cultural naturalism文化上的自然主义.pdfVIP

Entropy 2010, 12, 1325-1343; doi:10.3390/ OPEN ACCESS entropy ISSN 1099-4300 /journal/entropy Article Cultural Naturalism Arto Annila 1,2,3,* and Stanley Salthe 4, * 1 Department of Biosciences, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland 2 Institute of Biotechnology, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland 3 Department of Physics, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland 4 Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York 13754, USA * Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: arto.annila@helsinki.fi (A.A.); ssalthe@ (S.S.). Received: 25 February 2010; in revised form: 24 March 2010 / Accepted: 28 April 2010 / Published: 26 May 2010 Abstract: Culture can be viewed as the means by which a society can live in its surroundings by acquiring and consuming free energy. This naturalistic notion assumes that everything can be valued in terms of energy, hence also social changes can be described as natural processes that are influenced by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This universal law, when formulated as an equation of motion, reveals that societies emerge, evolve and eventually extinguish after tapping, exploiting and finally depleting their resources, which we can say are ultimately valued in energetic terms. The analysis reveals that trajectories of societies are, however, inhe