 This all raises a second question: if entropy tends only to increase, and so order in the universe continually degrades, where did all the order around us come from in the first place? Life, for instance, seems like an extraordinarily highly structured phenomenon. Living organisms are much more highly structured than the air and earth and water surrounding us, and certainly more so than the food we consume to build and replenish our highly structured bodies. The same holds true of planets themselves, stars, galaxies, and clusters and superclusters of galaxies—they all are prima facie much more highly ordered and structured than the homogeneous and highly rarefied plenum of interstellar dust surrounding them, and the vast reaches of empty space itself. How did such highly structured physical systems evolve in the first place? Are they all not manifestly a violation of the Second Law? (See Schrödinger 1944 for the locus classicus of discussion of these issues.) 