Statistical physics of self-replication.

@article{England2013StatisticalPO,
  title={Statistical physics of self-replication.},
  author={Jeremy L. England},
  journal={The Journal of chemical physics},
  year={2013},
  volume={139 12},
  pages={
          121923
        }
}
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the… 
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