http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf
Interesting and quite ahead of its time if a bit long.
For those without time to read it all the author Erwin Schrödinger (one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics) wrote this in 1944.
The first half pages 1-23 are a basic description of entropy and a complete coverage of genetics as it was understood in 1944
Essentially they knew that chromosomes somehow determined physical traits but did not know how.
Schrödinger postulated that the genetic information must be carried on a stable molecule of some kind and that mutation and evolution was the result of changes in the quantum state of this molecule to another form. This is pretty impressive and was later proved correct. We did not know DNA was that stable molecule until The Hershey–Chase experiment in 1952. It's structure was not known until Crick and Watson proved the structure of DNA was a double helix in 1953
Schrödinger argued that life feeds on negative entropy aka "it directs a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to
maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level." He argues that life is a process of creating order from order different from the 'statistical mechanism' which produce order from disorder (things like Brownian motion and diffusion) and that life is essentially a purely mechanical event. Consciousness he argues is therefore the mind/individual/operating system that runs the individual and controls the 'motion of the atoms'.
Now the theory that life is a purely mechanical event cannot be completely true because there is disorder in life both in random mutations and in the infinite variations that are produced via reproduction. Life without enough variation/entropy is deterministic (like the clones produced by simple cellular division) and prone to be wiped out by changing environment or threat. However excessive disorder/mutations/chaos also leads to tumors/death/extinction of the organism.
Perhaps there is a happy medium?