The Crucial Role of Thermodynamic Gates in Living Systems

Living systems can be characterized as seeming to violate the second law of thermodynamics in their operation, but not actually doing so, due to clever design. This type of operation raises questions of how these processes could be started. In this paper, I discuss how all forms of machines that have this type of operation rely crucially on the existence of “gates,” that is, interfaces between different populations that can either switch on or switch off entropic flow. These gates are directly comparable to transistors in modern electronic circuits. This allows analysis of biological systems to map directly to that of electronic and other engineered systems.