Notes On Equilibrium Variants Of Life

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IoHT Publications Chicago: November 18, 2008 - by Libb Thims

“Notes on Equilibrium Variants of Life” In thermodynamics, an ongoing, albeit unpronounced, debate of sorts exists as to the nature of the variant of “equilibrium” of the life process. The question remains: is life an in equilibrium process, an out of equilibrium process, or some variation therein, being labeled with possible terms such as “far-from-equilibrium”, near-equilibrium, or punctuated equilibrium, etc.? To give a common opinion on this matter, in 2001 American biophysicist Donald Haynie stated, in his university-level teaching textbook Biological Thermodynamics, that “a living organism, be it an amoeba, a bombardier beetle, or a wildebeest, is an open system [and] is therefore never at equilibrium.1 Likewise, according to the 2008 views of authors Sanford Kwinter and Cynthia Davidson, “life is a case of maintaining a very delicate structure, ourselves, a significant distance from equilibrium at nearly all times, and at others—in order to evolve, grow and invent—very far from equilibrium indeed.”2 As such, according this commonly accepted view, a human being is never at equilibrium, in life, but is in fact a significant distance from equilibrium. Yet, studies show that when people are polled and asked what percent of their life is found to be in equilibrium and what percent is found to be out of equilibrium, a converse answer arises in that people reason that about 40 percent of the average person’s life will exist in a state of equilibrium, in the sense of a state of life being balanced, in control, or stable.3 In any event, these accepted-as-truth far-from equilibrium views of life, stem, in large part, from the thermodynamics writings of Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine who in 1947 began to maintain the strict habit of opening each new publication with a statement or argument to the effect that the classical thermodynamics of German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1865) and American engineer Willard Gibbs (1876), such as is captured in the logic of the free energy minimization principle, is inapplicable to the study of life. In 1955, the opening page of his Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes states “a serious limitation of classical thermodynamics as a general tool for the macroscopic description of physico-chemical processes lies in the fact that its method is based on such concepts as reversible processes and true equilibrium states.” He continues, “it is well known that the steady flow of energy which originates from the sun prevents the atmosphere of the earth from reaching a state of thermodynamic equilibrium … obviously then, the majority of phenomena studied in biology and other subjects are irreversible processes which take place outside the equilibrium state.”4 The subject was so paramount in Prigogine’s mind, that he devoted the opening words of his 1977 Nobel Lecture “Time, Structure and Fluctuations” to an effort to discredit the standard characterization of thermodynamic equilibrium by a free energy minimum.5 At present, this Prigoginean view is so ingrained in the cultural mind that many a physicist will freely declare to being, themselves, dissipative structures, living in a state far from equilibrium; however, cumbersome this may sound. Yet when the Carnot “system” model of a section of the rotating earth’s surface is viewed in respect to the cyclical heat inputs of the sun, as shown below, a different picture emerges; in the

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sense that working systems are put first in contact with a hot body, for approximately twelve-hours, and then put in contact with a cold body, for approximately twelve hours:6 In this perspective, earth-bound biospheric systems seem not to be continuously far at bay from equilibrium, but rather to be set out of equilibrium at the start of each day and

then, following the setting of the hot sun, left to settle into an end-of-day equilibrium state, which would invariably be characterized by a daily free energy minimum, unique to each system. In this direction, some, in question of the assumed far-from-equilibrium Prigoginean view of life, have recently begun to arrive at a more realistic picture of how one might be able to quantify equilibrium in the biosphere. One of the first to see the inconsistency in the logic of Prigogine was Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev, who in 1977, in opposition to the views of Prigogine, wrote up a classical thermodynamics based view of the process of life, operating at what Gladyshev called “quasi-equilibrium”.7 In more detail, in his follow-up 1997 book Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings, Gladyshev quite readily pointed out, in respect to the initial-day/final-night states of heat input and heat release patterns characteristic of the earth’s surface, that “the thermodynamics of a system, considers only the initial and final states and is not interested whether the process under study occurs under equilibrium or non-equilibrium conditions.”8 In a similar manner, in 2005 authors Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan ask, in question of the term far-from-equilibrium:9

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“Is life a far-from-equilibrium system? If so, how far are organisms from equilibrium? And what does this phrase mean? In fact, the term far-from-equilibrium may be more applicable to backfiring engines than smoothly running life-forms.” They note that “far-from-equilibrium systems, a phrase that was, to the best of our knowledge, never defined by Prigogine and the Brussels school, seem to occur when sufficient but not excessive energy materially cycles.” In addition, according to Schneider and Sagan, “the tradition in nonequilibrium thermodynamics has been to define far-from-equilibrium events after the first bifurcation.” In respect to life, however, they note that many biological liquid systems operate under equilibrium thermodynamic conditions and that although “life itself seems to be a far-from-equilibrium phenomenon” it is, in reality, a collection of processes and structure, made of constitutive chemical reactions, requiring low activation energies, and that “life is made up of [so] many reactions in the near equilibrium range [that it] may not be so ‘far’ from equilibrium as has been suggested.”9 References 1. Haynie, Donald. (2001). Biological Thermodynamics (section: Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and life, pgs 173-74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2. Kwinter, Sanford and Davidson, Cynthia. (2008). Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture, (pg. 12). Actar. 3. Thims, Libb. (2006). “Equilibrium Poll [N=19]”, Chicago: IoHT Publications. 4. Prigogine, Ilya. (1955). Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes. Charles C. Thomas. 5. Prigogine, Ilya. (1977). “Time Structure and Fluctuations”, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 08. 6. Thermodynamic system URL: http://www.eoht.info/page/Thermodynamic+system 7. Gladyshev, Georgi, P. (1978). "On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution", Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 75, Issue 4, Dec 21, pp. 425-44. 8. Gladyshev, Georgi, P. (1997). Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living Beings (pgs. 1-2). Commack, New York: Nova Science Publishers. 9. Schneider, Eric D. and Sagan, Dorion. (2005). Into the Cool - Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, (pgs. 86-87). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.