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a1988). Darwinian theory which defines
evolutions the product of natural selection cannot address or
even recognize planetary evolution because there is no replicating
or reproducing population of competing Earth systems on which
natural selection can act (Dawkins, 1982) the Earth evolves
as a population of one.
The problem of the population of one is most
striking at the level of planetary evolution, but it is far more
general than that. Whether in the rumen of an herbivore or within
a larger ecosystem such as a forrest ecosystem undergoing succession,
selection is seen to occur within systems which are recognized
as populations of one. The same is true in the evolution of culture
which is seen to occur through the agglomeration of autonomous
chiefdoms into nation states, into empires, and at present into,
minimally, a global economy. The dynamics of all of these systems,
each and every one of which is an internal component process
of the planetary system as a whole, is beyond the ontology and
explanatory framework of evolution following from natural selection.
Natural selection is seen to be a process internal to the evolution
of a population of one, and it cannot explain the systems to
which it is internal.
This suggests the need for a physical selection principle (since
if selection is not between replicating or reproducing entities
cannot, by definition, be biological), a principle that would
account for the selection of macro (ordered) from micro (disordered)
modes, for spontaneously ordered systems, and from which the
fecundity principle could be derived.
The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics
The first and second laws of thermodynamics
are not ordinary laws of physics. Because the first law, the
law of energy conservation, in effect, unifies all real-world
processes, it is thus a law on which all other laws depend. In
more technical terms, it expresses the time-translation symmetry
of the laws of physics themselves. With respect to the second
law, Eddington (1929) has argued
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that it holds the supreme position among
all the laws of nature because it not only governs the ordinary
laws of physics but the first law as well. If the first law expresses
the underlying symmetry principle of the natural world (that
which remains the same) the second law expresses the broken symmetry
(that which changes). It is with the second law that a basic
nomological understanding of end-directedness, and time itself,
the ordinary experience of then and now, of the flow of things,
came into the world. The search for a conserved quantity and
active principle is found as early as the work of Thales and
the Milesian physicists (c. 630-524 B.C.) and is thus co-existent
with the beginnings of recorded science, although it is Heraclitus
(c. 536 B.C.) with his insistence on the relation between persistence
and change who could well be argued to hold the top position
among the earliest progenitors of the field that would become
thermodynamics. Of modern scholars it was Leibniz who first argued
that there must be something which is conserved (later the first
law) and something which changes (later the second law).
The Classical Statements of the First
and Second Laws
Following the work of Davy and
Rumford, the first law was first formulated by Mayer, then Joule,
and later Helmoholtz in the first half of the nineteenth century
with various demonstrations of the equivalence of heat and other
forms of energy. The law was completed in this century with Einstein's
demonstration that matter is also a form of energy. The first
law says that (a) all real-world processes consist of transformations
of one form of energy into another (e.g., mechanical, chemical,
or electrical energy or energy in the form of heat), and that
(b) the total amount of energy in all real-world transformations
always remains the same or is conserved (energy is neither created
nor destroyed). Among the many profound implications of the first
law is the impossibility of Cartesian dualism and all its descendent
variants which entail the interaction of a world split into one
part governed by a conservation principle and the
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