Thermodynamic Formulation of Living Systems and Their Evolution

Abstract

The purpose of this review article is to present some of the recent contributions that show the use of thermodynamics to describe biological systems and their evolution, illustrating the agreement that this theory presents with the field of evolution. Organic systems are described as thermodynamic systems where entropy is produced by the irreversible processes, considering as an established fact that this entropy is eliminated through their frontiers to preserve life. The necessary and sufficient conditions to describe the evolution of life in the negentropy principle are established. Underlining the fact that the necessary condition requires formulation, which is founded on the principle of minimum entropy production for open systems operating near or far from equilibrium, other formulations are mentioned, particularly the information theory, the energy intensiveness hypothesis and the theory of open systems far from equilibrium. Finally suggesting the possibility of considering the lineal formulation as a viable alternative; that is, given the internal constrictions under which a biological system operates, it is possible that the validity of its application is broader than it has been suggested.

Brain activity and cognition: a connection from thermodynamics and information theory

“…However, this connection has not been successfully formalized in neuroscience (Del Castillo and Vera-Cruz, 2011; Collell and Fauquet, 2014). In this respect, the main contribution of the present work is tackling the problem of relating brain activity and cognition from the classical connections between information theory and thermodynamics.…”

“…However, a connection between information theory and thermodynamics has not been formalized in neuroscience yet (Del Castillo and Vera-Cruz, 2011; Collell and Fauquet, 2014). This article aims at further elaborating the idea that we introduced in a previous paper (Collell and Fauquet, 2014), namely to develop a suitable framework to connect information-based models of cognition and thermodynamic models of the brain.…”

Information in Biological Systems and the Fluctuation Theorem

“…For living systems, the information is the cause and the entropy reduction is the result [34][35][36][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]:…”

Reissner-Nordström Black Holes Statistical Ensembles and First-Order Thermodynamic Phase Transition

“…Negative entropy was first introduced for living things by Ervin Schrödinger in 1944 as the reverse concept of entropy, to describe the order that can emerge from chaos [24]. The heat generated by computations in the information theory is other applications for negative entropy concept (see [25][26][27][28] for more discussions). However we consider ∆S and S tot to be physical entropies of RNBHs statistical ensemble containing two horizons which is in accord to positivity condition of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy theorem.…”