BIOLOGICAL ORDER 



and that the living being continuously increases its entropy, that 

 is, produces positive entropy, thus approaching the state of maximum 

 entropy, which is death. This is certainly all right. The organism 

 can remain alive, says Schrodinger, only by continuously drawing 

 negative entropy from its environment. Negative entropy is, accord- 

 ing to Schrodinger, "something very positive," that is, a measure of 

 order. 



The organism, according to Schrodinger, maintains its order by 

 "sucking orderliness" from its environment. For the animal, the 

 sources of orderliness are more-or-less complex organic compounds; 

 for the plant, the source of orderliness is the sunlight. This type of 

 reasoning has been endorsed by Brillouin, who writes, "If a living 

 organism needs food, it is only for the negentropy which it can get 

 from it and which is needed to make up for the losses due to mechan- 

 ical work done, or simple degradation processes in the living system. 

 Energy contained in food does not really matter, since energy is 

 conserved and never gets lost, but negentropy is the important 

 matter." 



The statements concerning negative entropy, or orderliness, as 

 the real fuel for the maintenance of life should be examined from 

 a biological point of view and also from a physical point of view. 



A steam engine is kept working by the combustion of coal. The 

 combustion of coal is the source of movement of the machine; it 

 is not the source of the structure. I know that the formula "the 

 organism feeds on negative entropy" has been applied to the mainte- 

 nance of the living system. But maintenance of the organism — that 

 is, maintenance of biological order — is only one aspect of life, repro- 

 duction being the other. It has been known for a long time that only 

 an organism can give rise to an organism. Schrodinger himself has 

 pointed out very pertinently that the characteristic of life is the pro- 

 duction of order from order. The only source of biological order is 

 biological order. Now, maintenance as well as reproduction of bio- 

 logical order both depend on the same process, namely, metabolism, 

 which is correlative to an increase of entropy. Because biological 

 order, or organization, just like information, can be expressed in 

 terms of negentropy, such statements as "The organism remains 

 alive by sucking orderliness from its environment," even when it 

 applies only to maintenance, might be misleading. 



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