Abstract
One of the great intellectual problems of this century for scientists working at the boundary between physics and biology was reconciling the Second Law of Thermodynamics with the principles of biological growth and evolution. According to the Second Law, the entropy or disorder characterizing a physical system tends to increase with time. Organic development, however, is a process of increasing order, on both ontogenetic and phylogenetic scales. In order to reconcile this apparent contradiction, the physicist Schrödinger (1944/1967) appealed to the concept of “negentropy”, upon which organisms were said to sustain themselves (p. 75). But the appeal to “negative entropy” was more a description of the problem than a solution.
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Chapman, M. (1991). Self-organization as Developmental Process: Beyond the organismic and mechanistic models?. In: Van Geert, P., Mos, L.P. (eds) Annals of Theoretical Psychology. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 7. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3842-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-3842-4_15
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