Syntropy and Living Systems

Without realizing it, humanity has been working on a global project of accelerating the process of entropy, which is reversing billions of years of physical, chemical, and biological evolution that has resulted in the process of life, a phenomenon of negative entropy.

“It seems fitting that some of the most important insights in exploring these hidden principles of nature have come from scientists who had the courage to cross over from one specialty to another. One of these was Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum theory, then ventured into the fundamentals of biology, publishing a seminal book in 1944 entitled What Is Life? Schrödinger's groundbreaking answer to this age-old question began with the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the universe is undergoing an irreversible process of entropy: an inexorable decline from order to disorder. This law predicts that heat will always flow to cooler regions and explains why, once you've beaten an egg, you can never get the yolk back. However, Schrödinger observed that while the universe as a whole undergoes entropy, life somehow manages to reverse this process. Living organisms, he noted, survive through sucking order out of the entropy around them and organizing it in a way beneficial to them. They do this through the process known in biology as metabolism. Schrödinger called this process negative entropy (or negentropy) and saw it as the defining characteristic of life.”

Lent, Jeremy. The Patterning Instinct (p. 366). Prometheus. Kindle Edition.