Thermodynamics or ecodynamics?

Entropy by Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard has been hailed as a new landmark in the study of what the Club of Rome calls the "predicament of Man". Rufus Miles of Princeton University describes it as "earth shaking in its implications" and compares Rifkin to Copernicus and Darwin. Hazel Henderson assures us that Rifkin and Howard "have written the epitaph of economics" and that their book provides a "major reconceptualisation which will help to shape the public debate of the 1980s." I am afraid I can agree with none of these views.

This is not to say that this book does not have qualities. I think that it does state very succinctly and very clearly just how industrial man is destroying the planet on which he lives. It also tells us that there is no technological way out, as government experts still insist there is. The only solution to our problems is to phase out industrial society itself and phase in a new low-energy society - a thesis that is well known to many of our readers since it was first properly formulated in the pages of the Ecologist in our Blueprint for Survival (see here) in January 1972.

It is for a different reason, however, that this book is considered so important. It tries to explain what is happening to our society and it does so in a language that will impress many people - that of thermodynamics, which our scientists - the priests of industrialism - and in particular our physicists - the high priests - have ritually sanctified. Their thesis is that the fate of our economic system is sealed, by virtue of the fact that economic behaviour violates that most holy of all principles - the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or the Entropy Law.

This is of course primarily the thesis of Nicholas Georgescu Roegen whose papers we have published in The Ecologist since 1971, [1] not so much because I or any of my colleagues were sold on the Entropy thesis but because Georgescu Roegen is one of the first economists to have shown that economic behaviour must be governed by the laws that govern other forms of behaviour on this planet and not just by those very narrow ones that our economists have formulated. I part company with Georgescu and Rifkin when they include the Entropy Law in the former category, still more when they tell us, as most scientists do today, that it is the most fundamental of all such laws.

Before I defend my position, let me first try to explain what is the Entropy Law.

The Entropy Law

The term 'entropy' was coined by Rudolph Clausius in 1868. He observed that within a closed receptacle, heat differences tended to even out. The evening-out continued until total heat-uniformity was obtained. This uniformity could thus be regarded as a position of 'equilibrium' - at least from the thermodynamic point of view and he referred to it as 'entropy'.

As Rifkin points out, however, the concept itself is much older. Sadi Carnot, a French engineer, first made use of it 41 years earlier. In trying to understand the workings of a steam engine, he realised that it was exploiting the heat difference between that part of the system which was hot and that which was cold. It was this difference in temperature that enabled the system "to do work". This difference, however, tended to even out, and as this happened, so the system's ability to do work was correspondingly reduced.

In such conditions, energy is said to have been dissipated - which means that it has degraded to a more homogeneous state - one that is identified with equilibrium or what Clausius called 'entropy'.

This, in essence, is the Entropy Law, and it would be quite acceptable if it were applied strictly to the field of thermodynamics. The trouble, however, is that its use has been extended to apply to fields of behaviour that are very distant from thermodynamics and which would appear, to most sensible people, to be governed by very different laws from those that govern the behaviour of hot air in a closed receptacle or of steam in the boiler of a locomotive.

The entropy cult

What has happened to the Entropy Law is what happened to many other scientific theories. It has become the object of a cult and taken to provide a key with which to unravel the secrets of the universe.

The same thing has occurred to Shannon and Weaver's Information Theory, which was perfectly all right, so long as it was applied to the field of communications for which it was designed but which has only served to confuse everybody, after it was hailed as a great scientific discovery that would, among other things, provide a means of measuring biospheric complexity or organisation.

Why does the Entropy Law not apply to the real world?

How then do we know that the Entropy Law does not apply to behaviour within the biosphere?

Well to begin with it is easy to see that it doesn't. Life probably began on this planet 3 billion years ago and since then - that is until the beginning of the historical era a mere 10,000 years ago - it has not ceased to develop both in complexity, diversity and stability. [2] In other words it has behaved over what most sensible people would regard as a sufficient sample of time, in a manner that is diametrically opposed to that in which it should have behaved had it been governed by the Entropy Law.

This is a source of great embarrassment to our scientists. "How is it possible to understand life", asks Brillouin, "when the whole world is ruled by such a rule as the second principle of thermodynamics which points towards death and annihilation?" [3] Indeed, either we are all mad and there has not been such a thing as evolution; and the biosphere with its myriad forms of life is an illusion; or else the Entropy Law does not apply to the behaviour of living things - only to that of hot air in a closed receptacle or steam in a locomotive.

Some of the most thoughtful philosophers of biology seem to realise this. Thus as Arthur Koestler writes:

"the Second Law applies only in the special case of so called 'closed systems' (such as a gas enclosed in a perfectly isolated container). But no such closed systems exist even in inanimate nature, and whether or not the universe as a whole is a closed system in this sense, is anybody's guess. All living organisms, however are 'open systems', that is to say, they maintain their complex form and functions through continuous exchanges of energies and material with their environment. Instead of 'running down' like a mechanical clock that dissipates its energies through friction, the living organism is constantly 'building up' more complex substances from the substance it feeds on, more complex forms of energies from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns of information - perceptions, feelings, thoughts - from the input of its receptor organs." [4]

Brillouin also realises this:

"Both principles of thermodynamics apply only to an isolated system, which is contained in an enclosure through which no heat can be transferred, no work can be done and no matter nor radiation can be exchanged." [3]

The World on the other hand is not a closed system.

