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IoHT Publications
Chicago: November 18, 2008 - by Libb Thims

“Notes on Equilibrium Variants of Life”

In thermodynamics, an ongoing, albeit unpronounced, debate of sorts exists as to the

nature of the variant of “equilibrium” of the life process. The question remains: is life an
in equilibrium process, an out of equilibrium process, or some variation therein, being
labeled with possible terms such as “far-from-equilibrium”, near-equilibrium, or
punctuated equilibrium, etc.?
To give a common opinion on this matter, in 2001 American biophysicist Donald
Haynie stated, in his university-level teaching textbook Biological Thermodynamics, that
“a living organism, be it an amoeba, a bombardier beetle, or a wildebeest, is an open
system [and] is therefore never at equilibrium.1 Likewise, according to the 2008 views of
authors Sanford Kwinter and Cynthia Davidson, “life is a case of maintaining a very
delicate structure, ourselves, a significant distance from equilibrium at nearly all times,
and at others—in order to evolve, grow and invent—very far from equilibrium indeed.”2
As such, according this commonly accepted view, a human being is never at
equilibrium, in life, but is in fact a significant distance from equilibrium. Yet, studies show
that when people are polled and asked what percent of their life is found to be in
equilibrium and what percent is found to be out of equilibrium, a converse answer arises
in that people reason that about 40 percent of the average person’s life will exist in a
state of equilibrium, in the sense of a state of life being balanced, in control, or stable.3
In any event, these accepted-as-truth far-from equilibrium views of life, stem, in large
part, from the thermodynamics writings of Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine who in 1947
began to maintain the strict habit of opening each new publication with a statement or
argument to the effect that the classical thermodynamics of German physicist Rudolf
Clausius (1865) and American engineer Willard Gibbs (1876), such as is captured in the
logic of the free energy minimization principle, is inapplicable to the study of life.
In 1955, the opening page of his Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible
Processes states “a serious limitation of classical thermodynamics as a general tool for
the macroscopic description of physico-chemical processes lies in the fact that its
method is based on such concepts as reversible processes and true equilibrium states.”
He continues, “it is well known that the steady flow of energy which originates from the
sun prevents the atmosphere of the earth from reaching a state of thermodynamic
equilibrium … obviously then, the majority of phenomena studied in biology and other
subjects are irreversible processes which take place outside the equilibrium state.”4
The subject was so paramount in Prigogine’s mind, that he devoted the opening
words of his 1977 Nobel Lecture “Time, Structure and Fluctuations” to an effort to
discredit the standard characterization of thermodynamic equilibrium by a free energy
minimum.5
At present, this Prigoginean view is so ingrained in the cultural mind that many a
physicist will freely declare to being, themselves, dissipative structures, living in a state
far from equilibrium; however, cumbersome this may sound. Yet when the Carnot
“system” model of a section of the rotating earth’s surface is viewed in respect to the
cyclical heat inputs of the sun, as shown below, a different picture emerges; in the
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sense that working systems are put first in contact with a hot body, for approximately
twelve-hours, and then put in contact with a cold body, for approximately twelve hours:6

In this perspective, earth-bound biospheric systems seem not to be continuously far at

bay from equilibrium, but rather to be set out of equilibrium at the start of each day and

then, following the setting of the hot sun, left to settle into an end-of-day equilibrium
state, which would invariably be characterized by a daily free energy minimum, unique
to each system.
In this direction, some, in question of the assumed far-from-equilibrium Prigoginean
view of life, have recently begun to arrive at a more realistic picture of how one might be
able to quantify equilibrium in the biosphere. One of the first to see the inconsistency in
the logic of Prigogine was Russian physical chemist Georgi Gladyshev, who in 1977, in
opposition to the views of Prigogine, wrote up a classical thermodynamics based view
of the process of life, operating at what Gladyshev called “quasi-equilibrium”.7 In more
detail, in his follow-up 1997 book Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living
Beings, Gladyshev quite readily pointed out, in respect to the initial-day/final-night states
of heat input and heat release patterns characteristic of the earth’s surface, that “the
thermodynamics of a system, considers only the initial and final states and is not
interested whether the process under study occurs under equilibrium or non-equilibrium
conditions.”8
In a similar manner, in 2005 authors Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan ask, in
question of the term far-from-equilibrium:9
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“Is life a far-from-equilibrium system? If so, how far are organisms from
equilibrium? And what does this phrase mean? In fact, the term far-from-equilibrium
may be more applicable to backfiring engines than smoothly running life-forms.”

They note that “far-from-equilibrium systems, a phrase that was, to the best of our
knowledge, never defined by Prigogine and the Brussels school, seem to occur when
sufficient but not excessive energy materially cycles.”
In addition, according to Schneider and Sagan, “the tradition in nonequilibrium
thermodynamics has been to define far-from-equilibrium events after the first
bifurcation.” In respect to life, however, they note that many biological liquid systems
operate under equilibrium thermodynamic conditions and that although “life itself seems
to be a far-from-equilibrium phenomenon” it is, in reality, a collection of processes and
structure, made of constitutive chemical reactions, requiring low activation energies, and
that “life is made up of [so] many reactions in the near equilibrium range [that it] may not
be so ‘far’ from equilibrium as has been suggested.”9

References
1. Haynie, Donald. (2001). Biological Thermodynamics (section: Non-equilibrium
thermodynamics and life, pgs 173-74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Kwinter, Sanford and Davidson, Cynthia. (2008). Far from Equilibrium: Essays on
Technology and Design Culture, (pg. 12). Actar.
3. Thims, Libb. (2006). “Equilibrium Poll [N=19]”, Chicago: IoHT Publications.
4. Prigogine, Ilya. (1955). Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes.
Charles C. Thomas.
5. Prigogine, Ilya. (1977). “Time Structure and Fluctuations”, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 08.
6. Thermodynamic system URL: http://www.eoht.info/page/Thermodynamic+system
7. Gladyshev, Georgi, P. (1978). "On the Thermodynamics of Biological Evolution",
Journal of Theoretical Biology, Vol. 75, Issue 4, Dec 21, pp. 425-44.
8. Gladyshev, Georgi, P. (1997). Thermodynamic Theory of the Evolution of Living
Beings (pgs. 1-2). Commack, New York: Nova Science Publishers.
9. Schneider, Eric D. and Sagan, Dorion. (2005). Into the Cool - Energy Flow,
Thermodynamics, and Life, (pgs. 86-87). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.