An essay, "The Pleasures of Change," at the end of Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature (a book mainly composed of essays by the great biologist Lynn Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan—Margulis, who was recently killed by a stroke, was Carl Sagan's first wife) lead me to this passage in a 1995 paper, "Order from Disorder: The Thermodynamics of Complexity in Biology," by Eric D. Schneider and James J. Kay:

Nonliving organized systems (like convection cells, tornados and lasers) and living systems (from cells to ecosystems) are dependent on outside energy fluxes to maintain their organization and dissipate energy gradients to carry out these self-organizing processes. This organization is maintained at the cost of increasing the entropy of the larger "global" system in which the structure is imbedded. In these dissipative systems, the total entropy change in a system is the sum of the internal production of entropy in the system (which is always greater or equal than zero), and the entropy exchange with the environment which may be positive, negative or zero. For the system to maintain itself in a nonequilibrium steady state the entropy exchange must be negative, and larger than the entropy produced by internal processes, such as metabolism.

Dissipative structures which are stable over a finite range of conditions are best represented by autocatalytic positive feedback cycles. Convection cells, hurricanes, autocatalytic chemical reactions and living systems are all examples of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures which exhibit coherent behavior.