y&#x27;know how every university department has a yearly &quot;retreat&quot;?<p>The parent poster made an incisive reference to: &quot;living things are not closed systems, the inevitable increase in the sum total entropy in the universe..&quot;; and so it is.  A living process maintains its own internal order at the cost of the entropy and energy of its surroundings.  Life increases the entropy of its surroundings at a higher rate than in its absence.  (of course so does fire, and that&#x27;s why this is only not the worst definition)