When an organism reproduces, it extracts free energy from its surrounding environment and creates a new subsystem with a high degree of statistical order or information content, locally decreasing the entropy at the expense of a heat entropy increase in its environment.

According to Rudolf Clausius, who established the first and second laws of thermodynamics, the energy of the universe is a constant, and the entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum.⁵...The universe was initially in a highly energized uniform state, essentially void of information, and has since become extremely complex with an enormous amount of stored information, thus reflecting a lower information entropy but at the same time a higher heat entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics, as interpreted by some, dictates that the universe is moving irreversibly toward increasing decay and disorder. Heat results in increased molecular motion, and as moving molecules collide with each other they are knocked out of their expected course into random paths. As molecular collisions continue, there is an increased randomness, moving the universe toward chaos. It has been postulated that this will eventually result in heat death of the universe, with the production of a tepid, homogenous soup of random atoms and molecules.⁶...If the law of entropy was the only force acting upon matter within the universe, then this outcome would seem to follow.

The heat death hypothesis, however, does not fit well with more current thinking, since the universe seems to be gaining in information and complexity. Entropy is occurring as originally conceived from the standpoint that isotopes are disintegrating and objects are giving up heat and energy; however, rather than systems becoming more random as they approach equilibrium, they are moving toward a state of higher complexity. The universe began in a state of high equilibrium and total chaos and is becoming increasingly more organized. I perceive a universe, as do many others, that is continually becoming more materially and physically complex. It is relying heavily on the entropic process to allow this to occur.

With the expansion of space, there is more room for energy to entropically dissipate, thus allowing matter to continuously congeal into more complex forms. Material forms are also continuously breaking down through the entropic process, but in time they once again reorganize into more highly complex physical structures. Through the evolutionary process, macroscopic structures undergo entropy with the breakdown of macroscopic information into microscopic information. The breakdown products, as they are reorganized into more highly organized complex forms, result in a continual net gain of useful information within each separate isolated open system.

Even though stars, as well as our earth, are involved in the heat entropic process, they are also concurrently gaining in information. As stars convert hydrogen to helium and then into heavier elements, a great deal of energy is being released so that heat entropy is occurring; however, each star is nevertheless gaining in information at the same time. The earth likewise is undergoing heat entropy as its central core gradually cools, and as rocks fragment and isotopes decay; however, it is also gaining in information. The earth today is a much more ordered system, richer in information, than when compared to the time of its origin. The earth during its entire evolutionary process has continuously gained in information. The universe as a whole, although it is undergoing heat entropy as energy is being dissipated, is also continually gaining in information.

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