"It is constantly receiving energy and negative entropy from outside - radiant heat from the sun; gravitational energy from the sun and moon (provoking sea tides); cosmic radiation from unknown origin and so on." In this way, the sentence to "death by confinement" is avoided by living in a world that is not a confined and closed system." [3]

Von Bertalanffy notes the same thing. Because they live within an open system,

"living systems, maintaining themselves in a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop towards states of increased order and organisation". [5]

So too Waddington [6] regards the embryological process as a model for other biospheric processes. He notes that the embryo increases its complexity as it develops and for this and other reasons cannot believe

"[that] any serious embryologists have considered that the second law of thermodynamics could be applied in any simple way to their subject material, in spite of what classical physicists might say."

Indeed, Waddington assures us that the most creative physicists of his day, people like Blacketh, Cockroft, Wilson and Dirck, would not have been tempted to impose the Entropy Law "as a rigid dogma of biology". But is it only because the earth receives energy from the sun (i.e. because it is an open system) that the Entropy Law does not apply? There seem to be other reasons. After all, other celestial bodies are open systems just as is the planet earth. They are all bombarded with energy, "radiant heat from the sun, gravitational energy from the sun and moon, cosmic radiation etc."

Another consideration leads one to the same conclusion. Even in a closed system, behaviour does not always occur as it should do were it governed by the Entropy Law. Thus if one puts a corpse in a closed receptacle, one would expect it to decompose into its component parts, hence moving towards that state of disorder which our aristo-scientists identify with entropy. However, it will not do so, unless we open our closed receptacle and let in some oxygen.

The reductionists

It is not altogether surprising that other conditions should have to be satisfied, for it is difficult to believe that the development of the biosphere can be explained as the Entropy Law implies, simply in terms of energy. Can sensible people really believe, as Rifkin tells us, that "the Entropy Law ... this supreme physical rule of the universe purveys every facet of our existence because everything is energy?"

This is an old myth which we can refer to as 'energy-reductionism'. It originally appears to have come into being as a way of getting round the problems associated with the understanding of matter. The atomic theory of matter was controversial. Thermodynamics was supposed to be based on it. Carnot however showed that this science was independent of such a theory. It only involves energy changes. As Mason points out, this meant that

"thermodynamics could proceed without a theoretical model of the nature of matter, indeed it could proceed without the supposition that matter existed objectively." [7]

Hence the 'Energetik' school which, like Rifkin, taught that the phenomena of nature were explicable in terms of the transformation of energy. As Oswald, the principal proponent of this view, wrote:

"What we hear originates in work done on the ear drum and the middle ear by the vibrations of the air. What we see is only radiant energy which does chemical work on the retina, that is perceived as light. From this standpoint the totality of nature appears as a series of spatially and temporally changing energies of which we obtain knowledge in proportion as they impinge on the body, and especially upon the sense organs fashioned for the reception of the appropriate energies." [7]

Of course other writers (Pythagoras, Mayer) have told us that everything is number, while atomic reductionists like Francis Crick tell us that the world is exclusively made up of atoms. In reality, of course, it is the way these atoms are organised that is critical, while there is no reason to believe that atoms have any greater reality than the objects - tables, chairs, dung-beetles, fiddler-crabs or whatever - into which they are organised.

The illusion of reductionism

It is only possible to maintain these various forms of reductionism if we limit our study to very simple inanimate objects like gasses and billiard balls. As soon as one looks at the behaviour of complex forms of life in the real world the illusory character of these theories is quickly revealed.

As Brillouin points out,

"For inert matter it suffices to know energy and entropy. For living organisms, we have to introduce the "food value" of products. Calories contained in coal and calories in wheat and meat do not have the same function. Food value must itself be considered separately for different categories of living organisms. Cellulose is a food for some animals, but others cannot use it. When it comes to vitamins or hormones, new properties of chemical compounds are observed, which cannot be reduced to energy or entropy. All these data remain rather vague, but they all seem to point towards the need for a new leading idea (call it principle or law) in addition to current thermodynamics, before these new classifications can be understood and typical properties of living organisms can be logically connected together ... " [3]

It is easy to show that if a complex natural system is deprived of any of its basic constituents, whether it be energy, information or any of the basic chemicals of life, it will cease to function properly and will slowly disintegrate i.e. move in the direction of disorder, or what Rifkin would call entropy. Thus it would be more precise to talk of 'energy-entropy' which would enable us to distinguish this notion from that 'information entropy' and 'materials entropy'.

We could then have a whole set of Entropy Laws, each one stating that, in the absence of a specific constituent, movement will be towards 'general' entropy. Such a law is implicit to Shannon and Weaver's theory of information. As we shall see, Georgescu Roegen also formulated such a law with regards materials - the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics.

We can, of course, go much further still and subdivide materials entropy into carbon-entropy, phosphorous-entropy, water-entropy etc. - and so on for the essential irreplaceable ingredients of living things. All such concepts would be as valid as that of energy-entropy, about which people make so much fuss but they would be equally invalid once all the other conditions favouring biospheric development were satisfied, for then systems are either able to synthesise their own constituents or derive them from elsewhere in the quantities required.

