In a series of comprehensive papers and three important books, Corning surveys a wide range of literature on the second law, and criticizes what he sees as the paradigmatic (mis)use of the second law of thermodynamics to explain biological evolution and calls for a new paradigm he names "thermoeconomics."

In a 2020 revision of his 2002 paper "Thermoeconomics: Beyond the Second Law," Corning provides many examples of confusion and misunderstanding of the physical concepts of energy and more important entropy and its opposite negative entropy.

• Jesn-Baptiste Lamarck: energy is "the power of life"
• Herbert Spencer: energy was the driver of an inherent evolutionary trend toward increased complexity, both in nature and in human societies
• Ludwig Boltzmann, Lotka: defined evolutionary progress in energetic terms
• Erwin Schrödinger: characterized a living system as, quintessentially, an embodiment of thermodynamic order -- what he termed 'negative entropy".
• Ilya Prigogine: discovered a “universal law of evolution”
• Daniel Brooks and E.i.Wiley: laid claim to a “natural law of history.”
• Rod Swenson: "law of maximum entropy production” forms “the cornerstone to a theory of general evolution."
• Jeffrey Wicken: characterizes entropy as a “teleomatic drive” and “Speciation is driven by the randomizing directives of the second law,”
• Harold Morowitz: evolutionary process was the necessary result of “the constant pumping” of energy, mainly from the sun and “the flow of energy through the system acts to organize that system."
• Eric Schneider and James Kay: “life emerges because thermodynamics mandates order from disorder whenever sufficient thermodynamic gradients and environmental conditions exist.”
• Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan: Life is organized by energy flows.” It was “sired by energy flow.” It is “ruled” by energy and its transformations. Indeed, the second law of thermodynamics defines the very “purpose” of life. “Nature abhors a gradient,” The emergence of life is “causally connected to the second law,” The second law is a force that “governs,” “organizes,” “selects,” “generates,” “determines,” “mandates,” “pushes” and “leads to” biological structure and organization.

Corning summarizes: There are, needless to say, major differences among these theories, but the common theme is the claim that biological evolution has been “driven” by forces, or propensities, or tendencies that are inherent in nature, as opposed to the workings of natural selection.

Corning cites two suggestions for a fourth thermodynamic law:

• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his classic 1971 book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process
• Stuart Kauffman in his 2000 book Investigations: an inherent tendency for the biosphere to become increasingly diverse and complex. Kauffman regularly invokes “self-organization” and “autocatalysis” as inherent ordering influences in evolution.

To reiterate, some of the flaws in what could loosely be called the “thermodynamics paradigm” include the following: Many of these Second Law theorists seriously misinterpret and thus misuse the concept of entropy; others utilize deficient concepts of “information” that cannot be operationalized; many blur the crucial distinction between statistical or structural forms of “order”, on the one hand, and evolved, goal-directed, functional “organization”; not least, they have been misled by some of the very “gods” of physics into conflating energetic order/disorder and physical order, which in many cases is not correct. But most serious of all, these theorists for the most part discount what I call the “ground-zero” premise of the biological sciences, namely, that life is a contingent phenomenon and that survival and reproduction is the “paradigmatic problem” of all living organisms. Life is quintessentially an always at-risk “survival enterprise” (and a reproduction enterprise, of course), the parameters of which are locally defined by the nature of the organism and its specific environment; the precise organism-environment relationship is a key determining factor in the ongoing evolutionary process.

As noted above both Erwin Schrödinger and Ilya Prigogine helped to promote an expansive definition of the entropy law that, I maintain, is both unwarranted and significantly overstates the role of entropy in the natural world. To reiterate, some of the confusion associated with the use of thermodynamics in evolutionary theory is the result of a major theoretical segue that occurred with the development of statistical mechanics in the latter 19th century. The problem arose when some leading theorists of that era assumed that there is an isomorphism between statistical order, energetic order, and physical order. As a consequence, subsequent generations of physicists and laymen alike have often uncritically accepted the claim that the entropy law applies to everything in the universe. Thus, biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1952/1949) wrote: “according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the general direction of physical events is toward decrease of order and organization.” Likewise, biologists Brooks and Wiley (1988, p. 36) speak of a general physical law that “predicts that entropy will increase during any real series of processes.” Georgescu-Roegen (1971, 1979, p. 1039) assured us that “matter matters too” — the material world is also subject to the Second Law. Physicist David Layzer (1988, p. 23) asserts that “all natural processes generate entropy.”

