Related papers: Evolution and Earth's Entropy

For several independent reasons, the idea that notorious sources of entropy could exist in the Universe has been recently revived. Taking advantage of a new framework accounting for non-equilibrium processes in cosmology, we explicitly…

Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will…

We consider the generation of entropy when particle pairs are created at a cosmological level. Making a reduction via the particle number basis, we compute the classical limit for the entropy generation due to the evolution of the matter…

Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…

Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…

We develop a classification scheme for the evolutionary state of planets based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of their coupled systems, including the presence of a biosphere and the possibility of what we call an agency-dominated…

Water content and the internal evolution of terrestrial planets and icy bodies are closely linked. The distribution of water in planetary systems is controlled by the temperature structure in the protoplanetary disk and dynamics and…

The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…

The interaction between a planet located in the inner region of a disc and the warped outer region is studied. We consider the stage of evolution after the planet has cleared-out a gap, so that the planetary orbit evolves only under the…

The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds…

Water and land surfaces on a planet interact with gases in the atmosphere and with radiation from the star. These interactions define the environments that prevail on the planet, some of which may be more amenable to prebiotic chemistry,…

A pair of symmetric expressions for the second law of thermodynamics is put forward. The conservation and transfer of entropy is discussed and applied to problems like biology, culture and life itself. A new explanation is given to the…

Many living organisms on Earth are strongly dependent on water, the natural liquid of the planet. A possible reason for that could be the conjecture of Ryoji Takahashi [Phys. Lett. A 141, 15 (1989)] that water microdrops release negentropy…

The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…

Understanding processes that determine the global circulation of the atmosphere is necessary for long-term weather forecasting and climate studies which are critical for ensuring energy security. Processes in the atmosphere depend on many…

Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…

The climate and circulation of a terrestrial planet are governed by, among other things, the distance to its host star, its size, rotation rate, obliquity, atmospheric composition and gravity. Here we explore the effects of the last of…

An observer increases in relative entropy as it receives information from what it is observing. In a system of only an observer and the observed, an increase in the relative entropy of the observer is a decrease in the relative entropy of…

The internal heat loss, or cooling, of a planet determines its structure and evolution. We study the effects of irradiation, metallicity of the atmosphere, heat redistribution, stratospheres, and the depth where the heat redistribution…