Don't Try This in the Laundry Room: Materialists Seek to Outsmart Thermodynamics

Entropy is a greased pole, but some researchers believe they can climb it. The fundamentals of thermodynamics were discovered in the 19th century, establishing some of the best-confirmed laws in all of science. Mathematician Granville Sewell has argued in these pages that evolutionary theory is at crosscurrents with the second law of thermodynamics (the law of entropy), dooming it to failure.

Every once in a while, though, a physicist or biologist tinkers with the laws, looking for ways to s...