The availability of these constituents then leads to a very strange, indeed what appears to be, unique phenomenon. They tend to organise themselves - not in a random or haphazard way as is suggested by Volterra [8], May [9], Mellanby [10], Prigogine [11], and many others, but in a highly directive way, for random organisation does not exist in the real world. [12]

Now, living things develop - successive thresholds are achieved which are referred to as 'levels of organisation'. Each time one is achieved, new forms of behaviour appear, that are governed by laws that were not previously operative. At the most sophisticated levels of organisation, behaviour displays those features we associate with life and are governed by a set of laws that are quite unknown to the physicist and the chemist to the extent that their knowledge is derived for the study of behaviour at lower levels of organisation.

What is particularly relevant to the thesis of this review is that living things are capable of overcoming many of the constraints applying to the behaviour of simpler things. On this subject it is worth quoting Brillouin once more.

"Consider a living organism. It has special properties which enable it to resist destruction, to heal its wounds and to cure occasional sickness. This is very strange behaviour and nothing similar can be observed about inert matter. Is such behaviour an exception to the second principle? It appears so, at least superficially, and we must be prepared to accept a 'life principle' that would allow for some exceptions to the second principle. When life ceases and death occurs, the 'life principle' stops working, and the second principle regains its full power, implying demolition of the living structure. There is no more healing, no more resistance to sickness; the destruction of the former organism goes on unchecked and is completed in a very short time. Thus the conclusion, or question: what about life and the second principle? Is there not, in living organisms, some Power that prevents the action of the second Principle?" [3]

The notion that living things have some property that distinguishes them from inanimate things is referred to as 'vitalism'. This property was once taken to be of a supernatural nature, as in the case of Aristotle's 'Entelechy', or of Bergson's 'Elan Vital'. This notion of vitalism, as von Bertalanffy points out, however has been dead for a long time although "people continue to pour abuse on its carcass". [5]

Vitalism is condemned for another reason. It implies that the world cannot be understood purely in terms of physics, which our physicists - who want to maintain their dominion over science, indeed over knowledge in general - cannot conceivably accept.

Vitalism in its modern form, simply implies that behaviour at that level of organisation achieved by living things displays features that were not present at the previous levels. As Waddington writes,

"the contrast is not so much between mechanism and vitalism but rather between mechanism and organicism." [6]

Overcoming energy constraints

Because of the way living things are organised they are capable of providing themselves with the energy they require to maintain their stability - green plants via photosynthesis and predators by consuming green plants. Significantly many economists and technologists, who see everything in terms of maximising production, tend to complain of the inefficiency of photosynthesis which only extracts a very small percentage of available energy from the atmosphere.

They fail to realise that plants extract, via photosynthesis, precisely the amount of energy that they need and no more; that which is required for the purposes of maintaining their structure and reproducing themselves i.e. of assuring their stability within the ecosystem of which they are part. Were they to fix more energy they would use up more nutrients in the soil than could be made available on a permanent basis, which would inevitably cause disequilibria leading to reduced stability.

A physicist might tell us that the sun's energy has been dissipated, but the answer to this is "So what?" As far as a student of the biosphere is concerned this dissipation is required to power the development of living things and to increase their stability and that of the biosphere, (I go as far as this with Prigogine, but no further).

Overcoming material constraints

The case for Georgescu Roegen's [13] fourth law is, superficially at least, a stronger one than his case for the second law, since, though the world is an open system from the point of view of energy, it is closed from the point of view of materials.

But once more living things can overcome this constraint by developing the means of recycling the materials they require, the waste products of specific biospheric processes serving as the raw materials of the next. A climax ecosystem such as a tropical rain forest can actually recycle materials so efficiently that it requires few resources from the soil beneath, which tends to be thin and poor. The decaying vegetable matter that the forest trees are constantly generating provide many of the nutrients it requires, the rest being derived from the air (carbon) and the sub-soil (minerals). Nor in a balanced ecosystem does there occur a loss during recycling that is not fully compensated for by normal biospheric production processes.

The application of this principle to the biosphere as a whole is made clear by Lovelock [14] . Whereas it has normally been assumed that life occurred on this planet when conditions became favourable to it, Lovelock shows that the biosphere, or Gaia, as he calls it, actually created those conditions that it required for its support. The oxygen is released by living plants during photosynthesis and carbon-dioxide is released as they die and decay. The atmosphere itself, as Lovelock shows, is the product of living things.

If we accept the Gaia hypothesis (and I think it is difficult to avoid doing so) how is it possible to regard living things as dissipating those materials that they have themselves created? The biosphere, in fact, rather than dissipate the materials it requires for its sustenance, as it would do, were it really governed by Georgescu Roegen's Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, does precisely the opposite and systematically builds up the stock of materials that it requires to move instead, towards increasing complexity, diversity and stability.

The question we must now ask ourselves is why our scientists so stubbornly refuse to face both the theoretical and empirical evidence against the applicability of the Entropy Law to the world of living things?

The obstinacy of scientists

To understand their obstinacy, one must consider the world view or paradigm of the physical sciences in the middle, and towards the end of, the 19th century. This is usually referred to as the Newtonian paradigm. In terms of it, the world was seen as an enormous machine whose components behaved largely like planets and billiard balls. It was just the world-view required to rationalise the trend initiated by the Industrial Revolution towards materialism, individualism, utilitarianism and economism - the closely associated values of the industrial age.

