| | If anything, it is life that violates the pre-eminent, physical laws of the universe.
This is why each life form ultimately dies... Although life seems like a self-sustaining system, it is really only conditionally sustaining, so long as the conditions for its replenishment exist. The universe's goal is for all things and systems to find a balancing equilibrium... We humans experience this as death.
Yet, as life begets life, you have more and more forms tragically competing for continuing existence and pre-eminence. This is why tree grow tall; they're really trying to outgrow each other in height, to absorb the most sunshine with their leaves.
So basically, maintaining life indefinitely is hard for each organism, and eventually wear and tear take their toll and eventually death occurs. Now, if you could find a way to maintain the proper replenishment/erosion ration, maybe "Dorian Gray" organisms could come into being.
But my point is that this condition of erosion or entropy (or "equilibrium" as you so pleasantly put it) is consistent with natural, universal, physical law.
And in essence, each life form that has ever existed, is a thumbing of the nose at universal law. Life is a wonderful and glorious form of spite, a rebellion, against nature itself. Each of us is the perpetuation of an accident which should not continue to exist.
There is a famous comic book series called The Watchmen, in which an all-powerful quantum-powered superhero scientist named Dr. Manhattan, arrives at a shockingly heroic conclusion about human life, which he shares with his existentially distraught ex-girlfriend, while both of them walk across the surface of Mars, as Earth faces imminent nuclear armageddon, and as Manhattan has washed his hands of the entire human race, there on Mars.
And so, for your interest or possibly not... here is the scene, in its entirety:
Manhattan: Laurie? Are you alright? I don't think your life's meaningless.
Laurie: Oh no, well, obviously that's what you're going to say because anything I'm stupid enough to believe is true, you just disagree with it and... Uh... You don't?
Manhattan: No.
Laurie: But... Listen, you've just been saying life is meaningless, so how can...?
Manhattan: I changed my mind.
Laurie: But why?
Manhattan: Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against, so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.
And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that precise daughter...
... until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged.
To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold...
that is the crowning unlikelihood.
The thermodynamic miracle.
Laurie: But... if that's me; my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!"
Manhattan: Yes. Anybody in the world.
... But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget...
... I forget.
We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away.
Come... dry your eyes, for you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
Dry your eyes... and let's go home.
Man, I still love that.
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