Designs on Us. Conservatives on Darwin vs. ID.

The New Republic recently published a survey of conservative journalists on the question of “Intelligent Design” (ID), the controversial critique of Darwinian evolution which argues that living creatures did not arise by an unaided, purely material process of evolution through random genetic variation but rather through the design of an intelligence transcending the material universe. To my surprise, it turned out that almost all those surveyed, including several NR editors and contributors, were doubters not of Darwinism but of Intelligent Design.

I realize with some trepidation that I am treading on the views of many of my old NR friends and colleagues, notably John Derbyshire who has written eloquently on the subject, but herewith a dissent on behalf of doubting Darwin.

A majority of biologists reject ID. But a minority of scientists, who are no fools, suggests that it is Darwinism that fails to explain the complexity of organisms. I don’t intend to wade into the details of the debate, but rather to ask how a layman like me, or Derbyshire, can hope to venture a responsible opinion. The question is not merely theoretical. The teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools is being challenged before local and state school boards across the country.

Some say that, for non-experts, the smartest thing would be to accede to the viewpoint of the majority of scientists. But wait. The point I want to draw out here is that Darwinism, in particular evolutionary psychology, itself undercuts the claim that ID may be safely dismissed.

Charles Darwin’s insight holds that people are simply animals and that, like all animals, we got to be the way we are because our ancestors beat out the evolutionary competition and survived to pass on their genes. Evolutionary psychology extends this idea. There are some behaviors that increase the chances that a given person will be able to pass on his genetic information. One, for instance, might be murder, often committed against rivals who given the appearance of seeking to diminish the odds of our raising viable offspring that will carry our DNA. A classic illustration is the crime of passion, where the angry husband shoots the sexual rival who has been having an affair with his wife.

From this perspective, a main evolutionary-psychological impulse that drives males in particular is the drive to fight off rivals. For rivals threaten to reduce our access to reproductive assets — namely, women — by lowering our status in a social hierarchy. In certain neighborhoods, all it takes is a disrespectful look or word, a “diss,” especially in front of women, to get a man killed.

In evolutionary psychology, as in common sense, it is apparent that males highly value whatever source of status or prestige they have managed to secure. We value status so much that some are willing to kill over it. Others are willing at least to wound, if only with words.

One prominent evolutionary psychologist, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, has written frankly about rivalry in academia, and the use of cutting rhetoric in the defense of established ideas: “Their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (‘Clearly…’), threat (‘It would be unscientific to…’), authority (‘As Popper showed…’), insult (‘This work lacks the necessary rigor for…’), and belittling (‘Few people today seriously believe that…’).”

I bring this up because Intelligent Design aggressively challenges the status of many professionals currently laboring in secular academia. And because one of the hallmarks of the defense of Darwinism is precisely the kind of rhetorical displays of intimidation, threat, authority, and insult that Pinker describes.

For instance in a section on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “Q&A on Evolution and Intelligent Design,” you will find numerous statements as if lifted almost verbatim from Pinker’s examples — ridiculing ID as “non-scientific,” an idea whose “advocates have yet to contribute in a scientifically rigorous manner,” who “may use the language of science, but [who] do not use its methodology.”

When you consider that ID theoreticians have published their findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals, in formidable academic presses such as those of Cambridge University and the University of Chicago, such denunciations start to sound like a worried defense of status more than a disinterested search for truth.

If the Darwinian establishment is vexed, that’s understandable. A century and a half ago, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species with its materialistic implications signaled the overturning of Western society’s traditional matrix for the granting of status: namely religion. From Darwin forward, intellectual prestige was bestowed not by religious institutions but by secular ones, the universities.

It has remained so until today. Now, with many parents and school-board members signaling their impatience with the answers given by secular academia to ultimate questions — like, where did we humans come from — the secular hierarchy would be foolish not to be concerned. It would be perfectly in keeping with their own Darwinist views — about how men especially will fight to defend their source of status — to expect secularists to struggle violently against any challenge that may be raised against Darwinism, no matter where the truth of the matter may actually lie. Being the animals that we are, we are programmed through our genes to do just that.

In a wonderful irony, the only intellectual framework in which people can genuinely be expected to pursue truth dispassionately, even if that truth undermines our sense of personal prestige, happens to be the religious framework, in which people aren’t animals at all but rather beings created in the image of God.

In the case of ID versus Darwin, this observation may not tell us which side to embrace. It should signal, however, that when secularists insist that real science must lead to the view that life and intelligence arose through chance genetic events, we needn’t accept that view as gospel. I’ve offered a reason to doubt the Darwinian establishment, not necessarily to reject it. When laymen, including conservative journalists, follow the scientific majority on a question like this, rather than the dissenting minority, they should at least be aware that they are following guides who, while claiming to be disinterested, are anything but that.

