Biotic Regulation of the Environment

Makarieva A.M., Gorshkov V.G. (2000) Order in physical and living systems: Principal differences in quantitative characteristics and mechanisms of maintenance do not allow a similar description. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute, Preprint No. 2388, 17 pp. Full text (PDF, 1.3 Mb).

Abstract

Closed systems obey the Second Law of Thermodynamics being incapable of spontaneously increasing the degree of their orderliness. In open physical systems existing in the fluxes of external energy there may arise additional macroscopic degrees of freedom (information memory cells). Their number grows with increasing power and orderliness of the external energy flux. Living systems are characterised by molecular (instead of macroscopic) degrees of freedom (information memory cells). In equal energy fluxes, the volume density of biological molecular degrees of freedom exceeds that of macroscopic degrees of freedom of any open physical systems by more than twenty orders of magnitude. This suggests that self-organisation of physical systems in external energy fluxes and self-organisation and evolution of biological and ecological systems are fundamentally different. It follows that non-linear equations of physical kinetics that describe physical self-organisation and have been recently claimed to be capable of explaining evolution and other biological phenomena as well, are not applicable for description of information gain in living systems.