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Atomic structure is amazingly uniform: there may be a few thousand possibilities, from hydrogen on up through all possible isotopes. We create laws as concepts to form concepts of matter, but atoms may or may not know of laws and they certainly don't act according to laws.

It seems to me the amazing uniformity you note in atomic structure (i.e., the limited range of its possible expression, seemingly limited to a "few thousand possibilities" in terms of particles) has a possible analogue in the uniformity of the physical laws -- which Grandpierre suggests are mainly about conservation, and which all seem to go by the variational principle a/k/a the "principle of least action." Grandpierre notes in the cited article that the general tendency of the physical laws is to bring about a state of physical equilibrium.

Interestingly, he says that from the standpoint of a living organism, "physical equilibrium" is tantamount to "heat death" -- that it is the "death direction" of biological life that the organism must somehow overcome to maintain its own existence. I thought that was a fascinating insight. What do you make of it, RW?

No question that life in itself needs to grow, which amounts to cell division. But on the other, the limited number of physical laws, it seems that the number of laws is limited by our imagination. We create the laws, matter does whatever it does and we see what we can see. There could be an infinity of laws awaiting our discovery or invention of them.

Butting in here : that systems tend to move to equilibrium is just le Chatelier's principle. In more rigorous terms; equilibrium is a local maximum of the entropy; the second law says the entropy increases in any real process; therefore real processes tend to push you to equilibrium.

The observation that the closest you ever get to equilibrium is when you're dead is a commonplace, and can be found in most textbooks of thermodynamics of biological system - e.g. Tinoco, 4th ed., p. 188.