Between 1976 and 1987 Wicken published over a dozen papers on the connection between thermodynamics and evolution, culminating in his 1987 book Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information.

A year later Wicken contributed the excellent article "Thermodynamics, Evolution, and Emergence: Ingredients for a New Synthesis” to the 1988 book Entropy, Information, and Evolution: New Perspectives on Physical and Biological Evolution by Bruce Weber, David Depew, and James Smith. This volume opened with two articles on the growth of entropy and information in an expanding universe by Steven Frautschi and David Layzer (which was likely based on a 1934 suggestion by Arthur Stanley Eddington).

Layzer and Frautschi had been mentioned frequently in the contemporary (1986, 1988 2nd ed.) book Evolution as Entropy by Daniel Brooks and E.O.Wiley, but this book made no mention of Wicken. Layzer's 1990 magnum opus Cosmogenesis made no mention of Frautschi or Wicken, nor the three recent books on entropy and evolution!

Some 15 years after Layzer's book, Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan wrote their book Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life claiming the second law of thermodynamics is driving evolution and the basic physics of energy flow can explain all complex, self-organizing, natural systems. They expanded ideas first developed by Jeffrey Wicken and many others.

There is of course a very long tradition of attempting to explain the origin of life using the laws of thermodynamics, the most notable being Erwin Schrödinger's landmark 1944 book What Is Life.

Next in importance is probably Ilya Prigogine's Nobel-prize winning efforts to explain the emergence of order out of chaos as a consequence of nonlinear thermodynamics.

Classical thermodynamics, by contrast with nonlinear thermodynamics, can only be used for the study of reversible processes and systems in or near thermal equilibrium. Prigogine's "dissipative" systems, today more commonly known as complex systems, could be described as "self-organizing," a property that "emergentists" said was a basic property of life, one that could not be explained by "reductionist" science.

Prigogine became very popular with "holists," "vitalists," and "emergentists" who were looking for new laws of nature that would add an explanation for evolution (None of course are needed!).

Prigogine is perhaps the most famous name in chaos theory and complexity theory. Although he made very few original contributions to these fields, he is famous for them, nevertheless. His work (especially his 1984 book written with Isabel Stengers, Order Out Of Chaos) is a major reference today for popular concepts like "self-organizing, "complex systems," "bifurcation points," "non-linearity,", "attractors," "symmetry breaking," "morphogenesis," "autocatalytic," "constraint," and of course "irreversibility," although none of these terms is originally Prigogine's. The name "dissipative structures" and perhaps the phrase "far from equilibrium" belong to Prigogine, but the thermodynamic concepts were already in Ludwig Boltzmann, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Schrödinger, and perhaps many others.

Today the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems in the natural sciences and the social sciences. Followers like Stuart Kauffman insist that concepts like self-organization, complex adaptivity, and autocatalyticity must be added to standard Darwinian theory to explain evolution. Terrence Deacon has similar ideas and adds "constraints."

Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life, by Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan, p. xix, p.102

Hmolpedia page on Jeffrey Wicken