Entropy Production and the Origin of Life

Abstract

All irreversible processes arise and persist to produce entropy. Entropy production is not incidental to such processes, but rather the very reason for their origin and persistence. Here we take such a thermodynamic perspective on the origin of life, recognizing that entropy production is not only the vital force of life, but the fundamental link between life in the biosphere today and its origin in the Archean. Today the greatest entropy production in the biosphere is due to visible photon absorption and dissipation into heat by organic material in liquid water and the subsequent degradation of the established heat gradient through the water cycle. Following this link back in time to the Archean environment leads to a suggestion for a mechanism for the origin of life based on UV photon absorption and dissipation by RNA and DNA.

Humic acid potentiometric response patterns: out-of-equilibrium properties and species distribution modeling

“…[18]. As can be seen in Table 1, good agreement between the two sets of results was verified and interesting features appeared under neutral pH Values obtained from Costa et al [14] de…”

“…It is interesting to note that this is not a property of all chemical systems (for example, small molecules or homogeneous solutions of pure substances), but out-ofequilibrium stable thermodynamic states are characteristic of complex, highly organized heterogeneous (negentropic) systems, such as humic substances, soils, microbiological systems, networks, root systems, and many others found in natural environments [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. A simple and important relation (for our approach and other related strategies) has been identified in modern out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics [15], which involves free energy and entropy:…”

Linear nonequilibrium thermodynamics of reversible periodic processes and chemical oscillations

“…Another principle is the maximum entropy production law (28,35,36). Maximum entropy production has been proposed to be important in the nonlinear physics of the atmosphere (37,38), of evolution and life in general (28,39). However, the maximum entropy production principle is not well established and has been heavily criticized (40).…”

Proton Exchange in Water/Mycelium System: Transdisciplinary Out-of-Equilibrium Thermodynamic Approach Using Potentiometric Titration

“…At pHe above 7, coef-ficient b decreases until pHe 9, and coefficient c begins a constant increase from 0.7 tending to 1. This behavior of coefficients b and c at pHe between 6 and 8 is consistent with deprotonable species at neutral pH distributed through a large diversity of accessibility conditions or heterogeneity of accessibility, which is an essential organizational characteristic for the emergence relation, or evolution relations, of living systems in water rich environments [7,26]. This neutral pH pattern is also coherent in relation to the modeled component C with an average pK aC of 7.04 and 24% of total deprotonable species.…”