Why Darwinists Hate Thermodynamics

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is to blame:

It is a well-known prediction of the second law that, in a closed system, every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease, as everything tends toward more probable (more random) states. Not only will carbon and temperature distributions become more disordered (more uniform), but the performance of all electronic devices will deteriorate, not improve. Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it. The second law is all about probability, it uses probability at the microscopic level to predict macroscopic change: the reason carbon distributes itself more and more uniformly in an insulated solid is, that is what the laws of probability predict when diffusion alone is operative.

The reason natural forces may turn a spaceship, or a TV set, or a computer into a pile of rubble but not vice-versa is also probability: of all the possible arrangements atoms could take, only a very small percentage could fly to the moon and back, or receive pictures and sound from the other side of the Earth, or add, subtract, multiply and divide real numbers with high accuracy.

The discovery that life on Earth developed through evolutionary "steps," coupled with the observation that mutations and natural selection -- like other natural forces -- can cause (minor) change, is widely accepted in the scientific world as proof that natural selection -- alone among all natural forces -- can create order out of disorder, and even design human brains with human consciousness. Only the layman seems to see the problem with this logic. In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ("A Mathematician's View of Evolution," 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000), after outlining the specific reasons why it is not reasonable to attribute the major steps in the development of life to natural selection, I asserted that the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.

Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in Order and Chaos (Basic Books, 1967), write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."

According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. According to this equation, the thermal order in an open system can decrease in two different ways -- it can be converted to disorder, or it can be exported through the boundary. It can increase in only one way: by importation through the boundary. Similarly, the increase in "carbon order" in an open system cannot be greater than the carbon order imported through the boundary, and the increase in "chromium order" cannot be greater than the chromium order imported through the boundary, and so on.

When I was taking Thermo, I used to think of nuclear bombs as a way of understanding this. In a nuclear detonation, a small amount of radioactive mass (very ordered) is blown up. The initial explosion, from the point of view of the mass, injects a great deal of energy into the mass. This energy is what kicks off the chain reaction. The mass is converted from matter to energy---entropy increases. Some of the mass is left, but a great deal of heat, light, and sound is produced, along with radiation.

Now, this doesn't happen naturally, as the probability of bringing together a pure enough mass of plutonium or uranium with a focused detonation is very unlikely. Thus, when one sees a nuclear bomb going off, it's safe to presume some intelligence caused that to happen---one would have to be very unlucky indeed for this to occur without some sort of intellect making it so.

This is precisely what the I.D.ers are saying with regard to macroevolution. You can certainly argue that the planet Earth is an open system in some respects, but one must then point to how the heat, light, and radiation injected into the ecosphere by the sun changes one species into another. This is precisely what evolutionists have failed to do. Nuclear physicists have quite spectacularly succeeded in creating several step-by-step sequences which result in the splitting or fusing of atoms, yet their colleagues who claim to have the key to life have nothing but conjecture to point to.

Don't give me Darwin's finches, either---subsequent study has shown that the specialized beaks which first piqued his interest are no more permanent conditions than the calluses one forms playing guitar or cutting wood with an ax.

All the Darwinists have provided society between frequent hoaxes is "just-so" stories, happy little myths about this critter begatting that one with a big question mark in the middle showing some as-yet-undetermined common ancestor.

It's as though Oppenheimer scrawled "Uranium-238--->something--->something--->atomic explosion" on a chalkboard in Los Alamos and claimed he'd invented the A-bomb right then and there.

It takes a lot of faith uninformed by reason to be a Darwinist. Thermodynamics is just one more counterargument in a long, long list.