P.W. Anderson - More Is Different (1972)
Progressing into the second part of the collection, we now switch perspectives to those from the scientific community. Nobel laureate PW Anderson writes from his work within condensed matter physics; this paper addresses the ways in which structures of increasing size and complexity begin to shift further from the symmetry we expect from particle physics, giving rise to quasi-stable far-from-equilibrium states which escape the pull of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
It's a nice insight into how complexity emerges at the most fundamental level, filling out the justifications demanded by those who claim that special sciences of level X are "nothing but" an applied form of level Y: it's clear that new (constructive) causal explanations are needed as we shift from the point of view of electrodynamic equilibrium to the information-processing work of biology. This doesn't detract from the acceptance that level X can still be ontologically reduced to level Y.
Amusingly, I read this in the wake of skimming the "doctoral" dissertation of creationist Kent Hovind (which is quite a piece of work; it begins with the word "Hello", for god's sake). Hovind's opening argument, based on a fallacious extrapolation of thermodynamics, is essentially as follows: anything in the universe, if left to itself, will tend towards maximal entropy and go to shit (and thus, "This clearly indicates a a Creator"). Yes, this is true for a closed system, but it's hardly true that the aquatic wetlabs which first spawned life on earth were isolated from the immense energy of the sun or the environment beyond.