“We are compelled to postulate that somewhere or other, or some time or other, the second law of thermodynamics must reverse itself, that is, some time or somewhere entropy must decrease, or have decreased, otherwise we shall be compelled (as Sir William Thomson was) to postulate a beginning, or creation.”

“In living processes, the increase in entropy is retarded ... [Johnstone] points out that this is true, primarily, of plants; but that among animals also natural selection must work toward the weeding out of unnecessary and wasteful activities, and thus toward the conservation of free energy, or, what amounts to the same thing, toward retarding energy dissipation.”

“Reversals of the second law are a regular phenomenon, and [they are identified] with what is generally known as life.”

“Lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, for ever and ever. Hence all the nonsense that Mr. Shaw puts into the final speech of Lilith, and Bergson's remark that the élan vital [vital impetus of evolution] is capable of surmounting all obstacles, perhaps even death—as if we could believe that any social or biological development on this planet will delay the senility of the sun or reverse the second law of thermodynamics.”

“Time’s arrow given by entropy—the loss of organization, or loss of temperature differences—is statistical and it is subject to local small-scale reversals. Most strikingly: life is a systematic reversal of entropy, and intelligence creates structures and energy differences against the supposed ‘death’ through entropy of the physical universe.”