Among physical systems, living beings are usually thought of as the only genuinely teleological natural systems. In this paper, I argue that the alleged teleology of living beings is not a real property but only an appearance, behind which what really exists is a complex version of stability. The complexity of living beings as stable systems has to do mainly, though not exclusively, so I argue, with the fact that living beings are dissipative structures which obey the thermodynamic principle of maximum entropy production.

This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2016
MIT Press
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.