2nd law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution

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Claim:

The second law of thermodynamics says that everything tends towards disorder, making evolutionary development impossible.

Source:

Response:

  1. True only in isolation. A steady source of organized solar energy and the nearly infinite repository of deep space (to dump waste heat energy to) makes self-organization on the earth's surface inevitable.
  2. When defining a thermodynamic "system" for purposes of calculating changes in entropy, you need to define it such that there are no external inputs (i.e., an isolated system). A life form is not an isolated system. Life takes in energy (food) in order to function & grow, whether it be an animal eating another animal or a plant utilizing sunlight. If you were to properly define the system, you would see that the apparent decrease in entropy of a particular lifeform is actually at the expense of creating more entropy elsewhere. When a creature becomes more organized (say, grows to adulthood) it does it by destroying other life. For the little energy plants capture from the sun, massive amounts of solar energy is lost to space. The net result is an overall increase in entropy for the system, in accordance with the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
  3. The Laws of Thermodynamics apply to physical events and chemical reactions. Evolution is neither of these things; it is a process undergone by populations of living organisms, such as bacteria, plants, and animals, as well as viruses. Evolution is the result of reproduction, which is itself contingent of biochemical reactions, some of which increase the entropy within an organism, and some which decrease entropy. However, reproduction is the same regardless of whether creation or evolution is true. Since the Second Law of Thermodynamics clearly does not forbid reproduction, sexual or otherwise, it follows that it cannot forbid evolution either.
  4. It should also be noted that a population of organisms does not constitute a thermodynamic system. Evolution has no more to do with thermodynamics than does writing a book, having sex, or debating creation vs evolution.
  5. How can the second law forbid evolution, but still allow reproduction? Reproduction produces a new copy of the organism - an ordered state.
  6. Take a fairly large amount of salt and add boiling water until it all dissolves. The salt is now in a highly disordered state. Let it sit in a warm place for a while, and order will spontaneously develop in the form of salt crystals. Is this a violation of the 2nd law? For that matter, does creation get around the interpretation of the law being claimed, since life still exists and reproduction happens. No. Entropy is not the same as disorder: It is the reduction in the ability to do further work. We consume food and give back wastes such as carbon dioxide. The food cannot do further work now. Plants use energy from the sun to make food for us, but the sun fuses atoms together to provide that energy, which then can't do more work. Entropy, properly understood, can allow increases in order.
  7. The smallest non-artificial thermodynamically closed system in the universe, is the universe itself. The 2nd law does not apply to mere subsets of it. Local entropy decrease does not contradict universal entropy increase.
  8. If we take into account other forms of evolution like evolution of computers and technology they will also violate second law thermodynamics if creationists are right. Modern day computers are much developed than those of older days. Yet nobody says they were created in a day.
  9. add more responses

Creationism and the order in nature

Creationists are seemingly right in the sense that random events do not produce order. But they have produced an enormous amount of disorder (Average Information) represented by millions of different species and billions of different individuals in certain species, in agreement with the entropy law. Because a more widespread gene pool with longer DNA-messages tend to be more disordered.

The order in the biologic sphere was biggest when only one species ruled the roost. Disorder/entropy may also be called biological diversity because there is hardly any reason to distinguish between disorder and diversity if it is the same random evolution giving rise to both.

The illusion of order in the biologic sphere seems to be due to the fact that only a very tiny little fraction of all possible DNA-messages may manifest themselves as living organisms.

Thus, the disorder becomes restricted, and this restricted disorder is commonly being interpreted as order. Intuitively, this may be understood, if we observe that the duality order-disorder is like cold-warmth. Actually there must not be any cold, only limited warmth.

Because of the equivalence between the disorder and average information we may say that a more disordered gene pool gives more information in the art of survival.

Errors in CreationWiki Article:

The article on CreationWiki makes two major errors about the second law of thermodynamics: First, it claims that entropy is measure of disorder. Second, it misstates the second law. Along the way, it makes a number of other errors, the most important being the claim that evolution is a random process.

  • Is entropy a measure of disorder?*

The CreationWiki article claims that the formula for statistical entropy is

S = k ln \Omega

where

\Omega is the number of equivalent equally probable configurations

The formula is correct, but the claim is incomplete and the definition of \Omega incorrect. The concept of entropy applies to an equilibrium macrostate. \Omega is some measure of the number of microstates consistent with that macrostate. These microstates are sometimes called "configurations", but they are never "equivalent". Furthermore, in many situations \Omega is not the number of configurations, but is instead proportional to a volume in phase space. Finally, the formula applies only to the microcanonical ensemble.

All of this shows that the concept of entropy is subtle: To understand entropy one must first understand the concepts of equilibrium, macrostate, microstate, phase space, ensemble, and microcanonical, each of which is itself a subtle concept. One must also understand logarithms, but this concept is straightforward.

The article ignores all this subtlety and declares blankly that "entropy is a measure of disorder". Now, because the concept of entropy is subtle, a number of analogies have been developed in an attempt to render the concept more concrete. The metaphoric images invoked for entropy include "disorder", "randomness", "smoothness", "dispersion", "homogeneity", "chaos", and "freedom". In a posthumous fragment, J. Willard Gibbs mentioned "entropy as mixed-up-ness". To evaluate these metaphors, take some ice cubes out of your freezer, smash them, toss the shards into a bowl, and then allow the ice to melt. The jumble of ice shards certainly seems more disorderly than the smooth bowl of liquid water, yet the liquid water has the greater entropy.

