John Bruni
Behind thermodynamics is a simple but crucial concept: nature seeks to undo gradients – differences in temperature or pressure. The familiar image of warm turning inevitably to cold, however, became rationalized into the historical specter of heat death, total energy loss, the final stillness of the universe. Henry Adams, the American historian and writer, having been overawed by the electrical dynamo at the 1900 Paris Exposition, offered ever-gloomier predictions that the Second Law of Thermodynamics – the dissipation of usable energy due to entropy increase in a closed system – foretold the gradual exhaustion of culture as well as nature. The sense of order to the universe supported by the First Law, the law of conservation of energy throughout its transformations, would no longer be sustainable. Adams made these predictions in part as a sarcastic response to the belief that evolutionary progress would drive history forward. For Adams, conversely, the beginning of the twentieth century could only usher in an increasing cultural chaos that he felt obliged to explain in thermodynamic language. That his Education of Henry Adams (1907) regards modern capitalism as naturally created through thermodynamic laws anticipates how, as we will later see, a thermodynamically guided model of evolution draws on imperialist logic. Indeed, Adams’s book, particularly in later chapters, forecasts the importance of information for thermodynamic science (Bruni 2010). The major developments of thermodynamics – for instance, the shift in focus as life becomes regarded not as a closed but as an open system, and thus resistant to the second law – are widely restaged in literary narratives that envision the creative and destructive roles for entropy to play in an increasingly technology-saturated social landscape.
Yet the tendency remains to extrapolate from simple scientific concepts a universal theory of development, one that leapfrogs on recognizable cultural trends. The temptation to find a natural explanation for cultural phenomena has long dogged thermodynamics. As thermodynamics shifts from closed to open systems, in Ira Livingston’s sarcastic description of the attitudes of those who would uncritically embrace a model that ties energy flows to economic flows: “Life, the tragic hero of the late nineteenth century, becomes at the dawn of a new millennium a surfing CEO with a cell phone” (Livingston 2006: 138). The danger, as will be made clear, is in totalizing thermodynamics, subsuming cultural differences under the heading of self-similarity.
By the late nineteenth century, evolutionary theory was shaping the development of thermodynamics. As Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan explain, “Darwin’s idea of natural selection leading to change over time” directed the thinking of the German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who statistically analyzed how the behavior of large groups of particles “changed in the direction of the more probable” (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 47). Boltzmann credited Darwin’s study of species transformation in populations for inspiring his explanation of “nature’s mixing tendency as one moves forward in time on the basis of vast numbers of atoms” (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 48). Darwin also guided Boltzmann’s speculations that the unequal temperatures of the earth and sun created competition among organisms to take advantage of the sun’s heat, taking and degrading that energy (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 59–60). Boltzmann therefore suggested that the second law was primary to life processes and demonstrated that thermodynamics, like evolution, was guided by chance (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 68).
The increasing significance of the second law motivated British physicist James Clerk Maxwell to wonder whether it could be broken. He produced a thought experiment to see if energy could be obtained without work, featuring a miniscule “demon” who sorted molecules by opening and closing a frictionless door. The faster molecules the demon would let pass; the slower molecules would be blocked. In this way, the demon would create an energy gradient, reversing the process of entropy. Maxwell’s thought experiment set the stage for the recognition that information and energy were connected (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 66–67). Collectively, the work of Boltzmann and Maxwell in the later nineteenth century would supply the foundations for non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
In particular, Boltzmann’s contribution to a “statistical view of entropy” troubled “the absoluteness of a predicted ‘heat death’ by giving entropy an interpretation that was overtly probabilistic rather than deterministic” (Hayles 1990: 41, 42). However, earlier literary treatments of thermodynamics tended to restage images of exhaustion, such as those found in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and Gustave Flaubert’s novels (Rabinbach 1990: 6), a strategy highly visible, for example, in the dystopian landscape of “Terminal Beach” in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). Like Henry Adams, Wells satirized a metaphysical vision of evolutionary progress, for
the Traveler’s dead end at Terminal Beach implies that his individual ability to move within time has given him no ultimate reprieve from the larger cosmic catastrophe … the ruin of nature promised by the apocalypse of ever-increasing entropy in a closed universe.
