"Nature abhors a vacuum" is really just a colorful description of how gas diffuses with a side effect of imposing force where there is a pressure gradient, but you won't go too wrong imagining something more active. 1/

I'm not saying I fully endorse an analogous account of entropy, that the facts of physics amount to an "as if" of the teleological claim. But I'm not ready to fully dismiss it either. 2/

It does seem surprising from first principles how often surprising order emerges that do not contradict the 2nd law only because they accelerate some other disorder. 3/

Thinking of the 2nd law in purely statistical terms (the universe slips into ever less unlikely categories of states), you'd predict a kind of passive diffusion rather than emergence of these elaborate mechanisms that the 2nd law might tolerate but that seem extraordinarily unlikely. 4/

So a teleological intuition might be usefully descriptive. I'm not fully persuaded, but I'm not fully persuaded that not. In any case, that intuition is the premise of the essay. It might be wrong, but I think it demands more consideration than immediate dismissal. /fin