Metaphoric images such as these are not bad, as long as they are regarded as metaphors and not as definitions or rigorous deductions. In exactly the same way, it's fine to say "my love is a red, red rose", but if you regard this as a rigorous result and begin searching your love for thorns before you touch him or her, it's likely to diminish rather than enhance your romantic relationship.

  • What does the second law say?*

According to the CreationWiki article, the second law of thermodynamics says that "the tendency is for entropy to increase". In fact, the second law says that in any change, the entropy of the universe increases (or at least remains constant).

  1. The second law says nothing about a "tendency". The first law doesn't state "there is a tendency for the energy of the universe to be conserved" and the second law doesn't state "there is a tendency for the entropy of the universe to increase". These laws are, as far as anyone knows, requirements rather than suggestions.
  2. The second law does *not* say that in any change, the entropy of *every part* of the universe increases. It is very common for the entropy in one part of the universe to decrease while the entropy of another part increases even more. This happens every time a crystal grows: the entropy of the crystal decreases while the entropy of the fluid surrounding the crystal increases even more.

If you change focus from entropy to disorder, you can find numerous occasions when objects in nature become ordered without anything organizing them: snowflakes form in the sky without instructions, seven marbles tossed into a bowl arrange themselves into a hexagon, dust collects into dust-bunnies under a bed, an unorganized low pressure system off the coast of Africa grows into a spiral-structured hurricane in the Caribbean. Processes like these happen all the time, and none of them violate the second law of thermodynamics.

The CreationWiki article claims that "when entropy is examined statistically, it is clear that the energy needs to be applied in an organized manner to reduce entropy". Not only is this not clear, it is patently false: energy is not applied "in an organized manner" to create a crystal, or a snowflake, or a cluster of marbles, or a dust-bunny, or a hurricane.

  • Is evolution random?*

The article claims that evolution differs from the sorting of molecules by size in that the "sorting is not a totally random event," suggesting that evolution *is* a totally random event. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution takes natural variation and sifts from those variations those that are most adaptive. The result is a more adapted species, not a random species.

This has been clear from the very beginning. In the *Origin of Species*, Charles Darwin wrote that "mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species." How did CreationWiki fall into the trap of thinking that evolution is totally random when the exact opposite is correct?

  • What do creationists claim?*

According to the article, "Creationists do not claim that increasing order is impossible".

Judge for yourself: The book *Scientific Creationism* (Henry M. Morris, editor) says on page 25 that, "The Second Law (Law of Energy Decay) states that every system left to its own devices always tends to move from order to disorder, its energy tending to be transformed into lower levels of availability, finally reaching the state of complete randomness and unavailability for further work."

Leave aside quibbles. (The second law of thermodynamics is not called the law of energy decay. "Tends to" means "usually but not always" so "always tends to" is a contradiction. What, if anything, does "left to its own devices" mean? Far from being the result of neglect, complete randomness is difficult to achieve: indeed a perfect random number generator has never been built.) It seems to me that this passage by creationists claims that increasing order is impossible, in contrast to CreationWiki's statement.

  • What do creationists want?*

The question of this article is whether the second law permits evolution. Henry M. Morris (above) erroneously claimed that it does not. Once Morris's errors were pointed out, Duane T. Gish wrote, in *Creation Scientists Answer their Critics* [sic], that an "increase in complexity doesn't violate the second law". Having conceded that point he goes on to say (twice) that the second law is "necessary but not sufficient", in other words, that while thermodynamics permits evolution it doesn't require evolution. The CreationWiki article echoes that for evolution to be accepted, scientists need "to demonstrate that decreases on the scale needed for the origin and evolution of life can occur spontaneously."

But this is obvious. The laws of thermodynamics apply on the Moon and life never evolved on the Moon, so of course the laws of thermodynamics do not make evolution necessary. Local increases and decreases of entropy are both permissible -- crystals form under some circumstances and dissolve under others.

Fallacies contained in this claim

References:

  1. Aranda-Espinoza et al., 1999. Electrostatic repulsion of positively charged vesicles and negatively charged objects. Science 285: 394-397.
  2. Kestenbaum, David, 1998. Gentle force of entropy bridges disciplines. Science 279: 1849.
  3. Han, J. & Craighead, H.G., 2000. Separation of long DNA molecules in a microfabricated entropic trap array. Science 288: 1026-1029.
  4. Demetrius, Lloyd, 2000. Theromodynamics and evolution. Journal of Theoretical Biology 206(1): 1-16. http://www.idealibrary.com/links/doi/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2106
  5. http://creationwiki.org/2nd_law_of_thermodynamics_prohibits_evolution
  6. McShea, Daniel W., 1998. Possible largest-scale trends in organismal evolution: eight live hypotheses. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29: 293-318.
  7. Schneider, Eric D. and James J. Kay, 1994. Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 19(6-8): 25-48. http://www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/u/jjkay/pubs/Life_as/lifeas.pdf

Further Reading:

Morris, Edward A., 2001. Evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. http://www.noble-minded.org/thermodynamics.html
Harvey, Allen H., 2000. The second law of thermodynamics in the context of Christian faith. http://www.shawangunk.com/scichr/essays/thermo.html
Lambert, Frank L., 1999. The second law of thermodynamics. http://www.secondlaw.com
Atkins, P.W., 1994. The Second Law. Scientific American Books, NY.
Kauffman, Stuart A., 1993. The Origins of Order, Oxford U. Press.
Brooks, Daniel and E. O. Wiley, 1988. Evolution As Entropy, University of Chicago Press.

Related claims

Acknowledgments

Dr. Dan Styer, the Schiffer Professor of Physics, at Oberlin College

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