Maximum Power and its Philosophical Roots: The Critical Importance Today of the Ideas of Howard Odum and Friedrich Nietzsche

This Briefs volume focuses on the maximum power principle, which was created by the mathematician and physical chemist Alfred Lotka, and further developed and utilized most prominently by the systems ecologist H. T. Odum, who applied it to different physical, biological, ecological and economic systems. They both described this principle providing a thermodynamic framework for evolutionary theory. This principle has a philosophical heritage that has, until now, gone unrecognized. The 19th c...