John Scales Avery - Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics

In his recent 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution, Avery combines information theory with thermodynamics to account for the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution. Since the beginning of the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in the 1860s, which states that the entropy, or disorder, of an isolated system tends to increase with time, there has been a debate as to how this law relates to the "ordering" process of evolution. The apparent paradox between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems, according to Avery, has its resolution "in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources."