[mtgp1000]

If you consider "organism" and "environment" to be separate systems which may exchange energy/entropy, would it be fair to suppose that living organisms dump entropy into their environments to maintain internal order?

I agree that this is a typically murky discussion since the concept of entropy for a complex organism gets pretty handwavy...

I'm supposing that an organism in "living" condition has many orders of magnitude fewer valid microstates than the same constituent atoms/molecules would have once life sustaining reactions cease and decomposition begins - there are only so many valid ways to assemble a given living being...