Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
14.5 The Gnergy Principle and Biological Evolution
During the past several decades, many biologists have been suggesting that the
Second Law is the driving force for the biological evolution. Some even asserted
“Evolution as Entropy” (Brooks and Wiley 1986). It is agreed that the Second Law
is a necessary condition for life, but it is obviously not a sufficient one, since
thermodynamic forces alone are not sufficient to drive living processes. If thermo-
dynamic forces were sufficient to produce life, life should have originated at the
time of the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, since the thermodynamic force of the
Universe must have been at its peak at that time. The thermodynamic force has been
decreasing ever since the Big Bang and it was not until about 12 billion years after
the Big Bang (3.5 billion years ago) that the first form of life emerged on this planet.
What took it so long? It was certainly not due to the lack of thermodynamic force.
It is suggested here that the necessary and sufficient condition for life is a combina-
tion of
thermodynamic force
(i.e., free energy) and
information
(i.e., the environ-
mental and boundary conditions needed for self-reproduction or self-replication on
this planet), the combination of which isbeing referred to as gnergy (see Sect.
responsible for life to become satisfied by the surface of this planet.
The author postulated in (Ji 1991, pp. 152-163, 230-237) that all self-organizing
processes in the Universe, including the evolution of life, are driven by gnergy, the
complementary union of
information
(gn-) and
energy
(
Consistent with this thesis, it was found in Sect.
11.3
that the single-molecule
experimental data on cholesterol oxidase can be interpreted only in terms of both
conformational energy
and
evolutionary information
(i.e., gnergy).
If the above reasoning is valid, it may be concluded that, to understand the
biological evolution in its fullest detail, it would be necessary to develop a new field
of inquiry wherein both
thermodynamics
(i.e., the study of energy and entropy) and
informatics
(i.e., the study of information, taking into account not only its
amount
as is
done by current information theories but also its
meaning
and
values
(Volkenstein
2009, p. 160)) play fundamental roles in modern biology on an equal footing. Such a
new field of study may be referred to as “gnergetics.” So defined, gnergetics would be
indistinguishable from or accommodate “infostatistical mechanics” (Sect.
4.9
), the
EvoDevo space (Fig.
14.3
), “synergetics” of Haken (1983), the “theory of self-organi-
zation” (Prigogine 1977, 1980; Kondepudi and Prigogine 1998), “infodynamics” of
(1995), and the Gibsonian information discussed by Turvey and Kugler (1984).
14.6 The Thermodynamics and Informatics of the Control
Underlying Evolution and Development
There are three essential ingredients for any goal-directed processes, including
development (the goal of which is for a fertilized egg to become a mature adult
organism) and evolution (the goal of which is assumed to be the development or the
