Much writing has been devoted to entropy and life. Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and the evolution of life began in around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of historysecond law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy. The 1944 book What is Life?Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger served largely to stimulate this research. In this book, Schrödinger states that life feeds on negative entropy, or negentropy as it is sometimes called. Recent writings have utilized the concept of Gibbs free energy to elaborate on this issue.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1863, Rudolf Clausius published his noted memoir "On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of its Action" wherein he outlined a preliminary relationship, as based on his own work and that of William Thomson, between his newly developed concept of entropy and life. Building on this, one of the first to speculate on a possible thermodynamic perspective of evolution was the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In 1875, building on the works of Clausius and Kelvin, Boltzmann reasoned:The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials – these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available – nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for [negative] entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.
