Evolution as seen through a thermodynamic macroscope

摘要

In the year we are celebrating Darwin and his efforts in explaining the evolution of species by natural selection, it might be worth while to return to basics and Darwinism at the time of Darwin. Darwin, for sure, was not aware of the precise nature of the material, i.e. the genes, that was subject to selection. From the time of Gregory Mendel, Gregory Bateson and Wilhelm Johansen, the gene and genome resided as ideas that could be used as a basis for calculation. They remained as convenient abstract entities, until the eventual discovery of their actual form and structure as one-dimensionally organized sequences of nucleic acids - the strings of DNA that form the helices discovered much later by Watson and Crick - a discovery which constituted the basis of neo-Darwinism.rnDarwin himself could have been aware of the importance of thermodynamics to biology and surely must have been familiar with the early energetic studies of organisms, as this is also from time to time demonstrated in his works. At least some researchers around his time, e.g. Meyer, Helmholtz, Boltzmann and Gibbs, to mention but a few, did speculate on the importance of resources as a background to competition and survival.