Selection as a Thermodynamic Principle of Action: Towards an Evolutionary Mechanics of Persistence

Biology still lacks a shared physical framework for describing what organisms are doing as open dissipative systems that must actively restore their own homeostatic boundary conditions to persist over time. The central problem is not merely how much energy organisms contain or expend, but how biological identities are constructed and maintained given local ecological conditions to drive the higher order topologies observed in evolutionary biology. Plant ecology, animal physiology, and biomedical science have each developed powerful quantitative traditions for measuring biological energetics, but they have done so at different scales and for different explanatory purposes. What lacks is a conservation-consistent framework in which construction cost, operating cost, and behavioral output given ecological conditions are commensurable within a system to test for selected design. This review proposes the energy transform motif (ETM) as an integrative measure of physical identity. Grounded in bond graph theory, the ETM is a conservation-consistent formal representation of an identity system as an energy flow configuration within an ecology over time. In an ETM, stored energy becomes the constructed C motif, and exchanged energy is accounted for as the operational relationships R among C elements and their historical costs to define the dissipative gradient of maintaining physical identity, or the homeostatic manifold in biology. The thermodynamics of open dissipative systems far from equilibrium thus constrains the scaling of energetic accounting across multiscale topologies, where previous energy flow budgeting forms the homeostatic priors upon which future action or behavior can be energetically optimized over evolutionary timescales. Neuroscience, as an interdisciplinary bridge within the life sciences, offers an empirical bridge across scales within an organism to complete an energetic accounting of organismal traversal of nonequilibrium. Specifically, we track the construction and operation of multiscale organismal systems over time to reveal the long run statistics of local choice under the homeostatic manifold given ecological conditions. We develop an evolutionary mechanics of persistence (EMP) as the falsifiable program of research to query whether the observed C – R motif that variational gene networks construct and maintain aligns with thermodynamic constraints over local ecological history. The proposed EMP provides a thermodynamic resolution via common metric and physical framing to questions of evolutionary design.