ABSTRACT
The greatest wonder of organic life is that it develops, in seeming defiance of all the laws of probability, from the simple to the complicated, from systems of lower to systems of higher harmony. However, infractions of the second law of thermodynamics simply do not occur, and, to achieve what it does, life is dependent on a gradient in the general, all-pervading flow of energy dissipation. Life lives on negative entropy. Any living species is a system that, very much like a prairie fire, greedily gathers energy and, in a positive feedback cycle, becomes able to gather the more energy, and to do it the quicker, the more it has already acquired.
