Synopsis:
- Biological organization is created and maintained at the expense of thermodynamic order
- Life displays two fundamental processes: creating order from order (the progeny has the same order as the parent) and creating order from disorder (as every living system does at every metabolic step, eating and growing)
- Living systems seem to defy the second law of Thermodynamics.
- They live in a world of energy flux (not a closed world)
- An organism stays alive in its highly organized state by absorbing energy from the environment and processing it to produce a lower entropy state within itself.
- "Living organisms feed upon negative entropy_ Life is "negentropic".
- The existence of a living organism depends on increasing the entropy of the rest of the universe.
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