Related papers: Thermodynamic Function of Life
The backbone of nonequilibrium thermodynamics is the stability structure, where entropy is related to a Lyapunov function of thermodynamic equilibrium. Stability is the background of natural selection: unstable systems are temporary, and…
The dynamics of molecular collisions in a macroscopic body are encoded by the parameter Thermodynamic entropy - a statistical measure of the number of molecular configurations that correspond to a given macrostate. Directionality in the…
One of the important challenges facing high resolution molecular dynamics calculations is to reproduce biological functions that occur in the macroscopic world and involve macroscopic variables. Some of these functions can be well described…
Vegetation often understood merely as the result of long-term climate conditions. However, vegetation itself plays a fundamental role in shaping Earth's climate by regulating the energy, water, and biogeochemical cycles across terrestrial…
Inside every living cell is the cytoplasm: a fluid mixture of thousands of different macromolecules, predominantly proteins. This mixture is where most of the biochemistry occurs that enables living cells to function, and it is perhaps the…
Cyclic, nonhierarchical interactions among biological species represent a general mechanism by which ecosystems are able to maintain high levels of biodiversity. However, species coexistence is often possible only in spatially extended…
Photosynthesis is arguably the fundamental process of Life, since it enables energy from the Sun to enter the food-chain on Earth. It is a remarkable non-equilibrium process in which photons are converted to many-body excitations which…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Skeptics of biological evolution often claim that evolution requires a decrease in entropy, giving rise to a conflict with the second law of thermodynamics. This argument is fallacious because it neglects the large increase in entropy…
Self-propulsion allows living systems to display unusual collective behavior. Unlike passive systems in thermal equilibrium, active matter systems are not constrained by conventional thermodynamic laws. A question arises however as to what…
The thermodynamic dissipation theory for the origin of life asserts a thermodynamic imperative for the origin of life, suggesting that the fundamental molecules of life originated as self-organized molecular photon dissipative structures…
Reciprocal relations correlate fairly accurately a great variety of experimental results. Nevertheless, the concepts of statistical fluctuations, and microscopic reversibility - the bases of the accepted proof of the relations by Onsager -…
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
The concept of entropy has been pivotal in the formulation of thermodynamics. For systems driven away from thermal equilibrium, a comparable role is played by entropy production and dissipation. Here we provide a comprehensive picture how…
Human-created engines and evolutionarily optimized molecular motors exhibit sophisticated design in order to harvest chemical or thermal energy for generating unidirectional motion. The complexity of these motors makes their random…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
We review some basic issues of the life-prescribed development of the Earth's system and the Earth's atmosphere and discourse the unity of Earth's type of life in physical and transcendental divisions. In physical division, we exemplify and…
The transformation of organic molecules into the simplest self-replicating living system,a microorganism, is accomplished from a unique event or rare events that occurred early in the Universe. The subsequent dispersal on cosmic scales and…
Substantial grounds exist to doubt the universal validity of the Newtonian Paradigm that requires a pre-stated, fixed phase space. Therefore, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, stated only for fixed phase spaces, is also in doubt. The…