Biotropy: Why Life Pushes Back Against Entropy

The Universe That Cheats at Decay

Everything in the universe wears down. Stars cool. Mountains erode. Your favourite coffee cup chips and eventually shatters. Given enough time, everything spreads out and smooths into what physicists call maximum entropy.

And yet, here we are. Cells continue dividing. Forests regrow after fire. Brains plan for weekends that haven't yet come.

I often get asked about Biotropy, the “driving force” of life, and each time my answer is a little different. Here is my latest version. Think of it as a progress update on a persistent question. Why does life continue to resist decay, even if only briefly?

From DNA as Blueprint to Biotropy as Rulebook

Most people are at ease with the idea that “DNA is the blueprint of life”. It’s a good metaphor. DNA holds information and, with the right machinery, it creates cells, proteins, organisms and eventually teenagers who roll their eyes at you.

But DNA is not the rulebook. It is the code that life uses, not the principle that explains why the code exists at all. Strictly speaking, it is not even the starting point. Life, like chemistry, almost certainly existed before DNA, in messy networks of prebiotic organic molecules and simpler replicators that could copy themselves poorly and change over time. DNA is more like a technological leap for Biotropy, the moment the system stumbled on a cheap, stable, high-capacity way to store and copy information. If you want an analogy, it is less “the first book ever written” and more “the arrival of the printing press”. Life was already improvising. DNA is when it got turbocharged.

Biotropy describes the deeper pattern behind all of that. It is the tendency of living systems to use energy to build, maintain, and sometimes increase their own organisation. If entropy is the rule that everything spreads out, Biotropy is the way life briefly bucks the trend and creates pockets of structure.

Not by magic. Not by willpower. By riding the physical laws in a particular way.

Grounding Biotropy in Real Physics

If Biotropy is to be more than just a fancy label, it needs to rest on something tangible. Luckily, we don't have to invent a new branch of physics to make sense of it.

Living systems are open systems. They exist within an environment, with energy flowing through them. A single cell takes in energy-rich molecules, burns them in a controlled manner, and uses the released energy to repair membranes, replicate DNA, and pump ions. It constantly drives itself away from equilibrium. Stop the energy flow and the cell quickly slips down the entropy slope and dies.

Scaling up reveals the same pattern. A forest absorbs sunlight, water, and nutrients, transforming them into layered structures of soil, roots, trunks, leaves, insects, birds, and mammals. Once again, energy flows in, local complexity and order develop, while waste heat and entropy increase overall.

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics provides the mathematics behind these processes. Biotropy describes what happens when matter, under a steady energy flow, continually forms self-producing, self-organising, self-correcting systems.

In other words, Biotropy is not a violation of entropy. It is entropy’s travelling companion.

Rivers, Dams and Detours

Here is a more intuitive picture.

Imagine a river flowing downhill—that is entropy. Water naturally moves towards the lowest point. Now picture a branch, a log, or a few rocks falling across the stream. They form a small dam. Behind the dam, water collects. Sediment accumulates. Plants take root in the calmer water. Fish and insects find niches.

The river still flows downhill. Eventually the dam will decay or be washed away. But for a time, there is a local pocket where the flow is diverted, slowed, and turned into structure.

Life is like that. Cells, organisms, ecosystems, even cultures and technologies, act as dams in the river of entropy. They temporarily redirect the flow, forming intricate detours of complexity.

Biotropy refers to the general tendency of such dams to form, stabilise temporarily, adapt when conditions shift, and eventually fail. Entropy ultimately prevails. Biotropy shapes the scenic route.

Why Would Biotropy Exist at All?

So far, this is just descriptive. Life exists and locally resists entropy. That is our “proof of the pudding”. This essay, you, me, we are all part of that “QED.”

The deeper question is why the universe permits or even encourages these local rebels in the first place. Here are two broad interpretations.

The physics reading.
Given enough time, energy gradients, and the right substrates, certain configurations of matter are more statistically stable than others. Some of these configurations happen to be self-producing, self-organising and self-correcting - biotropic. Once they appear, they persist and diversify. From this perspective, Biotropy is simply the emergent pattern of chemistry and probability. No intention. No goal. Just the kinds of structures that energy flows are adept at shaping.

The meaning reading.
Others will see Biotropy as an indication of direction in the cosmos, a built-in bias towards life, complexity, or even consciousness. For them, Biotropy appears as a “life vector” that prompts discussions about purpose, teleology, or a deity.

Personally, I favour the first reading. I enjoy the challenge of uncovering patterns within what seems like chaos and complexity. To me, “meaning” is more of a side pursuit, like watching a good comedy after a tough working week—enjoyable, but not to be mistaken for the underlying physics.

Why It Matters Beyond Philosophy

This is not only a metaphysical parlour game.

If Biotropy is the logic of how life organises itself, we can apply it at many scales. A cell embodies the triad of self-production, self-organisation, and self-correction. The same applies to a brain, a healthcare system, a social network, or a machine learning ecosystem that continually retrains itself on new data.

That gives us a way to ask sharp questions. When we build technologies and institutions, are we aligning with Biotropic dynamics, supporting stable, adaptable, life-promoting systems? Or are we constructing brittle structures that increase entropy for everything else?

As we enter an era of synthetic biology and more autonomous AI, this distinction might prove to be very useful, not just poetic.

Not Just DNA, Not Just Destiny

So where does this leave us.

DNA is still vital. It writes the scripts. But Biotropy explains why there is a stage, a cast, and a show in the first place. It is the name for the way matter, under the right conditions, keeps finding tricks to stay organised for a while in a universe that is otherwise committed to falling apart.

Whether you see that as physics doing what physics does, or as a faint footprint of something larger, is up to you. My modest claim is simpler. If we want to understand life, and the new forms of quasi-life we are now engineering, we should pay attention to Biotropy, the quiet tendency of the universe to hold itself together just long enough to ask why it exists at all.