Etropy, Information and Evolving Biological Systems
Daniel R. Brooks · Theoria et Historia Scientiarum · 2007
Internal production rules in biological systems require outside energy but are also highly insensitive to the conditions of the external environment from which the energy comes. This leads to the production of historically constrained, spontaneously stable, complex structure. Because the production rules are physically encoded in the structure of the system, biological systems are physical information systems, and their expected behavior over time follows a general entropie dynamic. The autonomy of the production rules leads to an explanation for the reality of natural selection that does not rely on analogy with human economic theory. The historical nature of the elements of diversity at any given time leads to an expectation that the details of responses to external evolutionary forces, such as natural selection, competition, or geological changes, will be highly individualized. Hence, evolutionary regularities will tend to be highly generalized (macroevolutionary) or statistical in nature.