Mechanisms Maintaining the Human Body’s Low-Entropy State: A Dissipative Structure Perspective

How can living systems maintain their highly organized states despite continuous entropy production? This study revisits Schrödinger’s concept that “life feeds on negentropy” from the perspective of modern nonequilibrium thermodynamics and biological organization. We first characterize the human body as an open dissipative structure, emphasizing its hierarchical organization, cellular nonequilibrium, regulated energy utilization, and information-guided regulation. Building on these characteristics, we propose an information-constrained dissipative structure framework that systematically integrates three interdependent mechanisms underlying the maintenance of biological order: genetic information, continuous free-energy utilization, and entropy export. Genetic information establishes persistent structural and functional constraints; continuous free-energy utilization provides the driving force for constructing, renewing, and operating the organized system; and entropy generated by irreversible processes is continuously exchanged with the environment to maintain entropy balance. The framework further connects these mechanisms with homeostasis and self-adaptation, in which homeostasis represents a dynamically maintained functional condition and self-adaptation represents the capacity to maintain or restore this condition under perturbations. By integrating information, energy, and entropy exchange within a unified dissipative-structure framework, this study provides a comprehensive physical and biological interpretation of Schrödinger’s “life feeds on negentropy” concept and offers a framework for understanding biological organization, homeostasis, and systemic self-adaptation.