Order from disorder: the thermodynamics of complexity in biology

Stress‐Induced Premature Senescence: Essence of Life, Evolution, Stress, and Aging

“…The building of organizational structure and associated processes degrades the imposed gradient more effectively than if the dynamic and kinetic pathways for those structures were unavailable. 21,22 This corollary of the second law holds for all living systems from cells to ecosystems and describes their expected behavior. Prigogine and others have shown that dissipative structures self-organize through fluctuations and instabilities that lead to irreversible bifurcations and new stable system states.…”

“…This paradigm provides for a thermodynamically consistent explanation of why there is life, including the origin of life, biological growth, development of ecosystems, patterns of biological evolution observed in the fossil record, stress response, and aging. 21,22,24,25 Maintenance of life, ontogenic (growth, development, and differentiation) and phylogenic evolution of living processes, from cells to ecosystems, is the response to the thermodynamic imperative of dissipating gradients. Biological growth occurs when the system adds more of the same types of pathways for degrading imposed gradients.…”

“…This can explain, for instance, the phylogenic appearance of more and more complex multicellular organisms with more and more complex metabolic pathways using and degrading the energy present in their environment, thus optimizing the production and use of free energy in function of the available substrate. 21,22,24,25 At the present stage of evolution, mechanisms exist, such as predation, parasitism, infectious diseases, aging, and age-linked risks of getting sick, being caught by a predator, or starving, that lead to a decrease in the number of individuals of a species. We have seen that a possible criterion of growth, differentiation, development, and evolution, is the capacity of cells and organisms to degrade energy gradients from the environment, which is the capacity to produce more entropy per unit of time and moles of molecules entering the cellular system (i.e., input fluxes) and per unit of volume or weight of the system considered.…”

Local Interactions and the Emergence of a Twitter Small-World Network

“…Small-world networks are classes of real-world networks which interpolate between random networks [1] and E. Ch'ng regular lattice [2], a characteristic of complex systems, which exist in a state between order and disorder [3] [4]. Small-world networks are also characterised by average shortest path length and high clustering coefficient [5] [ 6], and is associated with efficient information transfer, global integration and regional specialisation.…”

Empirical Evidence for a Law of Information Growth

“…Here the tradeoff is between configurational and thermal entropies. It has been suggested [1] that such local negative changes are a necessary consequence of the dynamics of some system behavior.…”