NEGATIVE ENTROPY CHANGE IN LIVING SYSTEMS 



189 



made. Growth of the living system, controlled from the outset by a molecule 

 such as DNA (desoxyribonucleic acid), must be one of the great "consumers 



of entropy" or "producers of negative entropy" Is it in the growth of an 



ever-increasing number of living individuals that we find our continuous 

 creation? .... Although during death and decay the order of life is gradually 

 replaced by disorder, the quantity of physical order existing at any one time 

 seems to be increasing each generation, and higher social and economic 

 order runs parallel with the higher physical order of a larger population. 



Expanding Universe 

 (entropy increasing) 



Protein Molecule 

 (very complicated 

 but highly ordered) 



Figure 7-8. Entropy Changes. 



Growing Li ving Thing 

 (entropy decreasing) 



Some attempts have been made go give quantitative expression to these 

 ideas. Most of these attempts since 1930 involve the concept of the "steady- 

 state," which is treated in the next chapter; but even these attempts do not 

 permit the use of numerical examples, and although inherently very interest- 

 ing, cannot be treated quantitatively in this book. On the other hand, per- 

 haps Teilhard de Chardin was right when he suggested that, taken as a 

 whole, the universe is evolving toward a single, highly organized arrange- 

 ment in which all the ("living") elementary particles of matter have achieved 

 their ultimate state of development; that as living systems organize them- 

 selves more and more, over many more thousands of years, the statistical 

 expression of behavior in terms of the average of random motion of many 

 subparticles, will gradually give way to expressive dominance by the grand 

 ensemble of organized living things. Unfortunately we simply have no way 

 at all of evaluating the sociological and economic interaction energies, nor 

 indeed the psychological, spiritual and moral energies of our own minds. 



Armed with the background presented in Chapters 4 to 7, the reader will 

 now want to push on more deeply into certain aspects of energy transfer in 



