Self-organization vs. entropy

"It would appear that, since isolated systems cannot decrease their entropy, only open systems can exhibit self-organization. However, a closed system can gain macroscopic order while increasing its overall entropy. Specifically, a few of the system's macroscopic degrees of freedom can become more ordered at the expense of microscopic disorder.

In many cases of biological self-assembly, for instance metabolism, the increasing organization of large molecules is more than compensated for by the increasing entropy of small molecules, especially water. At the level of a whole organism and over longer time scales, though, biological systems are open systems feeding from the environment and dumping waste into it."



Self-organization