I find it rewarding to read about biology and physics in parallel, because I start to see underlying commonalities. That's not a particularly earth-shattering epiphany, since biology is a consequence of chemistry which is a consequence of physics, but most biology takes place on a macrosocopic or near-microscopic level where we can conveniently study it. I think that the epiphany's humble consequence is that lessons taken from biology can be applied to physics as the root cause of biology.

Biology, and particularly biological evolution, decreases entropy and favors order. The process's "feedstock" is randomness, in the predominant form of mutation. Its "fabrication" method is selection, by favoring mutations that are viable, and eliminating those that aren't.

Think Maxwell's Daemon, sitting at the edge of a soup of entropy, plucking out particles and arranging them in complex ordered systems.

Seth Lloyd, whose forte is quantum computing, describes a precisely analogous mechanism to explain the universe's evolution towards order and complexity. Particles are constantly popping into existence in the quantum foam, and a Planck's unit of time later pop out again. Most of the time. But when a couple of compatible virtual particles pop into existence close to each other, the laws of physics swing into action and those two virtual particles can combine to form one real particle. Entropy decreases and order increases through the selection pressure of natural law.

I think that the observed distribution of elements in the universe supports that theory. It's statistically more likely for two compatible virtual particles to appear than for three, four, and so on.

Intelligence arose out of this process, and judging by our lone example, what it does is deliberately create order out of entropy (in matter, at least, if not in human affairs). Without intelligence, I suspect that entropy and renewable order would maintain a rough steady-state balance in the universe, slightly favoring a longterm decline into entropic heat-death. But intelligence may upset that balance, and if it can spread throughout the universe, enough of it could change the future course of the universe's evolution. Someday we might know how to prevent the heat death of an open-ended universe, and be able to maintain it hospitable to life for much longer than it might otherwise have lasted.

Do I think that "Complexity in an entropic universe is not a contradiction, it may be a requirement."? You betcha!