The answer is relatively simple and you've probably already seen it: that the law of entropy says that all reactions in a closed system tend toward entropy, whereas the Earth is an open system. The order we see on the planet is more than balanced by the disorder of the fusion going on in the sun. This is not some abstract proximity relationship either, it is causal ( to the extent that causality exists ). Sun rays are a form of energy that plants and bacteria can change to the energy they need to live, and these plants and bacteria are the basis of all the energy in the food chain.
I don't mean only to answer this apparent paradox, but to point out what evolution and entropy have in common, and how they can coexist as pseudo-laws of space-time.
Evolution, the biological term, is a special case of a larger pattern: survival of the stable. Since the big bang all matter has been under a selective pressure similar to the selective pressure life forms are under. For an example of this, think of the half-life of radiocative isotopes. Once the heat of the big bang had spread out thinly enough, and the fundamental particles grouped into atoms and molecules, all matter was under a selective pressure to last longer than other matter. Isotopes with short half-lives are akin to badly adapted organisms. Similarly certain isotopes are not unstable, or at least are continuously created under certain conditions, just as life forms find niches.
Given this arrangement, what overall strategies can matter take to survive? I am not necessarily suggesting that matter is conscious, only that whatever strategy is best will generally be taken by default in an evolutionary system. We now look at entropy as a force *for* stability and examine the forms of stability the law of entropy allows.
Well, one obvious strategy is to be as inert as possible. In other words, find the structure of matter with the lowest free energy available to change into another form. Become a planet, because a planet is bound together by gravity and does not have the energy to break apart. Or become rock, because the electromagnetic bonds of that material resist gravitational forces (falling impact). Or become a nucleus, because through the exchange of muons the electromagnetic repulsive force of a ball of protons can be overcome. Really this list should be traversed in the other direction, since the nucleus was formed first, but that's not relevant here.
What other strategies are there? As JP pointed out in the first post to the list, life takes energy, more specifically order, from other systems so that it can increase it's own order and therefore survive. This is the second strategy: avoid the law of entropy by stealing order from other systems for as long as possible.
And how long is that possible? Looked at one way, the law of entropy predicts the heat death of the universe: when all energy takes the form of heat, the ultimate stable form. But is this the only end case? We know that the entropy of the universe must always increase, but how quickly? It could be that the rate of increase of entropy drops quickly enough that order never entirely disappears. This is analogous to the infinite summation of numbers of the form 1/2n, where n goes from one to infinity, which adds to one. If we view the summation as happening in time, the summation is always increasing, and yet is bounded by a finite value. So abstractly, if the total amount of order of the universe was 2, entropy could always increase and never bring the amount of order below 1.
This is analogous in turn to the idea of escape velocity. Intuitively, if an object goes flying upward from planet earth, it will eventually fall back, since the force of gravity is always acting. This is not so because the force of gravity drops with distance, so that if the object is going a certain threshold speed, it covers ground, lessening gravity, faster than gravity can slow it down.
There is a very good reason why entropy and gravity both have a 'rate of escape' to them. In our universe, these two escapes are equivalent.
We understand that space-time must either collapse together in the "big crunch", finally pulled back from the big bang by the force of gravity, or keep on expanding infinitely because the system has reached escape velocity with respect to itself. Similarly either the universe ends in heat or continues forever in decreasing order. What we must notice is that the entropy heat-death and gravitational closure are the same: the big crunch would be a ball of compacted mass and unbelievable heat, incapable of taking any other form because of gravity - near-infinitely stable with respect to the law of entropy. Similarly the ever-expanding unverse and ever decreasing order cases are the same.
Both results are unalterable by us, so don't go out and fight to end all energy consumption in society. The sun represents far more entropy than we do. We now simply understand that the continued existence of 'life' is even more wrapped up in the big crunch than we thought, and we have reached a holistic merging of entropy and evolution.