A cartoon parody of the Brooks-Wiley theory, from a 2011 article on the theory by David Tyler, portraying their work as a "melting pot theory" wherein, in the end, Canadian zoologist Daniel Brooks is the one who gets "burned". [5]

“I see how you can do this with molecules, but I don’t see how you can do it with species. I don’t understand the extrapolation.”

— Ilya Prigogine (1982), comment to Brooks [6]

“Responses to the proposal have been mixed and often quite strong. Some consider the theory to be a brilliant insight that will advance evolutionary biology immeasurably. Others vehemently reject it as an ill-founded attack on neo-Darwinism. Curiously, yet others regard it as nothing but neo-Darwinism translated into incomprehensible form. Still others contend that Brooks and Wiley's use of nonequilibrium thermodynamics is untenable in this context.”

— Roger Lewin (1982) [6]

“The Wiley and Brooks (1982) discussion purportedly is based on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, as developed by Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues, and on some recent developments in information theory. Certainly, the cannibalistic nightmare depicted by the authors is completely unrealistic.”

— Soren Lovtrup (1983) [10]

“Wiley and Brooks misconstrued the meaning of their crucial conceptual borrowings.”

— Fred Bookstein (1983) [4]

“The Wiley-Brooks’ hypothesis itself is flawed and has been criticized by Lovtup (1983) and Bookstein (1983). I concur with most of these criticisms.”

— Jeffrey Wicken (1983) [8]

“The Brooks-Wiley theory has been criticized (Lovtrup, 1983; Bookstein, 1983; Wicken, 1983) for abusing terminology from thermodynamics and information theory and for not accurately describing the phenomena.”

— John Collier (1986) [2]

“I begin with this linguistic nitpicking because it is important to realize that [Entropy as Evolution] uses imprecise meanings and poor writing to cover up fundamental nonsense and emptiness of the underlying ideas. The only reason for reviewing such a work is that a number of biologists untrained in thermal physics and information science have been fooled into believing that there is some content in the ‘Unified Theory’ of Brooks and Wiley, and it is important to realize these biologists [have but been] mesmerized by the language and equations of physics to support a [baseless] hypothesis [evolution is an information-entropic process].”

— Harold Morowitz (1986) [3]

“As useless as the book cited above is the book Evolution as Entropy by Brooks and Wiley. The basic proposition in this work is that speciation is controlled by the stochastic premises of the second law of thermodynamics. One may only regret that in the 43-years since the publication of Schrodinger's work [What is Life?] a book has appeared whose authors do not understand the role of the second law of thermodynamics in living nature...the authors are concerned only with the amount of information and, hence, with [Shannon] entropy. But, by confining oneself to these concepts alone, one can hardly say anything about evolution...in the world of living things the quality or value of information is often of decisive importance. No appropriate methods have yet been worked out for estimation of the quality of information.”

— Mikhail Volkenstein (1996) [9]

“By 1982, the centenary of Darwin's death, Niles Eldredge and Steven J. Gould had catalyzed a loosely connected group of evolutionary biologists unhappy with the New Synthesis to unleash a cascade of criticisms and proposals. Emboldened by this display of the scientific community at its meritocratic best, Ed Wiley and I entered the fray. The day we finished proofreading Evolution as Entropy [1986], David Hull presciently warned us the fun was over. Soon, I received an envelope from a friend who had seen a manuscript on a colleague's desk. Such privileged material is rarely copied and forwarded. My friend wrote, "I think you and Ed should know what you're up against." The privately circulated manuscript was authored by three academics at the University of California-Berkeley. Ed and I were stunned by its vicious tone. Why the rhetorical heat?”

— Daniel Brooks (2011) [7]

“Daniel Brooks is has been living with controversy ever since 1982, when his [information theoretic entropy] ideas first appeared in an academic paper, and then when, in 1986, he co-authored with Ed Wiley a book with the title Evolution as Entropy.”

— David Tyler (2011) [5]