How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: ‘It feeds upon negative entropy’, attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

However insignificant the frictional and heating effects in a clock may be from the practical point of view, there can be no doubt that the second attitude, which does not neglect them, is the more fundamental one, even when we are faced with the regular motion of a clock that is driven by a spring.

I remember an interesting little paper by Max Planck on the topic ‘The Dynamical and the Statistical Type of Law’ (‘Dynamische und Statistische Gesetzmässigkeit’). The distinction is precisely the one we have here labelled as ‘order from order’ and ‘order from disorder’.