jamenegay{at}ra.rockwell.com (Jim Menegay) wrote in
news:bsv5vr$51r$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> Tim Tyler  wrote in message
> news:... 
 
> You are right in pointing out that Prigogine's theorem only applies
> near equilibrium, and hence does not apply directly to "dissipative
> structures" and does not directly contradict the theory that you 
> and Kay are promoting.  Nonetheless, it is quite a stretch to go 
> from "minimization is unproved" to "it maximizes!".
> 
> Your metaphor of "burning bright" vs "burning
long" is a good way
> to frame the question.  Whichever form of burning takes place, in
> a living system or a non-living system, the laws of thermodynamics
> are upheld.  If you have a fixed flux of negentropy to deal with, it
> doesn't matter whether the system is living or dead - all of that
> negentropy will be dissipated.  The only interesting question is,
> if you have a mixed system of living and non-living dissipators,
> how will they divide up the task of dissipation among themselves, and
> how will this division-of-labor change (evolve) over time.  It is
> certainly to be expected that the living components of the system
> will sieze for themselves a larger and larger role.
> 
> But it is far from clear to me that in doing so, they are maximizing
> anything, nor does it seem obvious to me that they are "burning
> bright". In a steady state, they consume only the fuel that is
> provided.  It seems to me that they are "burning long".


Lotka in 1922 theorized that the criteria for natural selection was the

[moderator's arghhh: ARGHHH! Not "criteria": CRITERION. Don't they teach
Greek any more? - JAH]
 
maximization of power for useful purposes. And in order to transform 
energy to work at the fastest rate, 50% of it will be wasted as entropy 
(I am paraphrasing Odum's 1971 "Environment, Power and Society" in all of 
this). Thus living dissipators will maximize the _rate_ of energy 
utilization, rather than maximizing the total energy utilization, which 
would minimize the rate of entropy production. As far as I can tell, you 
are correct that once all of the available energy has been converted to 
heat the total entropy production will be the same in any case. 

Yours,

Bill Morse
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