This book has for the first time disclosed mechanisms for the emergence and the evolution of life on the earth. Such a great success has been achieved by investigating the law of increase of entropy and the law of a minimum entropy production rate from an absolutely novel standpoint. To date, it has been believed that highly ordered structures in living organisms are produced against the second law of thermodynamics (or the law of increase of entropy). Thus, keen attention has been paid to self-organization in dissipative structures or in complex systems. This book presents quite a new mechanism. A main conclusion is that a stationary state in a non-equilibrium open system lying close to equilibrium has the internal ability to organize itself so that it realizes a minimum entropy production rate. A living organism can be regarded as lying in a stationary state. The basic qualities of living things such as autonomous dynamic self-organizing ability can be reasonably explained by the internal ability. Therefore, the above conclusion provides a reasonable mechanism for explaining the emergence and the evolution of life. Amazingly, it is not true that living things emerged and evolved against the second law of thermodynamics. The truth is that living things emerged and evolved according to the second law of thermodynamics under a particular condition. Originally, the second law of thermodynamics is the only universal law that describes spontaneous and irreversible processes in nature. Therefore, it is the most reasonable to explain the origin and the evolution of life based on this law. This book also shows that the above conclusion leads to convincing solutions of many important problems that have been left unsolved to date, such as where the origin of human ego is, how creation is achieved, and how we can produce artificial intelligence with free spirit and creativity, apart from the emergence and the evolution of life. Furthermore, this book shows that considerations from a novel standpoint lead to an innovative conclusion that the law of increase of entropy can be directly deduced from quantum mechanics without using Boltzmann's statistical interpretation. It should be mentioned also that this book presents detailed discussions of why previous studies have failed to explain the origin and the evolution of life and how this book has surmounted such difficulty.