As you work on it, I wonder if you have ever read a small monograph by
Schroedinger entitled, "What is Life?" It was published by Cambridge
Univ. Press in 1951.
It's a vast oversimplification, but part of the message of one of the
finest physicists we've yet had is that life "evades the decay to
equilibrium" (that is, the 2nd law of thermodynamics.) While inanimate
objects seem doomed to ever increasing entropy, or "entropy production" as
you say, living things actually have the capability of increasing order.
Living things create order from disorder, they are "self organizing" --
for example taking the disorder of a chemical soup and creating the
orderliness of DNA. In fact Schroedinger writes: "Thus the device by
which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of
orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually
sucking orderliness from its environment."
I hope this is useful and stirs some things up.
John
--"John W. Gunkler" <jgunkler@sprintmail.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>