摘要
Alfred Lotka was one of the founders of modern ecology. This paper explores Lotka's contribution to biophysical economics resulting from the marriage of the three disciplines: biology, physics and economics. Lotka founded the concept of “exosomatic evolution” to characterise the economic activities in their biophysical environment as a continuation of biological processes. Like Vernadsky, he adopted a holistic perspective of planet-system — the biosphere.Georgescu-Roegen was one of the founders of ecological economics. He explained the entropic nature of evolution and adopted Lotka's “exosomatic evolution” concept in his bioeconomic approach. Georgescu-Roegen had several warnings for economists about the irrevocability of the entropic degradation of matter–energy and the pressure on natural resources that goes hand in hand with economic processes in general.This article aims at drawing a parallel between Lotka's contribution and Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomics, by shedding light not only on their similarities, but also on the divergences that testify the novelty of Georgescu-Roegen's approach.