Here's an article in Salon that has a catchy title: God is on the ropes: The brilliant new science that has creationists and the Christian right terrified. The central idea, as far as I can see from this article is
That passage goes right to the heart of the matter. Evolution is no more a violation of the Second Law than life itself is. A more extensive, lighthearted, non-technical treatment of the creationist’s misunderstanding and what’s really going on can be found here.
The driving flow of energy — whether from the sun or some other source — can give rise to what are known as dissipative structures, which are self-organized by the process of dissipating the energy that flows through them.
Actually the first time this idea was published, to the best of my knowledge, was a paper entitled
Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in a special volume of
Mathematical and Computer Modeling entitled
Modeling Complex Biological Systems vol 19 Number 6-8 in 1994. This volume was co edited by Mathew Witten and myself. Later the book
Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (2005) by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan spelled it all out in great detail. My friend, James Kay, was coauthor with Schneider on the original paper. Kay has since passed away.
Read on below and I'll tell you why this all is important.
As far back as 1992 Schneider, Kay and I would discuss the way thermodynamics is the way to explain the origin of life. My own background in nonequilibrium and network thermodynamics and theirs in ecology and engineering made the discussions very fruitful. Eric was a senior scientist at NOAA and also director of the Marine Water Quality Lab of the EPA. James was a product of Canada's University of Waterloo's Department of Environment and Resource Studies.
Here's the idea in a nutshell rephrased from the paper's abstract. The whole issue of near equilibrium thermodynamics vs far from equilibrium thermodynamics in open systems was a hot topic. The whole issue was the way energy gradient were causal agents for all kinds of self organization. You may want to read my diary Have you ever seen a Kalliroscope? Art meets science in a strange way to get more information about this.
The idea has a very timely manifestation as the Jet Stream is causing us to freeze our butts of tonight due to the lessening of its driving gradient.
Yet there is a bigger picture when we look at the planet globally. As the sun heated up the planet, it created a driving gradient that resulted in a special kind of self organization. The evolution of life was not just the origin of species but, more importantly, the evolution of ecosystems. The system that evolved was hierarchical and species that survived did so because of these hierarchies called ecosystems.
It is the self organized ecosystems that enable the increase in the total dissipation of the incoming solar energy. This is a big reason why the predicted mass extinctions will have a more devastating effect than anticipated.
I am grateful that Salon called attention to these ideas once again. To present them as new is disgraceful and to ignore their originators is not ethical.
Fri Feb 20, 2015 at 3:03 PM PT: I guess it is possible to rewrite history. But for the record this needs to be noted as well: In biochemical thermodynamics, Aharon Katchalsky (1914-1972) was an Israeli chemist and biophysical thermodynamicist noted for his efforts, beginning in 1958, to bring the formalism of linear nonequilibrium thermodynamics into biology, particularly in the study of membrane transport. According to the views of American biophysicist Alan Perelson:
“Thermodynamics was one of Katchalsky’s great loves”
Katchalsky’s 1965 Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics in Biophysics, co-written with American epithelial physiologist Peter Curran, is one of the most fluent and cogent textbooks on thermodynamics ever written.Katchalsky was fascinated by the concept of time, in the context of the irreversible directionality of thermodynamics, epitomized as a movement towards disorder, and directional physiology of living organisms, as captured in the general ordering process of evolution. On this topic, in 1965 Katchalsky gave a series of lectures on “The Physics and Biology of Time”, recorded by on film, at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1968, Katchalsky founded the field of network thermodynamics through his associations at Harvard University and the Lewis School of thermodynamics.
Katchalsky's thermodynamics work was cut short, irregularly, when he died during the May 30th, 1972 Lod Airport massacre at Tel Aviv.
Fri Feb 20, 2015 at 3:22 PM PT: This update is from a comment by Karo Michaelian(see links in comment by pico): " Some of the most important works that come to mind (I’m sure I am forgetting others) are Boltzmann, Onsager, Prigogine, Nicolis, Babloyanz, Wicken, Zotin, Ulanowicz, Lloyd, Pagels, Swenson, Morel, Fleck, Kay, Schneider, Dewar. The references to these works can be found in our articles or by doing a Google search. The journalistic report in Quanta on the paper of England has given public exposure to these ideas and that is a good thing. Papers of this kind are usually rejected by the traditional origin of life journals, principally because of a general lack of appreciation for non-equilibrium thermodynamics. That is now starting to change and we must be grateful for the publicity, but, at the same time, it is important to be fair in attributing credit where credit is due. It represents, after all, many years of hard work performed by many generations of scientists throughout the world on this subject."