Bill writes:

>It is a fascinating subject. Glenn has tried to give a short answer, but 
>I don't think there is a short answer. In fact the association of 
>evolution with entropy (the Second Law) goes back at least to Lotka, 
>writing in 1922.

It actually goes back much further than that, all the way back to the origins
of thermodynamics itself. Modern thermodynamics was the first great
re-interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

Although it may seem odd on first hearing, Darwinian evolutionary biology,
thermodynamics, and information theory are the same subject, and they have been
philosophically intertwined from their very beginnings. The line of thought
that leads from Darwin to Boltzmann to Shannon is not only direct, but was
highly intended by each of its participants. 

Rudolph Clausius (1865) first defined the term entropy, S, as that fraction of
energy that is lost to the pool of irrecoverable heat in every ordered
transaction. Entropy literally means “in one turn.” The mental model that
Clausius employed was that of the gearing system in a grist mill. Some fraction
of the ordered energy in every turn of the primary drive shaft is never
returned to the subsequent gears; rather, it is irrecoverably lost to an
inaccessible pool of heat due to friction. Ludwig Boltzmann (1872) almost
immediately redefined Clausius’ entropy, not as a fluid-like, bulk quality of
heat, as Carnot, Kelvin, Clausius, and Maxwell had envisioned the process, but
rather as a population of particles inexorably moving from a state of order to
one of increasingly greater disorder. This is called the "microscopic"
interpretation in physics, although it could just as easily be termed the
"populational" interpretation.

The startling nature of Boltzmann’s reinterpretation was due wholly to his
great enthusiasm and deep understanding of the mechanistic explanation that
Darwin had put forward regarding selection operating on the smallest of
variations within a population of variants. Boltzmann was so entranced by
Darwin’s ideas that he wrote in his 1905 book, "Populare Schriften", 
“If someone asked me what name we should give this century, I would answer
without hesitation that this is the century of Darwin.” 

Ilya Prigogine (1984), Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, wrote that Boltzmann was
deeply attracted by the idea of evolution, and his ambition was to become the
“Darwin” of matter. Boltzmann’s approach had astounding successes. It has
left a deep imprint on the history of physics. The discovery of the quantum by
Planck was an outcome of Boltzmann’s approach." I fully share the enthusiasm
with which Schroedinger wrote in 1929 that ‘[Boltzmann’s] line of thought
[Darwinism] may be called my first love in science. No other has ever thus
enraptured me or will ever do so again.’" (Prigogine 1980).

If you wish to read a bit more about the connection between evolutionary
theory, thermodynamics and information theory, let me immodestly recommend an
informal note that I wrote on the history of the ideas for the Bulletin of the
Ecological Society on the death of Claude Shannon two years ago. The note is
at:

     http://www.aics-research.com/research/esa-shannon.pdf

Wirt Atmar
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