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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics

Eric D. Schneider, +1 more
- 11 Mar 1994 - 
- Vol. 19, Iss: 6, pp 25-48
TLDR
In this article, the second law of thermodynamics has been extended to nonequilibrium regions, where the evolution of a system is described in terms of gradients maintaining the system at some distance away from equilibrium.
About
This article is published in Mathematical and Computer Modelling.The article was published on 1994-03-11 and is currently open access. It has received 735 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Living systems & Second law of thermodynamics.

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Maximum entropy modeling of species geographic distributions

TL;DR: In this paper, the use of the maximum entropy method (Maxent) for modeling species geographic distributions with presence-only data was introduced, which is a general-purpose machine learning method with a simple and precise mathematical formulation.
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Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable—And why they are a key to sustainability

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe an approach to assess the ecological role of cities and to estimate the scale of the impact they are having on the ecosphere, showing that cities are causally linked to accelerating global ecological decline and are not by themselves sustainable.
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An ecosystem approach for sustainability: addressing the challenge of complexity

TL;DR: This work portrays these systems as Self-Organizing Holarchic Open (SOHO) systems and interpret their behaviours and structures with reference to non-equilibrium thermodynamics: holons, propensities and canons; and information and attractors.
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Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability

TL;DR: The authors assesses the capital stocks, physical flows, and corresponding ecosystems areas required to support the economy using "ecological footprint" analysis and show that most so-called "advanced" countries are running massive unaccounted ecological deficits with the rest of the planet.
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Quantifying sustainability: Resilience, efficiency and the return of information theory

TL;DR: In this article, the fundamental calculus of IT provides a uniform way to quantify both essential attributes (effective performance and reserve capacity) and results in a single metric that gauges system sustainability (robustness) in terms of the tradeoff allotment of each.
References
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Book

The Selfish Gene

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors take up the concepts of altruistic and selfish behaviour; the genetical definition of selfish interest; the evolution of aggressive behaviour; kinship theory; sex ratio theory; reciprocal altruism; deceit; and the natural selection of sex differences.
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The Strategy of Ecosystem Development

TL;DR: The principles of ecological succession bear importantly on the relationships between man and nature and needs to be examined as a basis for resolving man’s present environmental crisis.
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Selforganization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules

TL;DR: The causes and effect of cause and effect, and the prerequisites of Selforganization, are explained in more detail in the I.IA.