More surprising, physicist Stephen Hawking (1988, p. 102) refers to (quote): “a physical quantity called entropy, which measures the degree of disorder of a system. It is a matter of common experience that disorder will tend to increase if things are left to themselves. (One has only to stop making repairs around the house to see that!)” Similarly, physicist Roger Penrose (1989, p. 308) informs us that “the entropy of a system is a measure of its manifest disorder [his italics]...Thus, [a] smashed glass and spilled water on the floor is in a higher entropy state than an assembled and filled glass on the table; the scrambled egg has a higher entropy than the fresh unbroken egg; the sweetened coffee has a higher entropy than the undissolved sugar lump in unsweetened coffee.” It follows, then, that “the second law of thermodynamics asserts that the entropy of an isolated system increases with time” (p. 309). Penrose goes on to associate the Second Law specifically with the “relentless and universal principle” that organization is continually breaking down.

One problem with this formulation is that we know of no evidence for the assertion that the material world has an inherent tendency to dissipate. If this were the case, presumably somebody by now would have calculated the depreciation rate for the Earth as it progressively deteriorated. Though stars burn out and aggregates of individual gas molecules may readily dissipate, the stable molecular bonds that hold solid chunks of matter together do not spontaneously break down...

Equally dubious is the claim that the general trend in the universe is toward increased entropy. Indeed, entropy has often been portrayed as a dark force which somehow governs the fate of our species and dooms our progeny to oblivion -- in the eventual “heat death” of the universe, a practice that dates back to Clausius (Corning 2005). His dour vision has long since become the conventional wisdom of the western scientific establishment. However, there is reason to doubt the conventional wisdom. In a nutshell, the heat death scenario overlooks the role of gravity. Alongside the well-documented trend toward increased entropy in the universe, new “free” energy is being aggregated as we speak in the ongoing process of star formation and stellar nucleosynthesis. These energy-ordering processes are “driven” by the non-entropic influence of gravity, in utter contradiction to the Second Law!

A corollary assumption of the heat death scenario, and one of the pillars of modern physics, is that dissipated available energy ultimately goes to “equilibrium” (i.e., maximum entropy) in the vacuum of space and forms part of the residue of “background radiation” that is suffused throughout the universe. The problem with this scenario, it seems increasingly evident, is that the vacuum is not a vacuum. Rather, we simply cannot detect and measure what is going on out there. It has been a major embarrassment to cosmology for some years that perhaps 95% of the predicted energy and mass of the universe is missing and unaccounted for. Various theorists have struggled with this and other important paradoxes (such as quantum entanglement and quantum non-locality).

Entropy will have little to do with it...

More to the point, it is evident that entropy has had relatively little to do with biological evolution. Entropy is a state function like temperature or pressure; it cannot be equated to a “drive” or a “force” any more than temperature can be equated with energy. Entropy represents a constraint on thermodynamic processes, not a cause of them; it measures the energetic “wastes” associated with any real-world dynamic process. It’s a cost of doing business in the biosphere.6

Contrary to Schrödinger’s formulation, we believe that it more accurate to say that living organisms feed upon available energy to create thermodynamic (energetic) order, as well as structural and functional organization, rather than saying that they feed upon a statistical measure called “order”. Furthermore, we believe that energetic order, physical order and biological organization are not equivalent to one another. But most important, we believe that the role of energy in evolution can best be defined and understood in economic terms. By this we mean that living systems do not simply absorb and utilize available energy without cost. They must “capture” the energy required to build biomass and do work; they must invest energy in development, maintenance, reproduction and further evolution. To put it baldly, life is a contingent and labor-intensive activity, and the energetic benefits must outweigh the costs (inclusive of entropy) if the system is to survive. Indeed, energetic “profitability” is essential to growth and reproduction. This could be called the “First Law of Thermoeconomics.”

Accordingly, there are three core assumptions that provide the conceptual framework for thermoeconomics: (1) life is a contingent phenomenon, and “adaptation” to specific, varying environmental/physical conditions and constraints is an ongoing challenge for all living systems; (2) functional variation is endemic in nature and any form of biological order (or organization) is always subject to stringent testing and “editing” by natural selection; and (3) living systems are by their very nature “purposive” (cybernetic) in character, and their adaptation and evolution over time have been shaped in part by functional “control information” (see Corning 2005, 2007).

This paradigm sharply contrasts with the thermodynamics paradigm, which allows (and even invites) externally driven models of living organisms, and with attendant “laws” of evolution. Many of these theorists (by no means all of them) assume that available energy is a free good that can simply be poured into a living system and that the environment presents at most only limited “constraints”. In contrast, the thermoeconomic perspective is fundamentally Darwinian in that it assumes that the “struggle for existence” is a process in which living systems must unfailingly earn a living in the “economy of nature.” In this paradigm, there is no “order for free,” as Stuart Kauffman would have it; all forms of order must also have a Darwinian “seal of approval.”

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