Thermodynamics of the entropic balance in living systems

Living organisms are open nonequilibrium systems that sustain ordered structure by exchanging energy and matter with their environment. They do not evade the second law of thermodynamics; rather, they maintain local organization by continuously dissipating free energy while deploying regulatory architectures that store and process information to guide repair, renewal, and adaptive change. In this commentary, we outline a concise thermodynamic–informational framing of the living state, emphasizing (i) entropy production and self-organization in driven systems, (ii) how information-theoretic quantities can be connected to physical dissipation and nonequilibrium irreversibility, and (iii) aging as a progressive erosion of the feedback capacities that stabilize a nonequilibrium steady state. The aim is not a comprehensive review of a large literature, but a focused synthesis that clarifies how dissipation and information-processing constraints jointly shape biological organization, evolution, and decline.