Devine Sean D
Victoria Management School, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand.
Biosystems. 2016 Feb;140:8-22. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2015.11.008. Epub 2015 Dec 23.
Replication can be envisaged as a computational process that is able to generate and maintain order far-from-equilibrium. Replication processes, can self-regulate, as the drive to replicate can counter degradation processes that impact on a system. The capability of replicated structures to access high quality energy and eject disorder allows Landauer's principle, in conjunction with Algorithmic Information Theory, to quantify the entropy requirements to maintain a system far-from-equilibrium. Using Landauer's principle, where destabilising processes, operating under the second law of thermodynamics, change the information content or the algorithmic entropy of a system by ΔH bits, replication processes can access order, eject disorder, and counter the change without outside interventions. Both diversity in replicated structures, and the coupling of different replicated systems, increase the ability of the system (or systems) to self-regulate in a changing environment as adaptation processes select those structures that use resources more efficiently. At the level of the structure, as selection processes minimise the information loss, the irreversibility is minimised. While each structure that emerges can be said to be more entropically efficient, as such replicating structures proliferate, the dissipation of the system as a whole is higher than would be the case for inert or simpler structures. While a detailed application to most real systems would be difficult, the approach may well be useful in understanding incremental changes to real systems and provide broad descriptions of system behaviour.
复制可被设想为一个能够在远离平衡态的情况下产生并维持秩序的计算过程。复制过程能够自我调节，因为复制的驱动力可以对抗影响系统的降解过程。复制结构获取高质量能量并排出无序的能力，使得兰道尔原理与算法信息论相结合，能够量化维持一个远离平衡态系统所需的熵。根据兰道尔原理，在热力学第二定律作用下的不稳定过程会使系统的信息内容或算法熵改变ΔH比特，而复制过程能够在无外界干预的情况下获取秩序、排出无序并抵消这种变化。复制结构的多样性以及不同复制系统的耦合，都会增强系统（或多个系统）在变化环境中自我调节的能力，因为适应过程会选择那些能更高效利用资源的结构。在结构层面，由于选择过程使信息损失最小化，不可逆性也降至最低。虽然可以说每个出现的结构在熵效率上都更高，但随着此类复制结构的增多，整个系统的耗散比惰性或更简单结构的情况要高。虽然将其详细应用于大多数实际系统会很困难，但这种方法在理解实际系统的渐进变化以及提供系统行为的宽泛描述方面可能会很有用。
