Excerpt

The reconciliation of evolution—the theory underlying all of biology and society—and physical theory, which explains energy and matter and underlies most current technology and engineering, remains one of the most important problems in science. A synthesis of these very different theories is essential for creating a general, predictive theory of complex systems (Mitchell 2009; Thurner, Hanel, and Klimek 2018). Some of the deepest unanswered questions in science, such as the origins of life or the sustainability of future human societies, also hinge on a theory that can articulate the physical and biological worlds and produce extrapolations to entirely new situations (Elmqvist et al. 2021).

An important step in this direction was taken a century ago by Alfred Lotka (1922a) with a very simple deductive observation that was then, and it is now, as powerful as it is intriguing. His insight, following closely on developments in statistical physics and specifically the work of Boltzmann and the second law of thermodynamics, is simple and direct. It first recognizes that 1) any living organism requires “available energy,” which must be harvested from its environment, to live and thrive. It follows that 2) organisms that can harvest more energy from their environment relative to others will do better in the sense of sustaining larger numbers of their kind and more mass. This putative advantage is then interpreted by Lotka as the physical instantiation of natural selection (Lotka 1922a, 1922b), equating evolutionary fitness to the ability to obtain energy inflows from the environment. In Lotka’s own words, this principle “may be expressed by saying that natural selection tends to make this energy flux a maximum, so far as compatible with the constraints to which the system is subject” (Lotka 1922a). This idea must be true because it follows from the laws of physics: This is what it makes it powerful.

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