The one thing I can't abide, though, is misinformation. And I keep hearing the same bit of it from the more outspoken Creationist side of things. Just as there can be evolutionists who are jerks about calling Creationists stupid and wrong, the invective can flow the other way too. And when it does, the old chestnut that states that evolution defies the second law of thermodynamics usually gets pulled out. This might sound like a compelling argument to someone who isn't familiar with this scientific principle before, but it's easy to misunderstand, and this misunderstanding is what's being perpetuated.
So I'm hoping to set the record straight on this one issue, at least. I just can't watch the work of Isaac Newton and some of the other brilliant minds that have contributed to this discovery being misused this way. So here's my counter-argument...
The second law of thermodynamics states that, left to its own devices, order always runs to chaos. It's the basis for the idea of entropy. An example of this is that hot food left on the table will always move toward room temperature. Energy never spontaneously moves in the other direction. Now, some people will take this idea and extrapolate it, saying that this thermodynamic law contradicts the theory of evolution. They will ask: how can something as ordered as life start, not to mention evolve from simpler to more complex forms, all the way up to and including humans, if everything tends toward chaos? Doesn't that have to mean that some kind of divine hand is intervening, adding a counterbalancing force of some kind, in effect making an exception for us?
Well, no. They've got it right that entropy does exist everywhere and without divine intervention, no exceptions are made. But the folks who argue against evolution in this manner forget thermodynamics’ one caveat... that entropy only constantly increases within a closed system. Increasing order is possible, if there's a source of energy being applied. Life, after all, is only the redistribution of energy, changing raw material into structure, then using that structure to turn stored energy into a combination of motion and heat.
But Earth is *not* a closed system. We have a constant energy source, infusing our planet with something like 33 billion watt-hours per square mile every day. The one thing missing from their thought-experiment is the Sun. Absolutely, entropy works. But on the other hand, your food won't cool to room temperature if you keep hitting it with heat lamps. If order always ran to chaos regardless of how much energy you put into it, then we would see exceptions counter to known physics (other divine sparks) in every baby that is born, and every time a seed, dirt and sunlight turns into a blade of grass. However, that just isn't the case.
So that's one point. But it still doesn't fully explain how constantly adding energy makes it possible for life to arise naturally. Other arguments you might hear are that this happening is less likely than throwing the constituent parts of the human eye up in the air and having them land together perfectly, or watching a tornado pass through a junkyard, only to leave an assembled car in its wake.
Again, a compelling-sounding argument, but these are two wildly inaccurate analogies. Neither the human eye nor a car spontaneously came together whole, but incrementally, and every step in their creation led toward the next, more complex, step. Evolutionists believe it's the same with the start of organic life. We're not proposing that a spark of lightning in a murky pool created a little swimming creature. Not at all. What we're suggesting is that, sometime in the billions of years of history of Earth, at least one happenstance combination of organic compounds didn't get broken apart by its violent surroundings quite as quickly as its counterparts.
Those organic compounds had only a slightest of advantages of "survival" over those around them. But that was all they needed. Eventually there were more of these clumps, again found by quintillions of random molecular interactions over the course of hundreds of millions of years. And later on, a variation of this arrangement came along that worked even better. Thus began a constant process of trial and error, favoring the random designs that worked and winnowing out those that didn't. Not only did the sun provide the energy to keep these compounds interacting and floating in liquid water, but its cosmic rays also caused many small random changes that assisted the process (aka mutation). This is where the random-eye/tornado-car analogies break down. It's not a case of nature throwing random stuff together until a perfect form appears. It was a constant refinement of possibilities, building each new step on top of an earlier one. There are at least six kinds of eyes that have independently developed in the animal kingdom, which also shows that there's no one "perfect" way to do anything when it comes to biology.
Maybe part of the anti-thermodynamic crew's problem comes from the use of the word "law", and I agree with them on this one. It always makes me cringe when someone in authority calls anything scientific a "law" -- be it evolution, thermodynamics, or even gravity -- because science should never assume it has spoken the final word on anything. Case in point: One of Isaac Newton's other famous postulations is about the clockwork-like workings of gravity. His formulas worked perfectly well 99.9% of the time, until we realized that it doesn't quite account for objects that have unusually strong gravity, or are moving unusually fast. Einstein stepped in three hundred years later and course-corrected our ideas with special relativity, which solved the remaining .1%. Today we consider the theory of gravity to be complete, but it would only take one verified defiance to tell us that we have further refinements to make. This mutability is one of science's biggest strengths, and has kept us from discarding new discoveries simply because they didn't feel intuitively right. Keep what works, erase what doesn't... A sort of evolution of thought, you might say.
So those are my thoughts on these "scientific" arguments against evolution. True, there are logical ways to attack evolution, just as there are logical ways to promote Creationism, and there are even ways to combine the two. But thermodynamics just isn't one of them.
Although I have one final problem with those who promote this "contradiction", and it's really the most insidious one... who is this particular argument for, exactly? I can't imagine that a person who understands thermodynamics is going to disavow their beliefs after hearing it. This can only mean that people who parrot this argument are, knowingly, using incorrect information to reinforce something *that* *they* *themselves* *believe* to others, who probably already believe it anyway. This is an even worse crime, I think. You shouldn't need to deceive to get your point across if it's a valid one.
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