International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

"The physical configurations of the organism and the organic world as a whole are determined by the requirement of maximizing the rate of energy exchanges within the organisms and between them" (N. RASHEVSKY, 1956, p.124).

This principle was originally stated by A. LOTKA in 1924, (1956, p.357).

LOTKA elaborates the concept of "coupled energy transformers". He explains that two or more systems, coupled "in cascade" become able to use a whole range of differences of energetic levels quite better that anyone of them separately, in view that each one, due to its proper characteristics, is only able to use a certain specific type of energy at a specific level.

According to LOTKA, the green plants and the animals, being globally coupled, constitute a kind of "world engine" globally able to use a greater part of the sun's energy. The price that they pay for this is that the global engine "… spends all its work feeding itself and keeping itself in repair, so that no balance is left over for any imaginable residual purpose. Still it accomplishes one very remarkable thing; it improves itself at it goes along, if we may employ this term to describe those progressive changes in its composition and construction which constitute the evolution of the system" (p.335).

The "world engine" thus progresses towards global efficiency, which, by the way, makes it altogether an entropy accelerator, similarly global. Such a model offers, somewhat unexpectedly, a base for the idea that the planet constitutes a coherent global system, at the same time evolutive and autogenetic, in conformity with J. LOVELOCK's "GAIA" concept.

This is confirmed by R. MARGALEF's discovery that the flow of energy is from the less to the more organized systems in a global ecosystem (1982)

→ Saint Matthew's Principle

Finally, LOTKA's law has been wholly confirmed by PRIGOGINE's thermodynamics of systems faraway from equilibrium, in which emergent complexity may appear through dissipative transformation of energy into structures, particularly in those systems already most highly organized.

PRIGOGINE and ALLEN moreover consider that LOTKA's law "corresponds to the evolution of western societies in a situation where energy resource stocks were not a limiting factor"… As a result "LOTKA's law finds its natural interpretation in a succession of structural instabilities under these conditions" (1978, p.76-7).

However, excessive energy flows, in particular sudden wave shocks, can become destructive. ODUM gives as examples the melting of insulation wires or the violent release of strong thermal winds during a forest fire.