The science of the times, as it has been until very recently, was largely identified with physics or "aristo-science" as Passmore refers to it. All other sciences were considered very inferior and their practitioners were largely preoccupied with raising their status by slavishly imitating the methodology of the physical sciences, just as the lower castes in India increase theirs by imitating the Brahmans (which means, above all, proscribing the eating of meat and the remarriage of widows). If physics were to be the fundamental science governing everything else then the behaviour of physical things - billiard balls and the like - must be shown to provide a model for that of living things.

The trouble was that in terms of the neo-Newtonian world-view, it failed to do so on two counts. The first and most important was that Newtonian time was reversible. It could move backwards or forwards just as can a billiard ball, while in the real world, time is irreversible. One cannot eradicate experience nor restore the past exactly as it once was. As Brillouin puts it,

"one of the most important features about time is its irreversibility. Time flows on and never comes back. When the physicist is confronted with this fact he is greatly disturbed. All the laws of physics in their elementary forms are reversible." [15]

Another associated defect of the Newtonian paradigm, is that it does not explain the direction of time. Newton formulated laws governing the movement of bodies but did not tell us that they moved in one direction rather than any other. This again did not tally with the behaviour of living things.

The Entropy Law remedied all this. Since energy could only be degraded, it must follow that the time during which its degradation took place was irreversible. As Brillouin notes:

"it is a strange coincidence that life and the second law represent the two most important examples of the importance of time's running backwards." [16]

All this was just what our physicists were looking for: uncontrovertible evidence as they saw it, that the Entropy Law underlay the behaviour of living processes. This was further confirmed by the fact that, as in living processes, energy did not move in a random but in a specific direction.

The fact that Boltzmann had formulated the Entropy Law, as a statistical law further confirmed the entropy thesis since the behaviour of living things was also held to be governed by such laws. Of course a limitless number of processes can be shown to tend statistically in an irreversible direction; a game of snakes and ladders for instance satisfies these conditions yet nobody suggests that this great nursery game provides a model for life processes.

Why the behaviour of gas in a closed receptacle should provide a better model is not at all clear but what is clear, is the stake our aristo-scientists have in providing that it does. Monod sums up the aristo-scientist's attitude to the Entropy Law:

"L'evolution dans la biosphere est donc un processus necessairement irreversible, qui definit une direction dans le temps; direction qui est la meme que celle qu'impose la loi d'accroisement de l'entropie, c'est a dire le deuxieme principe de la thermodynamique. Il s'agit de bien plus qu'une simple comparaison. La deuxième principe est fondé sur les considerations statistiques indentiques a celles qui establissent l'irreversibilite de l'evolution. En fait, il est legitime de considerer l'irreversibilité de l'evolution comme une expression du deuxième principe dans la biosphere." [16]

Evolution within the biosphere is thus an irreversible process, and one which defines the very direction of time - and the direction is the same as that imposed by the Entropy Law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There is much more to it than a simple comparison: the Entropy Law is based on statistical considerations identical to those which establish the irreversibility of evolution. Indeed the irreversibility of evolution can legitimately be considered as the expression of the Entropy Law within the biosphere." [16]

Quantification

Another reason why our scientists are so keen to preserve the Entropy Law, contrary to all the theoretical and empirical evidence, is that it is easily quantifiable. This is a critical consideration for it is a dogma of aristo-science that only a quantifiable proposition can be regarded as scientific.

Entropy, as Erwin Shroedinger notes, is not a vague concept or idea,

"but a measurable physical quantity just like the length of a rod, the temperature at any point of a body, the heat of fusion of a given crystal or the specific heat of any given substance. At the absolute zero point of temperature (roughly -273 C) the entropy of any substance is zero. When you bring the substance into any other state by slow, reversible little steps (even if thereby the substance changes its physical or chemical nature) the entropy increases by an amount which is computed by dividing very little portion of heat you had to supply in that procedure, by the absolute temperature at which it was supplied - and by summing up all these small contributions. To give an example, when you melt a solid, its entropy increases by the amount of the heat of fusion divided by the temperature at the melting point. You see from this, that the unit in which entropy is measured is calories / ºC. (just as the calorie is the unit of heat or the centimetre the unit of length)". [17]

Boltzmann, as already mentioned, developed the statistical concept of entropy and as Shroedinger notes:

"this too is an exact quantitative quantification, and is expressed by:

entropy = k log D,

where k is the so-called Boltzmann constant (= 3.2983. 10-24 calories / ºC) and D a quantitative measure of the atomistic disorder of the body in question."

It is the quantifiability of many other scientific concepts that have led to their adoption by scientists, often regardless of the fact that, as they are defined, they correspond to nothing whatsoever in the world of living things.

Shannon and Weaver's [18] concept of information, as already noted, has nothing in common with the sort of information that is organised within the biosphere. It has been taken to apply to living things, to begin with because it is reconcilable with the entropy paradigm (its mathematical formula being almost identical with that of entropy) and also because it is quantifiable.

Complexity and diversity

Complexity, too, is defined in terms that make it easily quantifiable. Thus such authorities as May, Lotka and Volterra and Prigogine see it purely in terms of the number of interrelated parts without reference to the way they are organised. This means that by introducing a highly destructive alien parasite into an ecosystem (the rabbit into Australia for instance) one is actually increasing the complexity of the ecosystem in question. By defining complexity in this way, it is possible to maintain, as many ecologists still do (Professor Mellanby for instance), that complexity is associated with reduced stability. This enables them to justify the systematic simplification of agricultural ecosystems by means of destructive modern agricultural practices.

