I have often wondered about this myself. Still searching this through.
As regards the article:
Is not the steepest path for energy dispersal towards equilibrium just the direct flow of the sun out into space? Why, when it passes over the earth, does life slow down this path (ie, make it less steep). Life, if anything, retards the speed of the energy that wants to race out into space. The state of planet earth that would result in the fastest dispersal would be a a dead one, with a cold center.
So life should not be.
In fact, if we want to give the second law its way, the end of all life is imminent too. Life just gets in the way.
If this is bad logic, someone do jump in.
What the article seems to be saying then, is that evolution is attempting to speed up the eventual cessation of all life. I would expect just sort a thing from a random process, regardless if it is modulated by a selection mechanism.
Thanks for your response. Unfortunately the topic sentence of your response appears to have a strategic typo.
Did you mean to say you would expect just “the opposite” sort of thing...
Or, did you mean you’d expect just “this” sort of thing...?
Funny but that was a “random mutation” that seems not to have benefited your evolutionary thought process.:)