Lotka (the guy from Lotka-Voltera equations) said,
"The principle of natural selection reveals itself as capable of
yielding information which the first and second laws of thermodynamics
are not competent to furnish. The two fundamental laws of
thermodynamics are, of course, insufficient to determine the course of
events in a physical system. They tell us
that certain things cannot
happen, but they do not tell us what does happen."
THE GENESIS MODEL PART I: COMPLEXITY, A MEASURE FOR THE EVOLUTION OF
SELF-ORGANISED SYSTEMS OF MATTER
PETER WINIWARTER
Le Bordalier Institute, F-41270 Drone, France.
Received: 7 September 1982
Abstract
Cosmic, molecular, biological and human evolution are analysed in terms of the systems approach introducing a quantitative measure of complexity C = IR (where I is the average selective information per energy state of elementary element, and R is the energy redundancy of the system). A classification of self-organised systems according to their complexity suggests a general law. The first law of genesis: delta C > 0, i.e. the complexity of a self-organised system increases or remains constant. If the first law of genesis holds, the second law of thermodynamics in its microscopic formulation defining entropy in terms of the number of "complexions" of a system is a special case of delta C > 0, valid only in the case that the variety of relations measured by the energy redundancy R of a system remains a positive constant.