The question of the relationship between complexity and stability is further obscured by the general failure to distinguish between complexity and diversity.

The complexity of a system corresponds to the number of its sub-systems that can cooperate in responding to the challenges of a specific environment. Let me make this clear. One way in which systems can organise themselves, is to permit a more perfect adaptation to a specific environment with which their relationship thereby becomes more stable. Such systems can be said to increase their complexity. This is justified if it can be predicted that this environment is unlikely to change too drastically, a condition which only tends to be satisfied when the environment is protected by the action of the larger system of which it is part.

Thus in our internal environment, behaviour is highly specialised and highly adaptive, the relationship between sub-systems and their respective environments is very stable and characterised by very small fluctuations. In such conditions, small challenges can be dealt with extremely efficiently, large challenges not at all. This vulnerability to serious challenges, however, does not imply instability, because it can be predicted that they are unlikely to occur. We are sufficiently capable of controlling our external environment to prevent the disintegration of our internal environment.

Thus one cannot say that a baby is unstable because, if left on its own in a hostile environment it would probably not survive. The point is that babies are not usually left on their own in a hostile environment. They are looked after by their families, which are capable of providing them with an environment within which they display a high degree of stability.

A second way in which systems can organise themselves is for the purpose of adapting to a far less predictable environment; one that is far less under control. In these conditions the sub-systems rather than cooperate, so as to assure a highly differentiated response to a specific environmental challenge, must be able to act on their own. Each must be specialised in dealing with a different challenge. They are thereby very much more loosely organised. This permits adaptation to much more radical challenges. Such a system can be regarded as displaying diversity rather than complexity.

It might be argued that diversity does not provide a basis for organisation - but this is wrong. The general information contained in all the genes is the same - otherwise the gene-pool would not give rise to a population of the same species (we would get dung-beetles instead of fiddler crabs, for instance). Within a gene-pool it is changes in the frequency of specific genes that differ from each other superficially, that permits the changes in the particularities of the population's behaviour pattern in answer to different environmental challenges.

In practice of course, systems will display varying degrees of both complexity and diversity.

A gene-pool is designed to mediate a wide range of ontogenetic responses. It thereby displays great diversity. An amoeba's gene-pool displays little complexity since the ontogenetic responses it gives rise to, are not highly differentiated. A human gene-pool on the other hand displays greater complexity because of its highly differentiated ontogenetic responses, i.e. because of the large number of different sub-systems that cooperate in the execution of these responses.

Man, by virtue of his centralised nervous system and his highly developed neo-cortex, is also capable of a wide range of different behavioural (one might refer to them as 'neurogenetic' as opposed to ontogenetic or phylogenetic) responses and is thereby capable of a greater diversity to such responses than is an amoeba.

Surprisingly enough this distinction does not appear to have been made, explicitly at least. It is a critical one, which explains, among other things, why a complex system is vulnerable to serious challenges once its protective environment breaks down - why a child, for instance, is vulnerable once its family has disintegrated or why a tropical forest disintegrates once the canopy trees are removed. It explains too why an ecosystem displaying great diversity but low complexity, i.e. in which the parts are not integrated, is characterised by greater fluctuations but is less vulnerable to serious challenges.

For all these reasons there has been a frenzied effort to reconcile the thesis that the Entropy Law applies to the world of living things with all the theoretical and empirical evidence to the contrary. How, one might ask, has this been done?

Statistical method

The first attempt was Boltzmann's transformation of the laws of thermodynamics into statistical laws. The 'statistical method' is very convenient. Indeed if the Entropy Law is seen as but a statistical law, then the development of the biosphere over the last 3 billion years, rather than provide a clear violation of the Entropy Law, can be interpreted as nothing more than an exception, which does not invalidate what is after all but a statistical law. Georgescu Roegen realises how unsatisfactory is Boltzmann's compromise:

"According to this new discipline a pile of ashes may very well become capable of heating the boiler. Also a corpse may resuscitate to lead a second life in exactly reverse order of the first. Only the probability of such event are fantastically small." [13]

The statistical method is indeed largely a means of hiding one's ignorance as to what are the true forces determining behaviour in the world we live in. Thus Galton and others once drew up a statistical theory of genetics. But with the rediscovery of Mendelism, behaviour that previously appeared to be random and hence to justify the statistical approach, was shown to be governed by very definite laws and the statistical theory was abandoned.

This is not to suggest that randomness does not exist - only that its incidence has been grossly exaggerated so as to accommodate scientific dogmas that are critical to the paradigm of science and that would otherwise be revealed as false. As Sir Peter Medawar, one of the high priests of science himself, admits:

"it is upon the notion of randomness that geneticists have based their case against a benevolent or malevolent deity and against there being any overall purpose or design in nature." [19]

The statistical approach to thermodynamics is only justified if it makes sense to regard the 3 billion years, during which the biosphere developed out of the primaeval dust, as but an exception to the law that otherwise governs behaviour on our planet, and if we choose to ignore the nature of the biological and sociological laws in terms of which one can explain this remarkable development.

An island of negative entropy in a sea of entropy

This brings us to the second device resorted to by our aristo-scientists to reconcile the Entropy Law with reality. It is to postulate a subsidiary law stating that any reduction in the entropy of the biosphere must be compensated for by an increase in entropy elsewhere.

