How organisms decrease their entropy

Abstract

It is recognised that the second law does not, in principle, preclude the decrease of entropy of biological organisms. However, we want to know how it is done. We start from the entropy reduction that underlies biological work, using the framework of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, as formulated for continuous systems. This formulation includes time and rate, which are absent in classical thermodynamics. We then note that this entropy reduction can be made spatially differential in continuous systems due to another entropy reduction: the one brought about by the Turing instability with cAMP and ATP as the Turing morphogens. Both entropy reductions require holding ATP hydrolysis far from thermodynamic equilibrium. This solution to the mechanism of entropy decrease in organisms simultaneously provides solutions to other major problems in biology, including the missing link in molecular biology between the molecular level and the macroscopic level, the problem of spontaneous self-organisation and epigenesis, and the problem of coherence and coordination between all biochemical processes in space and time.