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Freedom, Diversity and Evolution in Nature

13 March 2025, 3:00 pm–4:00 pm

Nature

Join Duke University’s Professor Adrian Bejan as he explains how power drives freedom, diversity, and evolution in nature, highlighting phenomena from biology to human-made design. Drawing on the Constructal Law, he shows how maximising flow access shapes everything from inequality and hierarchy to the evolution of form.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Organiser

Li, Yutao

Location

AV Hill Lecture Theatre 131
Medical Sciences and Anatomy
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

Without Power, there is nothing—no movement, no change, no evolution, no life. The science that enables us the most came from individuals who questioned things so common that they are overlooked. This lecture is about some of the most common. Emphasis is on predicting diversity, inequality, hierarchy, and evolution. Predictions are made by invoking the universal natural tendency to evolve with freedom toward designs that offer greater access to their flows (constructal law). Examples come from the animate, inanimate, and human-made. Detailed treatments are available in recent books: Design in Nature (2012), The Physics of Life (2016), Freedom and Evolution (2020), and Time and Beauty (2022).

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About the Speaker

Adrian Bejan

Professor at Duke University

Adrian Bejan is the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor at Duke University. He is credited with several groundbreaking developments, including unifying thermodynamics with heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and the science of form (finite size, flow configuration, design). He discovered, taught, and applied the Constructal Law of evolution in nature, bridging disciplines such as biology, physics, engineering, sociology, philosophy, economics, management, and sports science through his books on thermodynamics, convection, design in nature, and evolution.

Adrian Bejan earned his BSc, MSc, and PhD degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, 1972, and 1975, respectively. He has received numerous honors, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2018), awarded by the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, "For his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and convection heat transfer that have improved the performance of engineering systems, and for constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems."