Life and entropy.

My chem teacher often likes to digress and spout nonsense instead of chemistry. Sometimes this is about his gold mining days, sometimes about wolves, about global warming, biotech opportunities, our generation, Obama, whatever.

Today we were talking about entropy (in regards to thermochem) and he started digressing about chaos and the universe pomegranate. He particularly wanted to mention that a defining quality of life was the ability to create order from chaos, reversing the universe's tendency toward entropy.

Wiki

Discuss?

ask him what reason he has to state a defining quality of life, does he have a logical rationale or just based on his observations/beliefs?

we are part of the universe.. so no matter how much we think we are making order of chaos there is no reason why we are not still under influence of entropy in the end

Although life creates order from chaos, It still tends toward entropy because all the order creating reactions that occur are coupled with a reaction that creates more chaos than the order creating reaction. Life is not defying the second law of thermodynamics, rather it is exploiting a "loophole" in it.