"Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures.The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number d molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly-ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of the billions of years during which prebiotic evolution occurred." —*llya Prigogine, *Gregoire Nicolis and *Agnes Babloyantz, "Thermodynamics of Evolution," Physics Today" Nov. 1972, p. 23.
Laws produce tendencies. The laws are inexorable; the tendencies are not.
There's an inexorable law called Newton's Law of Gravitation. Objects with mass are attracted to each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. There's another factor, the strength g of the force which was unknown to Newton himself but measured later by Cavendish. Anyway, it's the law and there are no exceptions.
(OK, there have only recently been some funny large-scale observations that there may be a repulsive force out there somewhere, perhaps operating at long distances. That doesn't affect my analogy.)
This inexorable law produces a tendency for objects on earth to fall or roll downhill whenever they are unsupported. But it doesn't mean an object can't go uphill. It just means that energy input is required.
The wind blows objects uphill all the time in reversal of this tendency. A really strong wind (a tornado) can blow big trucks or trailers from trailer parks "uphill," lifting them high and dropping them with a great release of energy which is unfortunate for anyone in or under the falling object. All of this is solar powered, undesigned, and counter to the interpretation of the Second Law urged by your quote-miners.
All that talk about tendencies in thermodynamics is the same thing in another arena. Temperatures tend to equalize, but expenditure of energy from some outside source can be destabilizing and create inequalities that make other things happen. Chaotic pheomena like weather and life, for instance.