Alfred Lotka
(1880-1949)
Alfred J. Lotka was a mathematician, chemist, ecologist, and statistician of population dynamics, especially the relationship between predators and their prey.
He hoped to show that evolution could be described by a scientific law, like the mathematical principles of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. Where the second law of thermodynamics is
regressive, the entropy or disorder always increasing to a maximum for an equibrium state, he hoped for an evolutionary law as an maximal principle and a "directed process," but he was hesitant to call it
progressive.
Lotka proposed the theory that the Darwinian concept of natural selection could be quantified as a physical law. The law that he proposed was that the selective principle of evolution was one which favoured the maximum useful energy flow transformation. The general systems ecologist
Howard T. Odum later applied Lotka's proposal as a central guiding feature of his work in ecosystem ecology. Odum called Lotka's law the "maximum power principle."
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