The second law of thermodynamics is the first law of psychology: evolutionary developmental psychology and the theory of tandem, coordinated inheritances: comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).
Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization. This means that the individually unique and unpredictable factors in the web of developmental interactions are a disordering threat to normal development. Selection built anti-entropic mechanisms into organisms to orchestrate transactions with environments so that they have some chance of being organization-building and reproduction-enhancing rather than disordering.
Tooby
John
J
Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, USA. tooby@anth.ucsb.edu
Cosmides
Leda
L
Barrett
H Clark
HC
D005075:Biological Evolution; D005823:Genetics; D006801:Humans; D011584:Psychology / Q000379:methods*; D020080:Tandem Repeat Sequences / Q000235:genetics*; D013816:Thermodynamics