In terms of “order versus disorder,” one may say that, when absorbed by green leaves, the sun’s radiation is robbed of the internal order with which it arrives on the earth, and this order is communicated to the molecules, permitting them to be built up into more complex, more orderly, configurations. Whereas plants build their bodies from inorganic compounds, getting their negative entropy (order) from the sun’s rays, animals have to eat plants (or each other) for the supply of that negative entropy, being, so to speak, second-hand users of it.
