Nevertheless, the concept, like many other abstractions that are used in physics, is extremely useful. If we are able to understand the behavior in ideal cases, we can gain a great deal of understanding about processes that take place in the real world. In fact treating a real system as an isolated one is often an excellent approximation. A bull in a china shop performs work, but he neither creates nor maintains organization. Here at the molecular level are the roots of the old puzzle about the chicken or the egg.
Crystallization leads to simple, very uniform repeating structures, which are inert.
These structures do not function, and are not designed by function. As the crystal becomes larger, the entropy of the system does increase. Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures. The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of billions of years during which prebiotic evolution occurred.