(Clarke 2001: 127)
Overall, the image of the sun became important for literary narratives about thermodynamics. The narrator of Sister Carrie remarks: “how dispiriting are the days during which the sun withholds a portion of our allowance of light and warmth. We are more dependent upon these things than is often thought. We are insects produced by heat, and pass without it” (Dreiser 1900: 88).
Such a dependency is symbolized in the deaths of George Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, and Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905); both occur in dark rooms. Victorian and modernist authors recognized the role of solar energy in maintaining the life processes that buttressed social organization. In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, published in the early 1920s, and D.H. Lawrence’s early twentieth-century writings, the authors pushed against the limitations of the closed-system environments fashioned by the physics of their day. Zamyatin saw thermodynamic equilibrium, caused by the diminution of solar energy, as socially regressive. Similarly, the “sun … becomes such a pivotal figure in Lawrence’s modernist myth-making precisely because Victorian physics had diminished its existential substance by envisioning it as a waning heat engine” (Clarke 2001: 153). The idea of the sun as a finite energy source was revised for the computer age in Isaac Asimov’s story “The Last Question.” At its end, a supercomputer comes up with an answer to the question of how to reverse entropy. Looking out over what is now chaos as the universe runs down, the supercomputer commands, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” (Asimov 1956: 300). For Asimov, AI becomes the embodiment of a higher power that is able to thermodynamically regenerate the universe.
Erwin Schrödinger’s What is Life? (1944) proposed that biological systems extract order, or negentropy (negative entropy), from their environment. As this approach has been developed in more recent systems theory, in the words of David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, a
living cell, an organism, even an entire ecosystem, might maintain its internal structure if it could be coupled to its surroundings in such a way that the entropy of the environment remains greater than the internal “negentropic” decrease within the boundaries of the system in question. This could happen only so long as the system remained far from equilibrium.
(Depew and Weber 1995: 461)
For a biological system, equilibrium equals death. The metabolic process through which a living system sustains itself reverses the sign of entropy. Through his uncoupling of order from equilibrium, Schrödinger furnished a rationale for seeing life as an open, rather than closed, system, which in turn questioned the primacy of the second law over complex, biological systems. Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth both anticipate a turn away from equilibrium. Consider the memorable quote from Dreiser’s novel:
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.
(Dreiser 1900: 3)
Likewise, in The House of Mirth, Lily’s attempt to repay a loan she was tricked into accepting, thus balancing money and morality, leads to a tragic outcome.
Schrödinger’s theories would be refined, with the terms “negentropy” and “order” replaced by “available energy” and “organization,” thus reinforcing the association of non-equilibrium thermodynamics with information. As Schneider and Sagan see it, “There are deep physical roots linking information manipulation to energy extraction in organisms that must make a living in variable environments to survive” (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 19–20). Yet this association remains problematic, because in information theory, as developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in the 1940s, the term “entropy” has a different meaning altogether. Schneider and Sagan explain,
In information theory entropy describes the uncertainties associated with the utilization of characters in sending and receiving messages. … In a thermodynamic system the basis for assigning an entropy value comes from the uniqueness of a system’s matter-energy distribution at a molecular or atomic level. At any one time a system can have just one particular microstate out of many possible.
