Does the waste heat generated by life's processes make survival more difficult in any meaningful way? From reading Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", I recently learned that biological processes and the formation of biologically organized structures (cells, organisms, metabolism and so forth) generate a large amount of waste heat (entropy) that gets emitted into the environment, thereby reducing Gibbs free energy.
What connection does this "waste heat" have to do with biological wastes arising from metabolic processes? Are they equivalent? Does this entropy increase meaningfully make the environment more difficult for biological processes to sustain themselves? In other words, is "life a game that gets harder as you play it", contributing some sort of selective pressure? Or is the entropy increase so minuscule relative to the scale of the entropy of the ecosystem/biosphere that it makes no difference?
 A: Great questions!

What connection does this "waste heat" have to do with biological wastes arising from metabolic processes? Are they equivalent?

They are similar. Both expel extra entropy into the environment (i.e. reduce the organism's entropy while increasing the environment's entropy). But in addition to that, the biological wastes also expel extra mass.

Does this entropy increase meaningfully make the environment more difficult for biological processes to sustain themselves?

No, because the biosphere expels the extra entropy into space. On the planetary scale, the Earth receives low entropy photons from the Sun, and expels high entropy photons into space.
A: As a biophysicist...
The processes and structures of life are out-of-equilibrium processes and structures. This means that their mere maintenance produces entropy by converting low entropy forms of material into high entropy forms of materials (whether this high entropy corresponds to heat transferred to the environment or by-products of the metabolism).
Therefore, to be maintained, life needs a constant influx of low entropy materials (that is it needs to be supplied with out-of-equilibrium materials).
If life were to be maintained in an isolated system, the end result (the equilibrium) would inevitably be death. So in this specific scenario, yes, the wastes would make life more and more difficult to be maintained as the isolated system would reach equilibrium.
For life on Earth the environment is plenty of out-of-equilibrium materials, moreover Earth is not isolated and is constantly maintained out-of-equilibrium by the flux of energy coming from the Sun and being released by radiations into space.