Thus, all living processes are seen by Rifkin as giving rise to entropy in the world around them. For instance, when a predator devours his prey, 80-90 percent of the energy contained is "wasted" in the form of heat; only 10-20 percent of the energy stored in the prey being actually transferred to the tissue of the predator to be used in the next stage of the food chain.

This is particularly serious, as Rifkin points out, by virtue of the sheer number of animals required to sustain predators, as we move up the food chain. Thus:

"Three hundred trout are required to support, one man for a year. The trout in turn must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live of 1,000 tons of grass."

To maintain one human being therefore, requires the energy contained in 27 million grasshoppers or a thousand tons of grass. He asks,

"Is there any doubt then that every living thing maintains its own order only at the expense of creating greater disorder (or dissipation of energy) in the overall environment?"

Yes there is. As Rifkin should know, predators are essential for applying qualitative and quantitative controls on the populations on which they prey and for maintaining the structure and viability of the ecosystem of which they are part. A predator must in fact consume his prey. In an unbalanced ecosystem, such as the one we live in, it is undoubtedly true, as Barry Commoner always says, that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but the opposite is true in a balanced ecosystem in which there is no such thing as a free fast.

The Universe as an open system

A third device is to postulate that though the earth may be an open system, the universe itself is a closed one which means that life on earth can only develop at the cost of increasing the entropy of the universe. According to Harold Blum, quoted by Rifkin,

"The small local decreases in entropy represented in the building of the organism is coupled with a much larger increase in the entropy of the universe."

The trouble with this argument is that there is no reason whatsoever for supposing that the universe is a closed system. Braham [20] goes into this at some length. He points out that a completely closed system "is a theoretical construct" and that "we have no way of determining whether the universe is closed or not."

Also to say that the universe is an open system raises a number of difficult problems. It would mean for instance, that it is exchanging energy with its environment, but we know nothing about such an environment and if it exists, then it must be part of another universe, part, in fact, of a 'mega-universe' of which we are but a sub-system.

"What then", asks Braham, "are the limits to the other, or to the mega-universe and so on?" Since we are quite incapable of answering such questions, it may be convenient to postulate that the universe is closed. But would this help us very much? As Braham points out,

"to assume closure is to assume a boundary. By definition, a boundary is between something and something else; there must therefore be something on the 'other side'. If we were to speculate meaningfully about this boundary we would require information about the "other side" and this would clearly require a leak in the system and hence no closure at all."

But even if we can find a way round this objection and accept that the system is a closed one and that one day the sun's energy will be entirely dissipated, is this consideration of any practical significance? The terrible problems we face today (such as the population explosion, social disintegration, deforestation, desertification, the contamination of groundwater, of our rivers and estuaries etc.) have not been caused by any reduction in the amount of energy generated by the sun.

To preoccupy ourselves unduly with the possibility that such a reduction may eventually occur would be to divert attention from these problems to an exceedingly long-term one (for no one suggests that the sun is likely to stop shining for a few million years or so). What is more, it is one about which we can do strictly nothing. I don't believe that even our most fanatical technomaniacs, the Herman Kahns or Gerard O'Neils of this world have yet thought of devising a technological substitute for the sun.

Physical reductionism

As already mentioned, the Entropy Law is cherished by our physicists because it helps to obscure the fact that the Newtonian world-view does not apply to the world of living things and thereby enabling them to maintain their dominance over all other scientific disciplines.

As a result, academics still try to explain the behaviour of complex living-things in terms of methodology of physics and of the concepts developed by physicists to explain the behaviour of inanimate objects. The result has, not surprisingly, been disastrous. Alexander Koyre possibly the leading Newtonian scholar himself admits that:

"The enthusiastic imitation (or pseudo-imitation) of the Newtonian (or pseudo-Newtonian) pattern of atomic analysis and reconstruction, that up to our times proved to be so successful in physics, in chemistry, and even in biology, led elsewhere to rather bad results. Thus the unholy alliance of Newton and Locke produced an atomic psychology, which explained (or explained away) mind as a mosaic of 'sensations' and 'ideas' linked together by laws of association (attraction); we have had, too, atomic sociology, which reduced society to a cluster of human atoms, complete and self-contained, each in itself and only mutually attracting and repelling each other. Newton, of course, is by no means responsible for these, and other Monstra engendered by the overextension - or aping - of his method." [21]

Unfortunately living things are infinitely more complicated than billiard balls or even atoms. As Wolfgang Kohler notes:

"If organisms were more similar to the systems which physics investigates, a great many methods of the physicists could be introduced in our science without much change. But in actual fact the similarity is not very great. One of the advantages which makes the physicist's work so much easier is the simplicity of his systems ... An amoeba is a more complicated system than all systems of the inanimate world." [22]

As von Bertalanffy points out, the basic features of the living things,

"concepts like organisation directiveness, teleology, etc. just do not appear in the classic system of science (which he identifies with physics). As a matter of fact in the so-called mechanistic world-view based upon classical physics, they were considered as illusory or metaphysical. This means, to the biologist for example, that just the specific problems of living nature appeared to lie beyond the legitimate field of science." [23]

He illustrates this point very convincingly:

"Organismic processes as a rule are so ordered as to maintain the system. But this makes no sense within the conventional categories of physics. From this viewpoint, there is no difference between physical and chemical processes taking place in a living organism and those in a corpse; both follow the same laws of physics and chemistry - and that's all that can be said. To the biologist and physician, however, there is a profound difference between events so ordered as to maintain the system, and those running wild to destroy it. What are the principles of order and organisation? What does 'health' or 'norm' mean in contrast to 'disease' and 'pathology'? Nothing, so far as laws of physics and chemistry are concerned ... But without these and similar notions there would be no science of medicine and indeed biology." [5]

At the same time, if we adopt the physicist's world-view to understand the behaviour of living things, we are saddled with a number of concepts which may help in understanding the behaviour of billiard balls and atoms but that are totally useless for the purposes of understanding the far more complex behaviour of living things.