My buddy, Mike Shelton, is an honest to goodness rocket scientist, and is very emphatic regarding the First and Second Laws of Thermodynaics destroying the theory of evolution. Here is one article of his.

The Second Law Of Thermodynamics (SLOT) and its Application to Evolution December 1999 (Updated June 2005, July 07 2005; July 24 2005)

Michael S. Shelton

Stafford, VA

Premise: The Second Law of Thermodynamics (SLOT) is the Silver Bullet against the Theory of Evolution. It is, indeed, a central stake through the philosophical heart of the atheist who must leave God out of the picture.

The physical universe can be explained in many ways using various mathematical relations, equations and laws. We have developed a number of mathematical relationships to describe gravity, place objects in orbit, fly Martian explorations, and operate submarines. We use thermodynamic laws and relationships to build steam turbines, gasoline internal combustion engines, and predict how much electrical current will be needed to cool a certain-sized building each day in summer.

The same thermodynamic laws can describe the operation of biological life. Although the operation and life of a rabbit differs from a Ford V-8 engine, the foundational principles of the Zeroth, First, Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics are the same. These Laws are easily found and investigated by normal web search methods. Of interest to us, however, are the First and Second Laws, particularly the Second Law.

To build a designed device (say, a refrigerator), energy input from the First Law must be manipulated correctly through the process of the Second Law (SLOT) to craft the device. We need energy, a plan, information, a sense of project, and tools to build the device. During the process, the overall disorder (entropy), or randomness, of the Universe increases, with a local decrease in entropy when the refrigerator is finally assembled. In other words, the various raw materials and components are brought together from their random, haphazard locations and placed into a highly-specified order that gives us a useful device to store cold water, hamburger meat, and ice cream. We have now gone through a complete thermodynamic cycle to harness the stored energy and raw materials. Simply pouring / adding non-directed energy to the components with no manner of manipulating the process won’t produce a refrigerator, or whatever you have in mind.

As I stated in the immediately preceding paragraph, the overall disorder (entropy), or randomness, of the Universe has increased. Although we have a finished product, the ancillary processes used to obtain the raw materials, cut the metal, mold the rubber trim, and charge the refrigerant are accompanied by frictional losses, noise, and waste. Most of these processes result in losses that cannot and will never be regained in the form of stored energy to be used again. This points directly to the idea that something / Someone had to have provided the Original Sources of potential, usable energy. Next, the idea that a plan is needed to assemble a usable device points to a designer. For biological life, this points to a Designer. Raw, inorganic matter, regardless of how much it is irradiated with the sun or heat from a thermal vent, does nothing to cause autoorganization of the matter into the building blocks of life, and then, into the numerous proteins and cells that comprise a living being.

The Second Law is expressed mathematically as:

dS = dQ/T Entropy change is denoted as ‘dS’ and is always ³ 0. ‘dQ’ is the incremental energy state change / increase

Further,

dSR = dQR/T, where the term ‘QR’ indicates application to a reversible process - reversible connotes we can do a process and return to the original state with no change in entropy to the system and/or surroundings. Some parts of processes are reversible, but not the entire process.

1. In a reversible and closed-cycle process, the entropy change is equal to the change in heat or energy transfer divided by the temperature of the system or process. This temperature ‘T’ (“absolute temperature” in either degrees Rankine or Kelvin, as applicable) is usually the temperature of the environment that any process occurs in or exhausts into. dQ = dE + dW, where ‘E’ represents thermal or kinetic energy and ‘W’ represents work.

2. Entropy can be further broken down into dS = dSe + dSi, where subscript ‘e’ is the reversible component of the process, and subscript ‘i’ is the irreversible component and lost forever. dSi represents irreversible effects (friction, internal hysteresis, sound waves, electromagnetic waves, etc.).

3. An example is the exhaust energy radiated from the engine of a car and through its tailpipe. Most of the combustion process is lost as unused heat transfer, not utilized in operating the mechanical components of the car. It is permanent and irreversible. Another example is heat generated by a human undergoing physical exercise. The heat is radiated, convected or conducted away and lost forever. To replenish the lost energy, the human must eat. The car must be refueled

4. Back to dS = dSe + dSi. The dSe part we recover. But it comes at a price, always accompanied by dSi. Additionally, dSe nearly always requires an intelligent mechanism, a design, a plan, information, a code, to be accomplished. dSi requires no code or design, such as the burning of a forest after a lightning strike, or the nuclear furnace of a star. They simply transform potential energy into kinetic energy and exhaust / transfer directly into their surroundings randomly. To further harness that wasted energy, a device intelligently planned and intelligently operated must be employed.

