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ENTROPY: THE GREAT ILLUSION.

The concept of entropy has been particularly fascinating to biological theorists, for reasons which are unclear. Even R. A. Fisher was moved to draw a comparison between his Fundamental Theorem of natural selection (according to which mean fitness increases or is constant) and the corresponding property of entropy in physical systems, although he was careful to list a number of important differences between the two. It is now apparent that the validity of the Fundamental Theorem is dependent on so many restrictive assumptions that it cannot be regarded as a useful unifying evolutionary principle, although it does have considerable technical utility. Other attempts to apply thermodynamic concepts to biology have, outside of biochemical energetics and purely descriptive measures of genetic and ecological diversity, been even less productive, if not downright silly. The reason is fairly obvious: the distinctive features of biological systems have little to do with the statistical properties of energy distributions which are the subject of thermodynamics. While the structural complexity of living organisms as little violates the second law of thermodynamics (or any other law of physics) as does that of a television set or a jet engine, we need to look elsewhere for a detailed understanding of the origin of this complexity during development and evolution. Most evolutionists believe that natural selection provides a satisfying answer to the last point. Brooks and Wiley dissent strongly from this view. They assert that neo-Darwinian concepts provide only a set of proximate causes of evolution, whereas they can offer ultimate causes: "Darwin referred to his theory as a theory of natural selection. In claiming that neo-Darwinism is a complete theory of evolution, neo-Darwinists have unjustifiably extended proximal causes to the level of ultimate causes. This has produced an incomplete and relatively weak theory" (p. 302). They claim to show that ". . . the expected outcome of historical constraints on the action of the second law in biological systems is self-organization. The axiomatic behavior of living systems should be increasing complexity and self-organization as a result of, not at the expense of, increasing entropy" (pp. xi-xii). Entropy here is not to be equated with the entropy of thermodynamics, which is of course associated with a tendency towards increased disorder in the distribution of energy states of molecules. Rather, Brooks and Wiley use the information theory analog of entropy in calculations of the complexity and organization of living systems, and do not claim to derive their results from energetic considerations. Their work suffers, however, from the usual faults