Despite decades of inquiry, biology still lacks a universally accepted definition of life. Instead, researchers have proposed various frameworks emphasizing different aspects, such as anti-entropic behavior, or the opposite, life as an exploitation of entropy; life emerging from complexity and evolution; life as a top-down informational process; life as dynamic kinetic persistence and organizational closure; and life as functional evolution. By integrating thermodynamic, informational, and evolutionary models, different perspectives have been evaluated, such as Schrödinger’s “order from order,” Prigogine’s dissipative structures, and Mossio’s organization-first paradigm, alongside computational analogies and biosemiotic interpretations. Drawing on these insights, life is seen as a multilevel, adaptive, and dissipative system governed by cyclical causality, functional information, and context-dependent organization. The cancer process is seen as a representative living system, illustrating how entropy management, metabolic simplification, and plasticity are central to malignancy persistence. Cancer, in this view, is not merely a genetic aberration but an entropic and informational adaptation to stress, hijacking life’s own organizational principles. By framing life, and cancer, through the lenses of thermodynamics, functional information, and evolution, a novel, integrative theory of living systems is introduced here. This theory underscores the role of multiscale coherence, entropy exploitation, and emergent order as unifying principles across biology, with profound implications for understanding cancer and the nature of life itself.