Are Humans and DNA the only things capable of creating order (Negentropy)?

Question

the 2nd thermodynamic law insists that our universe is reacting towards a maximized state of entropy (disorder). Yet it is clear that order exists in the universe with cosmological and biological structures. Negentropy means order, and it is the opposite of entropy. Are humans the only things capable of creating ordered objects?

I am aware that overall entropy is still increasing even when humans make an ordered object (i.e. a truck), but I am referring specifically to the creation of an object itself that has higher negentropy than its component parts.

It is the same thing with the DNA code, it is capable of coding for the emergence of ordered biological beings among a universe that tends towards entropy.

Are there any other examples of things that can create ordered/negentropic objects?

Answer 1

Any heat engine, generator or a living organism is performing useful work, thus reducing entropy somewhere (i.e., increasing order somewhere), although simultaneously increasing the overall entropy of the universe. In this sense living cells can be thought of as heat engines in thermodynamic sense: they receive energy in the form of sugars, sunlight, etc., use it to perform work (building themselves, sustaining temperature, synthesizing molecules, replicating) and then dump the unused energy in the environment.

TL; DR: there are plenty of devices and natural phenomena producing negentropy.

Remark: For those interested to look a bit deeper in the subject of life&entropy, there are several useful links/references in this answer.

Answer 2

Whenever heat moves out of a system in a reversible manner, the entropy of that system goes down.

If the process is irreversible to the extent that entropy increase $\Delta S$ occurs overall, then the entropy of the system still goes down if it exports more heat energy than $T \Delta S$, where $T$ is the temperature where the heat leaves the system.

Answer 3

In the cosmological realm, gravity makes ordered systems (planets orbiting around a sun) out of disordered systems (clouds of interstellar gas and dust). In this sense, gravitationally-bound systems are sometimes referred to as antithermodynamic.

Answer 4

Of course, there are other things which can create order. One such mechanism for creating order is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This may sound confusing at first, since it is a common misconception that entropy is "disorder," but this is not the case; if you read the Wikipedia page on negentropy that you linked, you'd notice that the word "order" appears nowhere on it—there's a reason for this. Entropy is defined in terms of the number of microstates corresponding to a macrostate; in other words, it is a measure of degrees of freedom. Order, on the other hand, is defined in terms of symmetries and correlations, but it does not have a precise, mathematical definition as entropy does.

Getting back to the topic of creating order, this paper explains how hard polyhedra in an initially disordered state will form quasicrystals (i.e. a more ordered state) in the absence of any interaction forces. In other words, the only mechanism driving the increase in order is the maximisation of entropy.