  The collective phenomena in physics and cooperative phenomena in
biology/chemistry is compared in terms of the variational description. The
maximum energy dissipation principle is employed and the cost-like functional
is chosen according to an optimal control based formulation (Moroz, 2008;
Moroz, 2009). Using this approach, the variational outline has been considered
for non-equilibrium thermodynamic conditions. The differences between the
application of the proposed approach to the description of cooperative
phenomena in chemical/biochemical kinetics and the Landau free energy approach
to collective phenomena in physics have been investigated.