(Schneider and Sagan 2005: 20)
While Schneider and Sagan argue there is a “seductive” logic that guides the equivocating of entropy between information theory with non-equilibrium thermodynamics, others have gone further in registering objections. For instance, Jeffrey S. Wicken considers it illogical “to affix the same name to different concepts” and faults Shannon for deliberately sowing confusion (Wicken 1988: 143). But Hayles reaches the opposite conclusion regarding “Shannon’s choice” to place the name of entropy on his calculus of information-load:
In his anxiety to suppress the metaphorical potential of Shannon’s choice, Wicken misses the richly complex and suggestive connections that were instrumental in enabling a new view of chaos to emerge. … The metaphoric joining of entropy and information … allowed complexity to be seen as rich in information rather than deficient in order. (Hayles 1990: 51)
Making a foray into this debate, Thomas Pynchon’s “Entropy” (1960) allegorizes the relationship between entropy and information in the parallel trajectories of Callisto, who faces a fate akin to impending heat death as the room temperature drops, and Saul, who discourses about the meaning of love in terms drawn from information theory: “Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All of this is noise. Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the system” (Pynchon 1960: 90–91).
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) “extends the formulary analogy between thermodynamic and information entropy into a mock-apocalyptic social allegory” (Clarke 2001: 87). As Eric White (1991) explains, Oedipa Maas intends to confirm that informational entropy, viewed as complexity, can overturn thermodynamic entropy, that is, social stasis. Oedipa finds, however, that the interface between thermodynamics and information leads to an unsatisfying binary, either absolute order or absolute chaos. This binary is validated by the idea that “noise within electronic channels was viewed merely as a corruption of the signal” (Clarke 2008: 129), a scenario allegorized in horrific science fiction scenarios, such as The Fly, where the result is a scientist’s bodily mutation.
One of the most important ideas to emerge from the debate about entropy in thermodynamics and information theory is that, as Hayles reports, increasing entropy “could drive systems to increasing complexity” (Hayles 1999: 103). The next step is to examine how systems maintain their internal order through self-organization. Erich Jantsch does so in the course of describing how a system perceives how to maintain itself through self-reference, an inherently circular process. Self-organization becomes a powerful tool, in the guise of complex dynamics, for establishing congruent patterns between living systems – if, albeit, at times over-generalizing on the basis of reductive cultural models, such as those of economic accumulation.
Jantsch’s ground-breaking The Self-Organizing Universe (1980) foregrounded dissipative structures, defined as self-organizing systems open to the environment that “have the possibility of continuously importing free energy from the environment and to export entropy” (26). Jantsch credits Ilya Prigogine for viewing thermodynamic non-equilibrium as a creator, rather than destroyer, of order. That self-organizing systems created a new idea of order became the foundation for a non-linear thermodynamics of irreversible processes now permitting the description of phenomena of spontaneous structuration. The new ordering principle … has been called order through fluctuation. It describes the evolution of a system to a totally new dynamic regime. This dynamic regime represents a spatial and temporal order which would contradict the second law of thermodynamics if it were near the equilibrium.
(Jantsch 1980: 28)
Jantsch laid the groundwork for a thermodynamically guided model of evolution by describing self-organizing systems as autopoietic, or self-making, borrowing the term from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Opening up autopoiesis to a thermodynamic reading, Jantsch made the connection between self-reference and information: a “dissipative structure ‘knows’ indeed what it has to import and export to maintain and renew itself. It needs nothing else but the reference to itself” (Jantsch 1980: 40). Located within a thermodynamic framework, Jantsch’s vision of coevolution as a series of feedback loops among different species leads to a rethinking of ecological stability. Ecosystems function far from equilibrium because the “closer the system gets to equilibrium, the less resilient it becomes”; near thermodynamic equilibrium, that is, “Any random fluctuation, such as climate fluctuations or the appearance of a new species, may destroy the system completely” (66).
Jantsch redefined life, in both the individual and the collective senses, as a thermodynamic process. He then extended the idea of coevolution to cultural systems, and here the book becomes the most provocative, albeit murky at times (Schneider and Sagan observe that Jantsch wrote it quickly at the end of his life). Jantsch proposes that there are similarities across systems, such that “The common denominator is always an open system far from equilibrium which is driven by fluctuations across one or more instability thresholds and enters a new co-ordinated phase of its evolution” (Jantsch 1980: 73). In successive chapters, he built his case for a thermodynamic model for emerging life, where energy flows drive ecosystems and communication appears within and between organisms.
