“The thought that the dry and forbidding discipline of thermodynamics could be applied to that most theory-defying of all applications, human behavior, may be staggering, and perhaps heresy to some. After all, the purity and precision of thermodynamics has been maintained on the strength of its validity only as a collection of limiting laws for infinitely large systems undergoing infinitely slow changes. However, the interest in thermodynamics has always been based on the great relevance for finite real systems undergoing changes that are fast on our everyday time scale and slow only on the microscopic time scale of atomic motion. Thus we are merely extending the beam of insight from the lifeless behaviors of inanimate matter to the vivid complexities of human behavior. In the final analysis this far-reaching analogy rests on the fact that the basic elements of the description of atoms, molecules, and matter can be scaled up to the realm of living organisms without changes other than in the complexity of the systems and their behavior.”