The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

> The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.