Thermodynamic theory of evolution
I recently linked to the a short piece by Pinker on how an appreciation for the second law of thermodynamics might help one come to some peace with the entropy of the world. It's inevitable, so don't blame yourself.
And yet there is something beautiful about life in its ability to create pockets of order and information amidst the entropy and chaos.
I don't know if that's true, but it is so elegant as to be breathtaking. What this all leads to is a theory of a new form of evolution, different from the Darwinian definition.
I'm tempted to see an analogous definition of successful corporate adaptation in this, though I'm inherently skeptical of analogy and metaphor. Still, reading a paragraph like this, one can't think of how critical it is for companies to remember the right lessons from the past, and not too many of the wrong ones.
Again, it's tempting to look beyond humans and at corporations, and why companies die out over time. Is there a similar process at work, in which a company's replication of its knowledge introduces more and more errors over time until the company dies a natural death?
