in a competitive world. Evolution is the “storage of entropy”. “Entropy storage” means that solar energy, instead of dissipating as heat in the Earth, is stored in the structure of living organisms and ecosystems. Part one explains this in terms comprehensible to a scientific audience beyond biophysicists and ecosystem modelers. Part two applies thermodynamic theory in non-esoteric language to sustainability of agriculture, and to conservation of endangered species. While natural systems are stabilized by feedback, agricultural systems remain in a mode of perpetual growth, pressured by balance of trade and by a swelling population. The constraints imposed by thermodynamic laws are being increasingly felt as economic expansion destabilizes resource systems on which expansion depends.
Author: Walter T. Grandy Jr.
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191562955
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This book is based on the premise that the entropy concept, a fundamental element of probability theory as logic, governs all of thermal physics, both equilibrium and nonequilibrium. The variational algorithm of J. Willard Gibbs, dating from the 19th Century and extended considerably over the following 100 years, is shown to be the governing feature over the entire range of thermal phenomena, such that only the nature of the macroscopic constraints changes. Beginning with a short history of the development of the entropy concept by Rudolph Clausius and his predecessors, along with the formalization of classical thermodynamics by Gibbs, the first part of the book describes the quest to uncover the meaning of thermodynamic entropy, which leads to its relationship with probability and information as first envisioned by Ludwig Boltzmann. Recognition of entropy first of all as a fundamental element of probability theory in mid-twentieth Century led to deep insights into both statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, the details of which are presented here in several chapters. The later chapters extend these ideas to nonequilibrium statistical mechanics in an unambiguous manner, thereby exhibiting the overall unifying role of the entropy.
