There is an error in my reasoning below. What is it?

In prebiotic Earth, solar energy was captured and transformed variously as kinetic energy (increased movement of molecules), and also as chemical energy (by providing the activation energy required for some chemical reactions to take place). Whatever chemical reactions took place in the primordial soup were disorganized. Any local order created (such as the chemical combination of two or more molecules into one) was paid for by energy input derived from the Sun.

The beginnings of life can be marked as an increasingly efficient transformation of solar energy to other forms of energy. The first self-replicating molecules–presumed to be RNA enzymes, or ribozymes–transformed solar energy into chemical energy, creating ordered copies of themselves. The first membraned cells transformed solar and chemical energy into electrical energy, by creating and maintaining an electrochemical gradient across the membrane.

Indeed, biological life can be viewed as a transformer, converting solar energy into chemical and electrical energy, and honed by natural selection and evolution to be as efficient as possible, that is, by wasting environmental resources as little as possible. Higher orders of life feed upon the energy stored within photosynthetic organisms, breaking them down, but efficiently converting the energy to even more complex and highly ordered forms.

Increase in biomass is, in effect, an increase in local order. A single photosynthetic algae converts solar energy and environmental nutrients into a replica of itself, thus ordering matter. Bacteria growing exponentially is ordering matter exponentially.

As the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates, entropy always stays the same or rises. So how can life create order? The answer is that local order can be created if paid for by an input of energy; this energy cost in turn must be paid for by coupled increase of entropy elsewhere. In the case of life on Earth, the ultimate entropic cost is paid by the dissipation of energy from the Sun.

Solar energy is stored not just as living biomass, but as dead biomass as well. Oil and coal are highly homogenized corpses; the long hydrocarbon chains in oil, full of energy-rich carbon-carbon bonds, seem perfect to use as energy sources, because they contain the energy stored throughout the lives of the organisms that were converted into oil by geologic processes.

Ultimately, all this conversion of solar energy to other forms is not just storage of energy, but storage of order. Order is the storage of energy. A battery contains an artificial electrochemical gradient in which ions are restricted to compartments they would not occupy were it not for the input of outside energy.

So the Earth can be viewed as a gigantic storage cell. Energy is paid into the system by solar radiation. Life serves as a transformer. Photosynthetic organisms convert solar energy into other forms, creating local order and storing energy. Higher life forms feed off lower forms, breaking down the molecules for energy, releasing entropy, but then harnessing the energy to create even more complex and ordered forms. Higher order life exists in less quantity than lower order life, meaning that entropy has decreased yet again. Complexity of form requires greater ordering capacity.

The rate of energy storage/order creation by biotic processes approaches the rate of energy bombardment by the Sun. So after life first formed, it began storing energy, akin to charging a gigantic Earth battery. The rate of energy storage has always been positive, and thus the amount of energy stored increased by a constant rate.

At least until human beings first discovered fire.

All processes produce net entropy. You observe, as Kauffman and others, that life aggregates order, and perhaps even tends to do so while minimizing net entropy production.

But humans discovering fire has naught to do with it. It’s just another energy source for our little contribution to the program. Like beef.

An additional problem arises because it’s not all that easy to measure the order produced by life – from DNA to functional organs to ecosystems – in terms of thermodynamic energy. Even if we accept Boltzmann’s constant as a valid conversion between the pure units of information and the Joules/Kelvin units of thermodynamic entropy, it’s unclear how to accurately measure the difference in order or information between a noncoding piece of DNA and one that produces a functional protein, as they both have the same Shannon entropy.