Evolution as Biological Thermodynamics | Wired Science | Wired.com

Evolution as Biological Thermodynamics | Wired Science | Wired.com: "Evolution as Biological Thermodynamics

* By Brandon Keim Email Author
* February 13, 2008 |
* 10:56 am |
* Categories: Uncategorized
*

Darwin213
When Guy Hoelzer runs computer simulations of organisms living in the modeling equivalent of a featureless plain, he sees them break into different species — even though there’s no reason for natural selection to take place.

That preliminary but tantalizing finding hints at some larger phenomenon driving the mechanisms of neo-Darwinian evolution. Hoelzer thinks the phenomenon is self-organization: combine energy with complex networked interaction and order will emerge.

In the abstract of 'On the logical relationship between natural selection and self-organization,' published in 2006 in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, he described natural selection as 'a mechanism that coordinates the coevolution of species in an ecosystem to effectively capture, process and dissipate solar energy into the earth’s shadow … an emergent process founded on the same thermodynamic imperatives that are thought to underlie all self-organization.'"