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July 23, 2004 Yesterday I was reading one of my favorite blogs and found something that steps all over the toes of, possibly, my biggest pet peeve. Weapon of Mass Distraction had a post about Stephen Hawking's admission that he as proven his previous theory on black holes wrong (in the process losing a baseball encyclopedia to his buddy Kip Thorne). The thing that got me going was this: (1) Hawking's new calculations show that the fundamental law of the Conservation of Matter cannot be violated. Perhaps this will give scientists more faith in another fundamental scientific law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that systems by themselves becomes more disordered rather than ordered, a principle that throws Darwinistic evolution into question. (emphasis added) The 2nd Law does not say anything such thing. It does not state that systems by themselves becomes more disordered rather than ordered at all. Rather, it was originally formulated to deal with the limits of energy that one could extract from a carnot engine. For our purposes, however, it's more informative to deal with the bigger picture. The 2nd Law actually states that under any given set of conditions: ...the entropy of the universe increases. This concept is absolutely essential to understand fully in order to disprove the old line that the 2nd Law contradicts evolution. Again: the entropy of the universe increases...but the entropy of any specific part of the universe does not necessarily increase. A perfectly simple example: Six tennis balls are on the floor of a ship's cabin at sea. They are rolling all over the place, bumping into walls and furniture. You come into the cabin and put those six tennis balls into their two respective cans. Now, the first two sentences describe a highly disordered system (the tennis balls are rolling all over the floor). The last sentence describes a highly ordered system (the tennis balls are restricted to the confines of their cans). How is that possible? If the anti- evolution interpretation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to be accepted...then the ordering of the tennis ball system is impossible for the simple reason that the system by itself went from highly disordered to highly ordered. On the other hand, if we look at the entire universe, we will find that it as a whole became more disordered during the process. How? You, in the process of picking up the tennis balls, expended energy. That process involves taking sugar (highly ordered carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms) and breaking it down into carbon dioxide (highly disordered gas) and water. So, what we have is a system that became more ordered at the expense of a second system, creating a net increase in disorder. Now, I can just imagine someone out there saying: But what they really meant to say about the 2nd Law was that no system could go from disordered to order in the absence of outside, preformed, order. That, my friends, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Theory of Evolution. That Theory, as advanced by Darwin and expanded on by many, deals solely with how one form of life develops into yet another...given that the older form was already in existence. Evolution does not directly deal with the origin of Life. As to the Origin, I have my own thoughts...and perhaps I will share them at some point. For now, we'll just stick to Evolution and the 2nd Law. ------------ About the author: Tom is a conservative medical student in liberal New England who probably spends too much time paying attention to politics and never lacks topics for friendly discussions. Check out his blog MuD&PHuD; and the new blog alliance Home spun Bloggers. Email Thomas Carroll: mudphud11@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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