Non-Equilibrium Approaches to Evolution
Discussion
Akop P. Nazaretyan:
"We need to remember that the Russian physician and philosopher, and one of system theory's founders, Alexander Bogdanov, had focused on the study of non-equilibrium systems in the 1910s (Bogdanov 1996). In the 1930s, Soviet biophysicist Ervin Bauer first used the concept of sustainable non-equilibrium, which was further developed by the Russo-Belgian chemist, Ilya Prigogine. This concept was then philosophically adopted by Jantsch, who dedicated his book to Prigogine. As a result, the concept of non-equilibrium systems was more familiar to Russian scholars than their Western colleagues. In contrast, systems-thinking in Western Europe had almost exclusively focused on the idea of equilibrium (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, W. Ross Ashby and others), so Western scholars still used equilibrium patterns when they developed their forms of Big History in the 1990s. This explains why Big History in Western universities has mostly ignored psychological considerations. In Prigogine's words, ‘equilibrium is blind’ and non-equilibrium gives a system sight (Prigogine 1981). In order to sustain a far-from-equilibrium condition, an organism must work in opposition to the environment's pressure. This work requires free energy to be extracted from other systems. So, in order to continually tap energy from outside and escape from itself becoming a source of energy for its enemies, an organism needs information: It has to orientate itself in the habitat, forecast events and organize its activity in conformity with a dynamic situation.
In other words, it must construct anticipative world models. Without this purposeful and highly sensitive anti-entropy activity, neither long-term, far-from-equilibrium conditions, nor the progressive building up of stages in living matter's non-equilibrium would be possible. For its own part, competition for matter and energy resources has served as an immutable motive for the perfection of modeling procedures, so that the specific weight of information versus matter/energy has been increasing with time. It is on the social stage that the mind became more and more the determinant cause of material evolution. So, as we like to get rid of teleology, or the ‘drive to evolution’ assumption, we still have to assume living matter's drive to sustain highly improbable, far-from-equilibrium conditions. This occurs in a manner similar to Henri Bergson's élan vital, but, in order to avoid the French philosopher's dualism, we must seek the evolutionary premises of living organisms' immanent attribute. As far as Big Historians in the West have used equilibrium patterns, they have tended to confine themselves to discussions of matter/energy interactions and underestimated the information processes. As a result, the history and prehistory of subjectivity, as well as mental and spiritual reality, are viewed as epiphenomena (side effects) of material structures that do not play a role in evolution. In this way, the psycho-physical problem raised by René Descartes was simply removed. This problem has moved from the ‘philosophical’ to the ‘scientific’ realm, as mathematical theories of communication and control have been developed. This move was highlighted when mathematician Norbert Weiner (1950) indicated that information was neither matter nor energy. Accordingly, after the basic question of Big History's methodology (teleological versus causal approach) is solved in favor of a posteriori arguments, attention to the last constitutive in the triad of ‘matter – energy – information’ will come to the fore. Properly, the question is whether information is a significant factor in evolutionary processes or if matter and energy are alone sufficient."
(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf)
The Anti-Entropic Role of Information
Akop P. Nazaretyan:
"In order to sustain a far-from-equilibrium condition, an organism must work in opposition to the environment's pressure. This work requires free energy to be extracted from other systems. So, in order to continually tap energy from outside and escape from itself becoming a source of energy for its enemies, an organism needs information: It has to orientate itself in the habitat, forecast events and organize its activity in conformity with a dynamic situation. In other words, it must construct anticipative world models. Without this purposeful and highly sensitive anti-entropy activity, neither long-term, far-from-equilibrium conditions, nor the progressive building up of stages in living matter's non-equilibrium would be possible. For its own part, competition for matter and energy resources has served as an immutable motive for the perfection of modeling procedures, so that the specific weight of information versus matter/energy has been increasing with time. It is on the social stage that the mind became more and more the determinant cause of material evolution. So, as we like to get rid of teleology, or the ‘drive to evolution’ assumption, we still have to assume living matter's drive to sustain highly improbable, farfrom-equilibrium conditions. This occurs in a manner similar to Henri Bergson's élan vital, but, in order to avoid the French philosopher's dualism, we must seek the evolutionary premises of living organisms' immanent attribute. As far as Big Historians in the West have used equilibrium patterns, they have tended to confine themselves to discussions of matter/energy interactions and underestimated the information processes. As a result, the history and prehistory of subjectivity, as well as mental and spiritual reality, are viewed as epiphenomena (side effects) of material structures that do not play a role in evolution."
(http://www.socionauki.ru/almanac/issues/evolution_2_en/full_text_nazaretyan.pdf)