https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
Henry Adams first put it to print in the 1910s, and Schrödinger did a fine turn on it and wrote a whole book in the 40s.
The idea that life exists as the most efficient method to facilitate thermodynamic equilibrium is older than the neutron.
I took a double take and thought you'd made a typo, because I've never heard that assessment before.
I see what you're saying about dissipating heat and work... but life organizes. Most of that wasted heat from any organism is the result of its processing, consolidating and transmitting information. Which is probably the only counter-entropic (extropic) process we can observe in the universe. My view has always been that life fights against entropy.
Yes, and that's the interesting part. In the right circumstances, more entropy doesn't mean less complexity. Matter can become more complex and less entropy locally if that results in increase of total entropy in the system. This can occur, for example, if we have constant flow of concentrated energy on some local areas of the environment that continuously wants to spread out. Because the system as a whole "wants" to maximize its entropy as fast as it can, and it statistically "searches" for the shortest paths possible. This may result in natural occurrence of more and more complex molecules that dissipate heat more and more efficiently.
It's like the planet's atmospheric processes, for example. Where differences in heat concentration don't just spread out in linear gradients but can form complex structures like vortexes, hurricanes or even stable geometric hexagons (like the famous hexagon storm on Saturn), etc.
>My view has always been that life fights against entropy.
Yes, it "fights" against entropy to exist, but it exists solely by processing low entropy into high entropy. Maybe that's why it even exists in the first place?
This part is better addressed in Jeremy England's work, for more basic explanations you can refer to videos like
this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcfLZSL7YGw (it's a very good video on this topic by PBS)
If Jeremy England’s hypothesis is true, then life shouldn’t be unique but rather inevitable, as life in general would be the way for matter to better dissipate heat, and better turn low entropy into high entropy.
In fact, if you watch what life is doing in terms of physics, then it’s obvious that all it does is consume low entropy (stored chemical energy, heat from heat baths), and dissipates it around very efficiently.
Even we, humans are more and more good at it: we take hydrocarbons chemical energy and turn it into work and heat. It’s not enough for us, we now consume energy stored in atomic bonds, and turn it into work and heat. We capture concentrated sunlight and also turn it into work and heat, etc.
Essentially, we are doing what we are supposed to do as a function of physical matter: we produce more entropy.