#1086 John Odling-Smee - Niche Construction: How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution
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Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Decenter. I'm your host as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. John Odling Smee. He's Emeritus Research Fellow at the Mansfield College at the University of Oxford. And today we're talking about his book, Niche Construction, How Life Contributes to Its Own Evolution.
So Dr. Odling Smee, welcome to the show. It's an honor to everyone. Thank you. So you start your book by talking about physics and about life itself and the origin of life.
So tell us first about the second law of thermodynamics. Why is it important in the context of evolution? Well. As far as I know, the first person to draw attention to the relevance of the laws of thermodynamics, and in particular the second law, which states that entropy or disorder was always increasing over time, was the physicist Erwin Schrdinger. And he did so in a short book called What It's Life that he published, I think, about 1944.
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