And when it did, it could start to evolve. Not before that.
To arbitrarily determine that *evolution* begins only once that increasing level of complexity arrives at a self-replicating stage and ignore the rest before that is intellectually dishonest.
Sez you.
There is still the increasing level of complexity to be maintained in opposition to the 2nd Law.
Come on, you've been around these threads long enough to know that doesn't hold water. The 2nd Law applies to closed systems, or whole systems. The Earth is not a closed system. Adult humans are more complex than the two cells they grow from. Trees are more complex than seeds. We see increasing levels of complexity happening around us every day.
Or, for that matter, your own field. If the Earth were an isolated system with increasing entropy, we wouldn't have weather. What is the source of the work being done to spin up a hurricane?
So what is the mechanism which is bring order into the system?
Simply pouring energy into it in and of itself accomplishes nothing.
Something has to be doing the work.