The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity

If those molecules bump together and form something more complex, on and on, Cronin said, “that is the selection equivalent of gravity. And that process of complexity generates everything we have in the universe that’s associated with life.”

The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures—galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings—that have somehow managed to assemble themselves.