Chapter 1: The New Biology
8 - The 2nd Law
Into that world stepped Nicolas Carnot, a military engineer interested in heat dissipation. While tinkering with steam engines he discovered a principle now recognized as central to all living things. Formalized by the physicist Rudolf Clausius, it became known as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The thermodynamic 1st Law holds that energy is never lost from the universe. The 2nd Law shows that while energy isn’t lost, it does dissipate from concentrated to diluted form—losing its ability to perform useful work as it flows from one physical system to another—and that when energy leaves a system, that system tends to degrade. As one writer puts it, “All fire will die, all variety goes bland, all structure will eventually extinguish itself.”
This handed a challenge to the Lamarckian view, in which life was seen as becoming always richer and more diverse. How could that happen if everything was winding down?
One response among natural philosophers, as biologists were then called, was the theory of “vitalism.” Life was animated not just by mechanical processes, they said, but by a kind of divine energy—a vital force that counterbalanced the 2nd Law’s dissipation. Vitalism would continue as a scientific theory until early in the twentieth century and remains a force today in its current form as the new age movement. At the time, though, despite real concerns about the 2nd Law, another development was about to steal the spotlight.
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