Evolution As Entropy (Science and Its Conceptual Foundations series)

Rating:
Summary: A blizzard
Review: of mathematical equations from information theory with little or no physical substance. One of the authors (Brooks) appears to be a misplaced mathematician who formally became a zoologist. It should be remembered that General Relativity was first submitted for publication by a mathematician (Hilbert) ahead of a physicist (Einstein) by a matter of weeks (but essentially by theft from Einstein, being a former mentor of Einstein)and dismissed in favour of the physicist as lacking any physical insights.

The late Volkenstein succintly criticized the book in his outstanding book "Physical Approaches to Biological Evolution"
as follows:

"As useless as the book cited above is the book 'Evolution as Entropy'by Brooks and Wiley. The basic proposition in this work is that speciation is controlled by the stochastic premises of the second law of thermodynamics. One may only regret that in the 43 years since the publication of Schrodinger's work [the book 'What is Life?'] a book has appeared whose authors do not understand the role of the second law of thermodynamics in living nature...the authors are concerned only with the amount of information and, hence, with entropy. But, by confining oneself to these concepts alone, one can hardly say anything about evolution...in the world of living things the quality or value of information is often of decisive importance...No appropriate methods have yet been worked out for estimation of the quality of information...

The problem of the origin of valuable information is very important to biology. It can be expressed by the formula:

V = log(P/P0)
where P and P0 are respectively the probabilites of achieving a 'purpose' before and after the information is received.

As we have seen, interesting results can be obtained with the aid of the tentative definition of information value as the indispensability, non-redundancy of information. However, the transition from static information theory, in which time does not figure, to dynamic information theory, which includes reception and memorizing and, hence, time and semantics has not yet been realized in physics.

The molecular theory of orgasmic evolution has not yet been united with the synergistic approaches and its development is beset with formidable difficulties... The key problem of evolutionary theory is the relationship between genotype and phenotype studied at different levels...As we have seen, this problem is missing in systems that are studied in the Eigen theory."