Exploring Life: Combining Ideas from Ecology, Business, and Evolution

Jenn Hoskins
21st January, 2024

Exploring Life: Combining Ideas from Ecology, Business, and Evolution
Image Source: © Natural Science News. This image is an artistic rendition.
Life’s fundamental characteristics – its ability to evolve, maintain internal order, and reproduce – have long been subjects of scientific inquiry. Defining ‘life’ itself proves surprisingly difficult, and understanding how life arose and continues to function on Earth remains a major challenge. Researchers at the Biosphere Research Institute have recently proposed a framework integrating systems theory and thermodynamics to address these questions[1]. This approach aims to provide a unified explanation for the organization, functionality, and evolutionary trajectory of life. The study begins by acknowledging the difficulties in defining life, highlighting that any definition is inherently linked to the levels at which life is organized – from molecules to ecosystems. It then explores the idea that all life on Earth may be fundamentally interconnected, representing a single, vast system. This concept builds on the understanding that living organisms aren’t isolated entities, but are deeply embedded within and reliant on their environment. A core component of this framework is thermodynamics, the study of energy and its transformations. Living systems, despite appearing highly ordered, don’t violate the second law of thermodynamics – which states that entropy (disorder) always increases in a closed system. Instead, they maintain order by constantly taking in energy from their surroundings and releasing waste heat, effectively exporting entropy. The researchers outline how thermodynamic principles apply across all levels of biological organization, from the molecular processes within cells to the interactions between species in an ecosystem. Systems theory complements this thermodynamic perspective. It focuses on how components interact within a whole system, emphasizing concepts like self-assembly, self-organization, and emergence. Self-assembly refers to the spontaneous formation of ordered structures from disordered components – a process seen in everything from virus formation to the creation of cellular structures[2]. Self-organization goes further, describing how systems can develop complex patterns and behaviors without external control. Emergence refers to the appearance of novel properties at higher levels of organization that aren’t predictable from the properties of the individual components. These processes are often non-linear, meaning small changes can have disproportionately large effects, and involve feedback loops where the output of a system influences its own input. The study highlights how these principles can explain key evolutionary patterns. For example, the directionality of evolution – the tendency for life to become more complex over time – can be understood through the lens of maximum entropy production. This theory suggests that systems tend to evolve in ways that maximize the rate at which they dissipate energy. This concept resonates with earlier work showing that the energetic cost of building different amino acids influences their prevalence in proteins[3]. Organisms may favor using less energetically expensive amino acids in frequently used proteins, enhancing metabolic efficiency. Furthermore, the researchers apply this framework to ecological succession – the predictable process of change in an ecological community over time. The intermediate disturbance hypothesis, which proposes that ecosystems are most diverse when disturbances are moderate, can also be explained by maximum entropy production. Moderate disturbances create opportunities for new species to colonize, increasing energy flow and entropy production. The study also addresses seemingly paradoxical behaviors like altruism. From a thermodynamic perspective, altruistic acts can be seen as increasing the overall entropy production of the system, even if they reduce the fitness of the individual performing the act. Similarly, the evolution of multicellularity and symbiotic relationships – where different species benefit from interacting – can be understood as strategies for maximizing energy capture and dissipation. The formation of complex structures, like gels, also follows similar principles of nonequilibrium self-assembly, driven by entropy production[4].

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References

Main Study

1) Systems theory, thermodynamics and life: Integrated thinking across ecology, organization and biological evolution.

Published 18th January, 2024

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2024.105123

Related Studies

2) Self-assembling outside equilibrium: emergence of structures mediated by dissipation.

https://doi.org/10.1039/c9cp01088b

3) Metabolic efficiency and amino acid composition in the proteomes of Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Issue: Vol 99, Issue 6, Mar 2002

4) Understanding Gelation as a Nonequilibrium Self-Assembly Process.

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.8b02320


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