One such notion is 'causality'. One of the basic principles of physical causality is that a similar cause will have a similar effect. This is simply not true in the world of living things, where a given state of a system can be achieved by a large number of different processes - a principle referred to as 'equifinality'. As von Bertalanffy points out, it is precisely this consideration which led Driesch to come to the conclusion that the behaviour of living things could not be explained without introducing a "vitalist" principle of some sort.

Another concept of physics with which we are saddled and that is inapplicable to the world of living things, as Koyre intimates, is the reductionist notion that the behaviour of a system can be understood by studying its component parts. Crick states the reductionist credo very explicitly:

"Eventually one may hope to have the whole of biology explained in terms of the level below it and so on right down to the atomic level... So far everything we have found can be 'explained' without effort in terms of the standard bonds of chemistry - the homopolar chemical bond, the van der Waal attraction between non-bonded atoms, the all important hydrogen bonds, and so on." [24]

This may appear to be true in physical systems whose parts display the minimum organisation, but as already mentioned, living systems are vastly more complex. They display a very high degree of organisation and are thus, to use a consecrated phrase, very much more than the sum of their parts. This means that their behaviour cannot be understood from a study of these parts.

For exactly the same reason the principle of isolating living systems from their natural environment in order to understand their behaviour - a technique that may be perfectly adequate in the physical sciences, when applied to the study of living things, provides but the most superficial information. To quote Wolfgang Kohler:

"Some behaviourists have rightly said that it is the whole organism which we have to study. Unfortunately in the whole organism one can seldom follow the change of one particular variable, as though it alone were affected by a certain change in outer conditions. The change of one factor usually involves concomitant changes in many others, and the latter changes again affect the former. Now, isolation of functional relationships and reduction of variables which take part in an event are the great artifices by which exact investigations are facilitated in physics. Since this technique is not applicable in psychology, since we do not have to take the organism more or less as it is, any kind of observation which refers to the behaviour of our subjects as complex acting units will be right in our case." [22]

Passmore feels that it is precisely because of this insistence on trying to understand the world in terms of physics - aristo-science as he refers to it - that scientists have been so unsuccessful in understanding the real problems that face us today:

"If we are still ignorant about most of the phenomena we encounter in our daily life - whether it be human nutrition or the life history of animals - this ignorance can in part be set down to the aristo-scientific emphasis on a very different kind of knowledge. Scientists themselves are beginning to emphasise as much. Even within physics - and remember Rutherford's dictum that 'science is either physics or stamp collecting' - the Cavendish professor at Cambridge, Brian Pippard, has recently told aristo-scientific physicists that it is time for them to turn their attention towards what he calls 'the difficult and less elegant phenomena of the real physical world' in contrast with their past concentration on these phenomena, the behaviour of which can be described in beautifully concise formulae." [25]

Indeed, contrary to what our scientists try to make out, physics does not provide the only model. As von Bertalanffy writes,

"physics is but one model dealing with certain aspects of reality. It needs not to have the monopoly, nor is it the reality."

It seems clear that if we are to provide a theoretical framework for understanding what is happening to the biosphere, it is not in terms of physics that it should be formulated. The problems that we face today, that threaten the very survival of our species, have not been caused by violating the laws of physics or thermo-dynamics. If the Entropy Law really applied to the world of living things and we had violated it, then the biosphere would be short of energy. But it is not. On the contrary our problems, rather than being due to a shortage of energy, are due to a surplus which we have temporarily created by using the energy locked up in fossil fuels that have previously been stored away in the bowels of the earth.

If it were possible to measure the biospheric devastation our industrial activities are giving rise to (and we have shown in the pages of The Ecologist over the last eleven years that our problems are largely the symptoms of this devastation), then it is in terms of the energy consumed by us over and above that required for the normal functioning of the biosphere. This was in effect the conclusion of the prestigious Study of Critical Environmental Problems (SCEP). [26] By making use of this surplus energy, (and many other surplus resources too) we have developed a behaviour pattern that violates the laws that must be observed in order to maintain the proper functioning and hence the stability of the biosphere.

A hierarchy of constraints

I shall be more explicit. First of all, what do we mean by laws? I think it is best to regard them, as Waddington suggests, as constraints.

Thus the behaviour of an individual person must be subjected to a given set of physical, biological and social constraints if he is to survive. If he jumps off a cliff, refuses to eat any food or poisons himself with paraquat and insists on murdering his neighbours, the chances are that he will not survive for very long.

