Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life?, calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy".

> In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase – decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy.

> The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. This, Schrödinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter.

> Schrödinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrödinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms:

> "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entr...

1) BOOT STRAPPING COMPLEXITY: Non-trivial static environment: Something simple is rarely the global efficiency optimum in a non-trivial environment. There is nothing trivial about chemistry and the myriad of terrains created by physics in the non-living world. So simple living things, in competition, quickly get more complex.

2) ACCELERATING COMPLEXITY: Dynamic environment: In a competitive ecosystem of continually diversifying life forms, the ecosystem gets more complex, so competing in the ecosystem both enables and requires more complexity.

The exponential increase in complexity produces qualitatively new modes of complexity leveraging beyond initial resources: such as specialization, food chains, parasitical strategies, mutual or cyclical symbioses, discarded products that become new resources, colonization of new environments and energy sources, flexible behaviors based on conditions, greater utilization of existing environments and resources, cooperation within multi-cell colonies, specialization and reproductive coordination within cell colonies (creatures), communication and coordination between similar and different life forms, tool use, tool creation, environment shaping, anticipation and planning, curiosity driven learning, aggregation and recombination of knowledge, resource trading systems, systems to promote positive sum interactions, and suppress negative sum interactions, engineering, invention, science, automation, etc.

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TLDR: Non-trivial environments provide initial opportunities for complexity to improve efficiency. Complexity feedback in ecosystems exponentially accelerates further complexity. Exponential growth of life's complexity on Earth shows no signs of relenting.

Qualitatively new forms of complexity keep appearing. Conscious intelligence, culture, technology and automation are more continuations than breaks from this trend.

It can both be true that everything humans do or create is natural because all of existence and everything in it is natural, and also that some things humans do or create are artificial or un-natural, without contradiction, because context may be taken into account, and the same words can mean different things depending on how and why they're employed.