The ripples from Jantsch’s work resonate within subsequent attempts to realign thermodynamics and evolution. Schneider speculates that evolution operates according to thermodynamic principles: “growth and maximization of free energy and structure” and “the development of complexity and efficiency, and minimizations of specific entropy productions” could be connected to natural selection (Schneider 1988: 131). Schneider’s essay occurs in the collection Entropy, Information, and Evolution (Weber, Depew, and Smith 1988), which features several significant essays valuable for understanding the rethinking of thermodynamics and evolution. Rewriting evolution in thermodynamic language, Wicken states,
All natural organizations (as opposed to machines) are non-equilibrium systems that operate, and autocatalytically [i.e. by internal recursive processes] produce themselves, by degrading energy resources. This sets the basic currency of the organization-environment interaction, as well as the general terms on which natural selection operates. Natural selection is based on competitive success in autocatalytically converting resources into organization.
(Wicken 1988: 165)
Commenting on efforts such as Wicken’s to foreground the importance of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in evolutionary development, Depew and Weber suggest that thermodynamics may overturn the reign of neo-Darwinism by offering challenges to traditional explanations for evolution, for instance, the assumption that natural selection only operates on the individual, not larger systems, such as ecosystems (Depew and Weber 1988: 321). Furthermore, non-equilibrium thermodynamics offers new ways of connecting cultural and natural processes, with the result being a heightened ecological awareness. Dyke argues that ecological issues are not simply “natural,” but encompass a larger realm of environmental concerns, such as urban pollution. In brief, Dyke relates the energy flows that sustain ecosystems to the material flows that maintain social structures (Dyke 1988: 359). Not only does waste become unavoidable, creating “a gradient down which material flow can cascade,” a necessary process for maintaining a dissipative structure’s stability, but non-equilibrium thermodynamics also spells out a set of interrelated responsibilities. Several decades before our current climate crisis, Dyke insisted that
our existence as dissipative structures defines a space of possibilities for us, and does so rather tightly. We know from the standard thermodynamic analyses of human life that if we conserve and recycle we can lengthen the course that materials follow as they run through our hands. We know that if we use sunlight (and its immediate and inevitable correlates such as wind) we can select a composition of the material flow that gives us a longer thermodynamic horizon.
(Dyke 1988: 365)
Relating thermodynamic self-organization to systems of meaning, the essays in Chaos and Order (Hayles 1991) apply thermodynamic principles to redrawing disciplinary boundaries. William Paulson’s important essay in this collection relates chaos and order to noise and information, signaling a way of harnessing noise to create meaning:
What appears to be a perturbation in a given system turns out to be the intersection of a new system with the first. In becoming aware of such a relation, the reader in effect creates a new context in which the previously disruptive event or variety is reread. The principle of constructing a pattern out of what interrupts patterns is inherent in artistic communication.
(Paulson 1991: 44)
By exploring the interstices between literature and science, Paulson proposes, we find new meanings (through/in noisy channels) not reducible to either discipline: “From the interference between disciplines can arise new forms of explanation, new articulations between levels of phenomena in a world of emergent complexity” (Paulson 1991: 49). Paulson here sets the stage for speculations about how thermodynamics resonates in postmodern literature. David Porush (1991) connects Prigogine, a seminal figure in thermodynamics, with William Marshall’s novel Roadshow. Both Prigogine and Marshall explore the idea of a traffic jam as a dissipative structure, telegraphing the ways that thermodynamics and self-organization map the trajectories of both biotic and abiotic systems. In the closing chapters of Darwinism Evolving (1995), Depew and Weber devise a thermodynamic framework for evolution. They rethink the principle of selection as a process that complements, rather than resists, crucial thermodynamic concepts. They acknowledge the sizable influence of biologist Stuart Kauffman. In their reading of Kauffman they find “that many phenomena that have become well accepted in contemporary evolutionary science flow rather easily and directly from background assumptions taken from complex dynamics” (Depew and Weber 1995: 456). These complex dynamics connect to thermodynamics, primarily, through the ways in which systems self-organize as a means to process energy flows more efficiently.