Once he marries and has children a new level of organisation has been achieved and a new larger system brought into being, of which he is but a sub-system. To assure the survival of this system a new set of constraints over and above the previous set must now be observed. Thus, if he does not behave in a husbandly way towards his wife and in a paternal way towards his children, though he may continue to survive as an individual, his family will cease to do so.

But at the same time, his family is part of a larger community, which in order to maintain its stability and survive, must subject its component families and individuals to a further set of constraints, while the community is in turn, part of a larger society whose stability too can only be assured if its members are subjected to yet another set of constraints.

If we prefer to do so, we can regard each set of constraints as laws which can, of course, be violated but only at the cost of causing the disintegration of the system whose integrity and stability their observance assures - which in turn must affect to a varying degree the integrity and stability of their component sub-systems.

In my writings in The Ecologist over the last eleven years, I have been at pains to point out that it is our failure to observe the constraints associated with the integrity and stability of the various social and ecological systems of which we are part, that is giving rise to their disintegration, of which the problems that confront our society today, are but the symptoms.

Evolution and anti-evolution

All this leads one to view, biospheric or evolution as a process involving the accumulation of constraints - those that at each new level of organisation are required to maintain, or increase overall stability. This view of evolution is not acceptable to our aristo-scientists.

One of the reasons is that it provides a criterion for distinguishing, on the one hand, those biospheric changes that have occurred over the last 3 billion years and have tended in the direction of increased biospheric stability and, on the other hand, those that have occurred during the historical era (and in particular since the beginning of the industrial age) and which have tended instead towards decreased stability.

It is appropriate, I believe, to refer to these two totally distinct and indeed competing trends as evolution and anti-evolution. It is worth looking at this critical distinction more closely.

At the level of biological organism, it is important to distinguish between the accident that causes a wound and the process that heals it. At the level of an ecosystem, one might distinguish, on the one hand, between an accident such as the intrusion into an ecosystem of some alien species, its poisoning with biocides or a climatic change, and on the other hand, the processes that lead to the restoration of its normal functioning: the ecosystem's healing process.

Each accident can be represented graphically by a large oscillation leading to smaller and smaller oscillations as healing takes place and stability is restored. But not always. One must make a further distinction between those accidents that the system is capable of dealing with adaptively and those that it is not capable of dealing with and which lead to the establishment of a new climax at a lower level of stability.

It is the latter that we must regard as anti-evolutionary for they are effectively reversing the evolutionary trend towards increased stability. Serious anti-evolutionary accidents of this sort have already occurred. Volcanic eruptions have made whole areas less favourable to supporting complex ecosystems. Ice ages have had a similar effect, as have large scale ecological invasions of the sort that occurred when previously separated land masses were joined as a result of the slow action of continental drift.

The Industrial Era, by far the most serious biospheric accident to have occurred so far, would, if it lasted for another few decades, probably see the extermination of most complex forms of life on a planet that would have become too degraded to support them.

It could be argued that such a catastrophe is a necessary stimulus to further evolutionary development and that from a degraded; contaminated and largely depopulated planet, there may emerge, after a few billion years, new forms of life that are more adaptive than those that have been annihilated.

What serious grounds, though, do we have for believing such a theory? Even if there were such grounds, this thesis would provide little consolation to those who are today witnessing the reversal of 3 billion years of evolution.

Needless to say, to accept this critical distinction between evolution and anti-evolution is to reject the very notion of material progress and hence the value of all those enterprises that have promoted it, including the development of science itself.

To avoid having to make this distinction, our scientists insist on seeing the evolutionary process in one of two different ways. Some have made it out to be no more than random change. This is convenient because it enables one to see man's Promethean enterprise as giving rise to the only truly purposeful changes - the only ones designed to improve human welfare. It is also a view that fits in nicely with the general paradigm of physics and thermodynamics, which sees behaviour moving in the direction of entropy or randomness. Such a view, however, is impossible to reconcile with experience, as it is with the findings of evolutionary biology.

For these reasons the trend has been away from this view. In fact the position of most of our leading scientists today is that evolution is directive, although this is not taken as implying 'teleology' which is still taboo, but 'teleonomy' a term originally coined by Pittendrigh [12]. The teleonomic view of behaviour is that it is indeed directive but not because it must be so, to satisfy the requirements of the biospheres, but because it is programmed to behave in this way - in this way teleonomy is reconcilable with causality. The goal of behaviour, however, is not taken to be increased stability but increased complexity and no attempt is made to distinguish between the complexity of the biosphere and that of the technosphere.

Failure to do so of course obscures the fundamental distinction and incompatibility between the two rival organisations of matter and the two rival processes that brought them into being; evolution and antievolution. It thereby enables our aristo-scientists to pretend that the historical era and in particular the industrial era, are part and parcel of the same evolutionary process.

Medawar [19] for instance talks of industrial development as "exosomatic" evolution, and makes fun of a student who asked him if humans "might not evolve to possess wings and so make it possible to fly". He regards this as a "foolish question" since "it is obvious that human beings have already acquired some of the capabilities of both birds and fish - capabilities which they owe to their own special style of evolution, the 'exosomatic'?"

Some of our scientists go further. They see the historical and industrial eras as periods of 'accelerated evolution'. Even Huxley sees things in this way. He writes:

"in psychosocial evolution it is quite clear that, at least in the last few millennia and especially in the last few centuries, there has been an acceleration instead of a more or less uniform rate." [27]