Living cells are sustained by countless chemical reactions that must be carefully regulated to maintain internal order and function. Enzymes play a central role in this process, accelerating reactions that would otherwise proceed too slowly to support life.
but. the whole point is Maxwell’s demon is that it would violate thermodynamics
It may help to think of it as the authors invoking the idea of Maxwell’s demon to illustrate the elegance of the enzymes involved instead of an actual Maxwell’s demon that would literally decrease the entropy in the system over time.
this is how scientists do clickbait
The point of Maxwell’s demon is that there’s an intimate connection between thermodynamic entropy and information: increasing entropy reduces information, but adding information can reduce entropy.
I think what they’re getting at here is that the enzyme’s state preserves information about its recent past which it then uses to reduce entropy the way Maxwell’s demon does.
going from a simple though experiment to being able to quantify the thermodynamics of information is one of my favorite concepts.