ENERQY IN ANIMAL ECOLOQY
81
them?” and also, “For an adult organism, the energy content is as
stationary as the material content since, surely, any calorie is worth
as much as any other calorie. One cannot see how a mere exchange could
help” (Schrodinger, 1946).
This is not merely a jocular or trivial point. It is possible to conceive
a world in which organism-like entities do actually require only enough
food t o make good entropic gain and do not replace existing biomass.
It is equally possible to imagine an astronomical world in which planets
follow the eminently logical paths of epicycles. The reason for an
organism requiring energy may be obvious, but after Schrodinger’s
question, it may deserve restatement. Organisms are not exchanging
one calorie for another nor are they only maintaining body heat and
performing the other energy-utilizing operations of normal physiology.
When the first animal ate its first plant, the animal was not exchanging,
it was gaining. To meet the conditions set by natural selection, the
plant had t o increase its rate of incorporation of energy t o make good
the loss t o the animal or it would have disappeared in the process of
evolution. Animals need energy t o make good their loss of energy t o
other animals. We’re not simply dealing with a steady state system
sucking in negative entropy t o maintain itself against the laws of
thermodynamics, but we have a whole set of such systems, each one
acquiring energy and matter at the expense of other organisms t o make
good its losses t o yet other systems. The only reason for this state of
affairs is that the systems or organisms which behaved in a rational way,
as if they understood Schrodinger, have long since been eliminated by
natural selection.
The energy losses of an organism in a population are not simply
heat. Corpses, faeces, exudates are all necessary by-products of evolutionary success. The rate of energy passage through an organism or
population can, in fact, be altered by altering the predation rate, and
this is different from increasing the population’s heat production. If a
closed system including a living organism is considered, the metabolic
activities of the organism in maintaining itself in an unchanged condition result in an entropy increase in the closed system. If it were
possible in principle to measure the entropy of the isolated organism
itself, this would have been found t o be unchanged. Therefore, the
organism is acting t o increase the entropy of the world around it.
Patten carries the paradoxical part of Schrodinger’s statement further
by stating that living organisms feed upon negative entropy t o compensate for information losses attending the life process (Patten, 1959).
Here the formal similarity between information and the statistical
mechanical concept of entropy is taken to demonstrate identity between information and negative entropy. However, information in
81
them?” and also, “For an adult organism, the energy content is as
stationary as the material content since, surely, any calorie is worth
as much as any other calorie. One cannot see how a mere exchange could
help” (Schrodinger, 1946).
This is not merely a jocular or trivial point. It is possible to conceive
a world in which organism-like entities do actually require only enough
food t o make good entropic gain and do not replace existing biomass.
It is equally possible to imagine an astronomical world in which planets
follow the eminently logical paths of epicycles. The reason for an
organism requiring energy may be obvious, but after Schrodinger’s
question, it may deserve restatement. Organisms are not exchanging
one calorie for another nor are they only maintaining body heat and
performing the other energy-utilizing operations of normal physiology.
When the first animal ate its first plant, the animal was not exchanging,
it was gaining. To meet the conditions set by natural selection, the
plant had t o increase its rate of incorporation of energy t o make good
the loss t o the animal or it would have disappeared in the process of
evolution. Animals need energy t o make good their loss of energy t o
other animals. We’re not simply dealing with a steady state system
sucking in negative entropy t o maintain itself against the laws of
thermodynamics, but we have a whole set of such systems, each one
acquiring energy and matter at the expense of other organisms t o make
good its losses t o yet other systems. The only reason for this state of
affairs is that the systems or organisms which behaved in a rational way,
as if they understood Schrodinger, have long since been eliminated by
natural selection.
The energy losses of an organism in a population are not simply
heat. Corpses, faeces, exudates are all necessary by-products of evolutionary success. The rate of energy passage through an organism or
population can, in fact, be altered by altering the predation rate, and
this is different from increasing the population’s heat production. If a
closed system including a living organism is considered, the metabolic
activities of the organism in maintaining itself in an unchanged condition result in an entropy increase in the closed system. If it were
possible in principle to measure the entropy of the isolated organism
itself, this would have been found t o be unchanged. Therefore, the
organism is acting t o increase the entropy of the world around it.
Patten carries the paradoxical part of Schrodinger’s statement further
by stating that living organisms feed upon negative entropy t o compensate for information losses attending the life process (Patten, 1959).
Here the formal similarity between information and the statistical
mechanical concept of entropy is taken to demonstrate identity between information and negative entropy. However, information in