Depew and Weber’s model reworks natural selection from an ecological perspective that draws together energy resources in the environment with the metabolic needs of biological populations. Upon first glance, ecosystems, built up through species coevolution, mirror the development of individual organisms. Following that line of thinking, Alfred Lotka’s work in systems ecology in 1924 seems prescient. As Depew and Weber explain, Lotka attempted to “relativize the conditions under which natural selection can be effective to more fundamental forms of what we call chemical selection (‘the survival of the efficient’) and physical selection (‘the survival of the stable’)” (Depew and Weber 1995: 408). Therefore, Depew and Weber agree with Lotka that “Ecosystems favor species that, in funneling energy into their own production and reproduction, also increase the total energy flow through the system” (Depew and Weber 1995: 474). On the other hand, individual organisms, unlike ecosystems, “employ informational macromolecules to achieve stable, homeostatic (stabilized state of a single parameter), and homeorrhetic (stabilized flow or trajectory) metabolic pathways that can never be achieved by entities that depend on external signals” (475). What this is saying from a thermodynamic perspective is that there are important distinctions between how individuals and ecosystems process energy flows. And yet as we shall see, Depew and Weber, arguably, over-generalize somewhat when they call for Darwin’s theories to be mapped across thermodynamic principles.
Depew and Weber address the formidable challenge of coupling non-equilibrium thermodynamics with evolution: if evolution is rewritten in thermodynamic language, there is a logical case for weakening, if not disallowing, the traditional argument against teleology; that is, the argument that evolution occurs at random – for instance, through non-directed genetic mutations. In their view, however, natural selection has always suggested a movement towards a greater state of adaptability. Thus in a non-equilibrium thermodynamics model of evolution, that natural selection works on “kinetic pathways” with regard to the dissipation of “entropic debt” suggests that “these pathways will have a propensity for complexification and organization” (Depew and Weber 1995: 486).
Depew and Weber also investigate the relationship between natural selection and self-organization. They observe that the consideration of this relationship results in a “deeper appreciation of the pervasively probabilistic and statistical character of the world” (1995: 486). What Depew and Weber call “the probability revolution” will, in the long run, contribute to a Darwinian view of evolution: “Nonlinear dynamics is extending the probability revolution by severing dynamics from its last links to classical physics. It is thereby offering new explanatory resources to the Darwinian tradition” (1995: 486). Observing that such a revolution goes beyond the linear thinking that shaped Boltzmann’s modeling of entropy in thermodynamics, they point out that a considerable obstacle to Darwin’s model of evolution, that it ultimately made no sense in the context of classical physics, may be surpassed:
The rise of the sciences of complexity and self-organization now promises an even more robust set of background assumptions that is harmonious with the kinds and degrees of complexity that are at work in the evolution of living systems.
(Depew and Weber 1995: 490)
While admirably straightforward, such a pronouncement leaves out how thermodynamics might apply differently to varying types of living systems. On firmer ground, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan have argued that the “Evolution of life does seem to have a direction. Life’s peculiarities and human technologies do seem to expand at an accelerating rate of change as we come from the past to the present” (Margulis and Sagan 2002: 43). They believe thermodynamics can chart life’s direction, citing Schneider, who proposes that “Life is one of a class of systems that organize in response to a gradient. A gradient is defined as a difference across a distance” (45).
