Talk:Biological thermodynamics

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[edit] External links

I have put the following link-revert war here so as to find the general consensus: we note that User talk:24.93.101.70 wants the following linked article attached to the external links section, however User:Nonsuch does not want the following link here:

• Inquiries into the Nature of Free Energy and Entropy in Respect to Biochemical Thermodynamics

If interested, please leave your comments below. Thanks:--Sadi Carnot 05:49, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Merger

The bioenergetics and biological thermodynamics articles basically refer to exactly the same field of study. I suggest we merge bioenergetics to biological thermodynamics, but have bioenergetics redirect to the very different bioenergetic analysis, which as far as I can tell is the most common usage of the term "bioenergetic". We could then simply include a disambiguation link on the bioenergetic analysis page toward the biological thermodynamics page.

This just might help avoid the switching and reswitching (a very slow edit war...) between discussing biological thermodynamics and bioenergetic analysis on the bioenergetics page, which is highly visible if you click its history tab...

--BadLeprechaun 15:57, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merged with bioenergetics

I'm in the process of merging bioenergetics into this page, mainly to prevent confusion with bioenergetic analysis (BA). I should be done in the next few minutes. Bioenergetics will disambiguate to both this page (BT) and BA. For now, I will put BA and BT each including Otheruses4 links to each other (of the type, this article is about blabla, for blibli, see -wikilink-). The paragraph below is the entire old article from bioenergetics, in case anybody feels I missed something in merging into here.

Bioenergetics, loosely defined, is the study of energy investment and flow through living systems. This broad definition includes the study of thousands of different processes ranging from cellular respiration and the production of ATP, to the study of evolutionary costs accompanying the development of a particular trait, such as the immune system. One question this area of science seeks to answer is whether protective benefit of a particular trait is worth the energy investment it requires.

--BadLeprechaun 02:50, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Comment: energetics, and biological thermodynamics, or biothermodynamics, etc., are closely related topics; but each has a separate agenda. See, for example, Nicholls and Ferguson's 2002 Bioenergetics as it contrasts with Haynie's 2001 Biological Thermodynamics; the latter is more thermodynamically-focused, the former is more biochemically-focused. Short on time presently. --Sadi Carnot 16:33, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip, Sadi. However, I'm not quite sure how I would divide the two (bioenergetics, biological thermodynamics) at this point, as what was there in the past was rather identical. Do you think you could start the bioenergetics article, even as a stub, and I might pick it up later when I have time? If you do, please make sure to leave a proper visible link to bioenergetic analysis so that the switching back and forth between the two subjects (the biology and the psychotherapy) on that page doesn't start again. Thanks, and I'll look into bioenergetics eventually. --BadLeprechaun 00:58, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

I also did a redirect of biochemical thermodynamics into this page, as is used in Robert Alberty's 2003 Thermodynamics of Biochemical Reactions. My general intuition is that "energetics" or "bioenergetics" are outdated terms, although they are still used in some books. --Sadi Carnot 01:37, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

In PubMed, "bioenergetics" gets 194201 hits, while "biological thermodynamics" gets 2. I understand the goal of maintaining the distinction between this topic and bioenergetic analysis, but that might be better served by moving this page to something like bioenergetics (metabolism). --Arcadian 12:30, 23 March 2007 (UTC)