EXAMPLE 1: A tank of water is on a mountain peak (for the moment, let’s ignore how the water got there). The tank bursts and the water runs down to the valley below. At the bottom, the water remains there. If this water was not employed to run turbines or other devices, then the process is a pure conversion from potential energy to kinetic energy. Once all the sloshing at the bottom of the hill ceases, the potential energy of the water is zero. We still have the water, it has not been removed from the system, but it has achieved a useless state. Under these conditions, maximum entropy (randomness) has been achieved, and will remain thus unless acted upon from outside the system. We could construct a mechanism to fully funnel the water down a tube or chute to the bottom of the mountain, then transport back to the top via pumps or buckets. However, this will require an intelligently designed and employed mechanism to do so. In this case we could have dS = dSe + dSi, where dSe represents the entire water supply restored to the tank (miraculously repaired somehow) and dSi is the energy lost from sloshing and friction down the mountainside, replaced by the outside energy needed to move the water back up to the tank.

EXAMPLE 2: A small animal loses its food supply. It remains alone in a very large room (large enough that suffocation is not an issue, say a building of 150x150x1 miles, i.e., 22,500 cubic miles) sealed from the outside and adiabatically perfect. The animal naturally roams around, looking for food (there is none). As it starves, all its fat reserves are consumed by the normal biomolecular mechanisms of life. Heat is generated and is radiated away from the body. As the animal finally dies from the lack of nutrition sources usable by its body cells, causing organ shutdown and finally brain death, entropy will continue to increase because the cells break down and deteriorate from decay. Any parasite life will now work in the decay process until they, too, die from lack of nutrition. At some point in the future, under the carefully controlled conditions of this large room, maximum entropy will be obtained and remain static until something from outside the system acts upon it.

SUMMARY:

· The earth is not a closed system. Thermodynamic processes are used to explain ordinary physical laws. We can choose isolated cases to study closed systems.

· Reasonably, our solar system can be treated as a closed system for most ordinary thermodynamic studies. Arbitrarily, we could put the spherical “closed” boundary of our solar system at a two or three light-year radius (two light years is 11.7 trillion miles (11.7 x1012)). In other words, there is no known power source of sufficient strength, other than our sun, to add value to our solar system’s energy resources.

· There is no scientific literature that I am aware of that indicates violation of any known laws of thermodynamics. In fact, atheists / evolutionists themselves state this. (ref That Their Words May Be Used Against Them by Henry Morris).

R. B. Lindsay says: “The most careful examination of all naturally occurring processes (i.e., those in which external influences are not allowed to intervene) has only served to confirm our confidence in the inexorable over-all increase in the entropy of the universe” (“Entropy Consumption and Values in Physical Science,” American Scientist, Vol. 47, September 1959, p. 379)

· Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking system. The overall change is then a complexity loss in line with the dictates of the second law. “Beyond the Cosmos” by Dr. Hugh Ross, using Einstein’s relativity equations, string theory, the hot Big Bang theory model, shows that our universe by necessity is a closed system (the reader will note that until recently I was neutral in the debate of Young Earth vs Old Earth Creationists – citing “Beyond the Cosmos” is not necessarily an endorsement of Old Earth Creation research and conclusions. But after years of struggling / searching for the best approach, either Old Earth or Young Earth Creation, I have finally concluded that the proper Biblical and Scientific agreement and approach is that of Young Earth Creation. This includes the notion that the Hot Big-Bang Model is not congruent with the Creation account cited in the Book of Genesis). Our universe, and neither our solar system, is not receiving any additional energy from without. The COBE satellite in 1993 detected a uniform background radiation signature of the universe, with a temp of about 3 degrees R, which was extremely close to predictions. So, it seems we safely can call the universe closed (at least for now).

“….in any isolated system (that is, a system from which all external sources of energy are shut off), the energy of the system is conserved in quantity but is continually being degraded in quality as long as any energy change is taking place in the system. Some of the available energy is always dissipated in nonrecoverable friction or heat energy. Since all activities of nature (including biological activities) involve such energy transfers, there must be an ever-decreasing supply of usable energy for maintaining all natural processes in the universe as a whole.” [“Science And The Bible,” ‘Chapter 1 Science in the Bible, The Basic Laws of Science’ by Henry M. Morris, revised and updated, (MOODY PRESS, Chicago), “That Their Words May Be Used Against Them,” hardback and CD-ROM] {Note: Dr. Henry M. Morris is founder and President Emeritus of the Institute for Creation Research, an engineer, and former Department Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech - MSS} (again, the reader will note that in the debate of Young Earth vs Old Earth Creationists, I now very firmly side with the Young Earth Creationists camp – citing “Science And The Bible” and “That Their Words May Be Used Against Them” is not necessarily an endorsement of all Young Earth Creation research and conclusions, for there are some disagreements and incomplete models)

· We have a battle primarily of theological ideologies:

“Science doesn’t “prove facts,” it only offers reasonable explanations that fit with the evidence.” Ariex, a former debate opponent

“The heart cannot embrace what the mind cannot comprehend.” Hank Hanegraaff

“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (I Corinthians 2:14, NIV)

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