Contemplating a thermodynamic framing of evolution that would revise natural selection, Schneider and Sagan’s Into the Cool (2005) does highlight an “important difference between ecological succession and evolution,” for evolution, unlike ecological succession, “can generate novelty” through the addition of new genomes (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 237). Citing the work of such thinkers as Depew, Weber, and Wicken, Schneider and Sagan argue against a neo-Darwinian view of natural selection, proposing instead that selection operates at a “higher” level. Quoting from Wicken, what is being selected are “informed patterns of thermodynamic flow” (239). Schneider and Sagan also acknowledge the work of chemical engineer Robert Ulanowicz, who has created “methods to quantify energy flow in biological systems” and “agrees with us that the second law generates complexity in nature, but stresses that autocatalysis then selects from among the new combinations those that will remain as part of evolving systems” (100). This redefining of selection is central to Schneider and Sagan’s ecological argument: an “increase in species diversity may represent the ecosystem searching out new pathways for energy degradation. As these systems increase their diversity more pathways are found. This creates redundancy and makes the ecosystems less likely to shut down” (244).
Schneider and Sagan claim that economics in human societies also operates on the basis of gradient reduction (i.e., supply and demand differentials), patterning how biological systems obtain resources for maintaining autopoiesis. In fact, economies and cities that operate far from equilibrium, Schneider and Sagan attest, offer strong evidence against
orthodox Darwinian interpretations that natural selection only ever acts on “the individual”–or that divisible part of “the individual” (literally, “the undivided”), the gene. Even bacteria exhibit incipient market behavior, pooling their genes, metabolites, and resources to perform activities and make structures that would be impossible for them as individuals.
(Schneider and Sagan 2005: 287)
For Schneider and Sagan, gradient reduction constitutes our present lived realities, from the rise of the “internet economy” to politically conservative proposals to allocate “limited resources” in the face of energy scarcity (292, 295).
While non-equilibrium thermodynamics reshapes how life is defined as “an end directed system” (Schneider and Sagan 2005: 301), the critical flaw in this latest synthesis of thermodynamics and self-organization is the tendency to naturalize the politics and ideology that make it appear so persuasive. Livingston remarks,
It is now rather difficult to restore the sense of scandal in the resemblance between descriptions of self-organizing processes in biology and physics and the transnational neoliberalism they underwrite. It is difficult partly because the scientists tend to present paradigms of complexity and self-organization as the deep theory behind all these phenomena – capitalism, biological life, physical laws, and so on. (Livingston 2006: 138)
Regarding Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe (1991), Livingston reveals what he calls the “blatant” ideological underpinnings of arguments for the self-organization of physical or biological systems on the model of human institutions (recall Schneider and Sagan’s supposed “market behavior” of bacteria); Kauffman enthuses, “As if by an invisible hand, each adapting species acts according to its own selfish advantage, yet the entire system appears magically to evolve to a poised state where, on average, each does as best as can be expected” (cited in Livingston 2006: 139). Kauffman’s circular reasoning, of course, should not surprise anyone familiar with the self-reflexivity of self-organizing thermodynamic models, as Jantsch has confirmed. Nonetheless, the disquieting implications here are already being worked out in cyberpunk narratives, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). Livingston warns that Gibson’s futuristic landscape, where the legacy of social Darwinism intersects with a thermodynamically guided techno-capitalist economy, reminds us that
a relentless aestheticization of the apparently kinder and gentler paradigms of chaos and complexity keeps the ecology of violence that it describes hidden in plain sight. The dynamically changing patterns of a “kaleidoscopic” universe are apt to include cascades of viruses spreading like wildfire, flows of international capital abruptly shifting out of your country.
(Livingston 2006: 142)
Even with the dramatic change from life running down in a closed system to open systems constantly self-organizing, self-maintaining, dominant cultural beliefs remain intact, which should give both scientific and humanities disciplines pause. The controversies surrounding the unfolding sciences of thermodynamics show no signs of diminishing.
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——(2008) Posthuman Metamorphosis: narrative and systems, New York: Fordham University Press.
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