http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1246 states specifically that:
Even on a mid-scale, say with a bunch of plants and animals living in an isolated box, all the processes increase entropy. There is absolutely nothing that we know of that makes life any different from any other process in this regard. As for whether the net effect of life has been to increase or slow down the rate of entropy increase, I bet the answer is that it has slightly increased it. I'm guessing that because it seems that life has increased the light absorbancy of the Earth, and led to the thermalization of some light energy that might otherwise be traveling through space in a somewhat lower entropy form.
Erwin Schrodinger says: What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening - call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy - or, as you may say, produces positive entropy - and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy - which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
from http://dieoff.org/page150.htm
Hardly a personal or ideological one; I am an engineer and scientist and have studied thermodynamics. What we are talking about is that life, like every other process, produces entropy - from a scientific basis.
bb: I haven't gone back far enough into the thread to catch the real thrust of your statement, but, from experience, I expect that you are correct, too. Probably what we have is a clash between a statement concerning system totality vs your view that slices the temporal sequence more finely...
Again, where does this "scientific basis" come from — without you having to invoke metaphysics by way of explanation???
From where I sit, the life principle is "at war" with the so-called "entropic principle" as articulated by "science."
Which is hardly to say that I hold "science" worthless, to be held in contempt.
I am only saying — or trying to say — that science can only get at problems that can be "measured."
It turns out that any such notion as "life principle" is immeasurable in scientific methodological terms.
Does this mean that there really is "no Life" in the universe of human experience, existentially discerned by human souls?
Oh, I forget. There are people nowadays who tend to argue that human beings are just machines anyway. And so have no possible "use" for "souls."
Still that answer doesn't "answer," as far as I'm concerned. For one thing, even if human beings were only "machines," they would still need a "program" in order to function in any kind of productive, beneficial way.
It all boils back to the seemingly eerie fact that the cosmos is indeed ordered; but not in such a way as to preclude the human search for understanding of its order.
Somehow Man seems to be the "free agent" of all the splendor and chaos of our present time....