I do not understand how people can reconcile be second law of thermodynamics with evolution. I know I’ve heard the explanations of adding energy to the system or that overall entropy increases but you can have small pockets where it decreases etc. To me they are still diametrically opposed
Processes involving symbolic information can be used to create "self-organizing systems." In most life forms on Earth, this symbolic information is encoded in DNA and RNA molecules. Once it is represented in this way, information can be copied with almost zero errors, which is the key to evolution; here the word "almost" has as much significance as the word "zero."
But the second law is still in effect; living creatures use energy to power the systems and cycles that enable that information copying process, which takes place in parallel within billions of cells across trillions of living systems every second of every hour of every day. That expenditure of energy increases the disorder of our world, but the flow of energy from the sun keeps re-ordering things, and the two processes are in approximate equilibrium, and have been for several billion years, although the equilibrium point changes slowly over time. Well, usually slowly.
Universe vs. a small subset known as a system.
Recall too that organisms are open systems.
They can’t. So-called “macro” evolution is utter foolishness. Sure, there are a few in the evolution camp who can wax eloquent in their idiocy, throwing out red herrings along the way to mislead, such as crystal formation, the old white vs. black moths, or even “evolution” of viruses, but in the end they have no credible way to explain how simple organic compounds, combined with random undirected energy can form even the most basic protein molecules, much less unimaginably complex organisms like humans. In fact, to get back to entropy, even if a few amino acids or even proteins somehow magically formed in the “primordial soup” long ago, they would not be relentlessly pushed upward into more complex forms via unguided energy, such as lightning, but would certainly be immediately destroyed by a different type of energy, ultraviolet light.
But that’s just the problem of trying to explain the origin of the chemical building blocks of life via materialistic mechanisms. FAR more difficult to explain is how information, and a coding system to encode, store, decode, and error correct that information came into being by random chance and the innate properties of certain chemicals. That’s just flat impossible. Any code, such as the genetic code, can only be created by an intelligent mind because it takes intelligence to assign meaning to what would otherwise be nothing but arbitrary sequences of nucleotides, and to develop the processes and nano-machinery for storing, decoding, and error correcting that information.
That’s because entropy is racist!
This could be considered the driving force behind evolution as it hastens Le Fin de la Monde.