Professor Eddington has recently remarked that 'The law that entropy always increases — the second law of thermodynamics — holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature'. It is not a little instructive that so similar a law [the fundamental theorem of natural selection] should hold the supreme position among the biological sciences.

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. … if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Just like a computer, we must remember things in the order in which entropy increases. This makes the second law of thermodynamics almost trivial. Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases. You can’t have a safer bet than that!

It's a very plausible thing now that the entropy should increase all the time... [T]hese volumes... are... enormously different in scale... I can't convey to you in the picture the absolute stupendous difference in the sizes of these volumes. So if you happen to find yourself in one of them, and you wiggle around, the next one you find yourself in will be overwhelmingly likely to be much much larger, and the entropy therefor goes up.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, the sum of the entropies of the participating bodies must increase. Yet, living organisms seem to exhibit a deliberate anti-entropic force that hints at “by design” rather than “by chance.”

The 2nd law of thermodynamics has the same degree of truth as the statement that if you throw a tumblerful of water into the sea, you cannot get the same tumblerful of water out again.

The 2nd law of thermodynamics... tells you that randomness increases with time. It's a sort of depressing law... It depends on how you look at it, really...

There is nothing supernatural about the process of self-organization to states of higher entropy; it is a general property of systems, regardless of their materials and origin. It does not violate the Second Law of thermodynamics since the decrease in entropy within an open system is always offset by the increase of entropy in its surroundings.

I pointed out in the second part of my paper... that my Minimum Theorem, as well as the so-called , are only theorems of probability. The Second Law can never be proved mathematically by means of the equations of dynamics alone.

We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form : The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.

An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)

All living systems locally reverse entropy but globally increase it. More complex, more entropy. Life accelerates 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Fisher's Fundamental Theorem states — in terms appropriate to the present context — that the better adapted a system is to a particular environment, the less adaptable it is to new environments.

[I]t is our main purpose not to limit our discussion to thermal equilibrium, but to explore the relationship of this probabilistic formulation to the second theorem of the mechanical theory of heat.