Journal of Theoretical Biology 2 le

This is the third in a series of three papers devoted to energy flow and entropy changes in chemical and biological processes, and their Two previous papers (Smith, 2008a, b) have developed a general relation between energy flow and entropy transfer transformations which arise in metabolism. These cycles define precise measures of chemical work and relate them The purpose for the current paper is to relate the foregoing energy/entropy constraints from chemistry to the precise below. Thus it is tempting to think of natural selection, via metabolism, as an essentially computational process that instills the information particular to biomatter ARTICLE IN PRESSin the course of incorporating material from the growth medium into living structures. Anticipating this connec-tion, the relation between energy and entropy wa