THERMAL FORWARD REACTIONS. “Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one.”
http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538