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.
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