Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure

... 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", 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, 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. ...

It certainly was not to expand the universe of competing knowledge. They were protecting their recruits from the mean old outside world.

Protecting their recruits? LOL! The percentage of high school students who will go on to research oriented careers in any natural science field (let alone those directly related to evolution) is infinitesimal. Even if there was this grand conspiracy you seem to imagine, it wouldn't focus there. It would focus on upper level and postgraduate college work. Yet in grad school no one much cares what you think, so long as you're not a clymer about it.

There was a controversy involving a college instructor out in California in the 90's. Maybe the name will come to me in a minute. Oh, yeah, it was Dean Kenyon. Anyway, Kenyon's department objected that he was teaching ID in his intro-level biology courses. At one point in the negotiations his department noted that their main objection was that intro courses should restrict themselves to established theory, but if Kenyon agreed to forgo teaching ID there the department would give him senior (or post-grad, I don't remember) seminars especially devoted to the topic.

Kenyon turned this down. So here Kenyon had the choice, on the one hand, of discussing ID, superficially and for a few days, with general students, virtually none of whom would chance to take up research oriented science careers, and none of whom would be equipped to debate, refine, apply, or otherwise help advance Intelligent Design. On the other hand he had the opportunity to engage students with ID in detail and for a full semester, and furthermore these would be advanced students who were already on a track toward research careers, or who had already begun them. These would also be students would be equipped, at least to some degree, to help develop a scientific theory. In any case it would be an opportunity to recruit students who might then devote a portion of their subsequent careers to the subject.

Now I understand that maybe Kenyon had a point to make, and so he didn't want to give ground. But this was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. No scientist advocating a fringe idea, who genuinely believed in it's scientific potential, would turn down such an opportunity. Recruitment is KEY in getting a new idea off the ground, and young scientists just starting their careers are a fertile ground.

But the fact is that virtually ALL creationists focus almost exclusively on secondary level education, or undergrad level college at best. They don't even seem to care about real science: that is the working profession. Oh, they pretend to, but they don't really. They have all sorts of excuses for focusing on high schools instead. Notice your own sour grapes attitude, that it (evolutionary science) is a uncrackable conspiracy of cowed functionaries who fear to challenge the official "dogma". No uncommitted person believes that nonsense for a minute. (I don't even believe you really believe it, not deep down. It's a rationalization you reiterate, accept and don't question.)

Like most antievolutionists you've just written off actual science (science as practiced by working scientists doing original research) because you don't really care about it. Your interest is in indoctrinating non-scientists, particularly children.

And yet you seem to believe that this will have some effect on science down the line somewhere. Get a clue. It won't. It doesn't work that way. Again it's like thinking the Red Sox can actually win the World Series if only the sports pages pretend they did. But it's what really happens on the baseball diamond that counts. Just so with science. It's was happens in the lab that counts. You can't effect that by rewriting textbooks. You can only effect it by DOING science.

Very good post.

Agreed...

I think it would do well for the anti-evolutionists to learn that science is by nature adversarial

If we could substitute scientist in place of science above it would explain many of the issues which I've noticed bother many on the CREVO side of these threads.

It is my experience that most of the truly "religious" people I know are non-confrontational by nature to the point of being polite to a fault. It is exasperating to them IMHO that they are "talked to" the way many of the "scientists" on these threads appear to think is appropriate. I have found many of the threads to be of a much higher quality in terms of tone lately and it appears that trend invites more participation.

Thanks again for your input it has been most helpful.

I think that is only part of the answer.

Scientists normally go through an extremely long and difficult education process, and it doesn't stop with the Ph.D. There is simply so much to learn, often it takes a decade or more to just get to the leading edge where you can begin to do work which advances the field.

And then somebody, who has not gone through the same educational process, comes along and says its all "evo-bunk," or "evilution," or "evo-cultism" or, in one case, "I'm sick and tired of athiest monkey-worshipping communist swine ..." We see examples of this on these threads daily; most of these comments come from people with a religious background.

It is amazing that these comments are received as well as they are on these threads; occasionally there are responses in kind.

For the most part, the working scientists try to share their knowledge, but often the response from the other side is less than kind; religious belief is not open to reasoned argument. The level of discourse, as you might expect, can go downhill from at that point.

"For the most part, the working scientists try to share their knowledge, but often the response from the other side is less than kind; religious belief is not open to reasoned argument."

If you want to know the true reason why the lay audience is skeptical of evolutionist claims, see here:

http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9711/articles/johnson.html

When scientists acknowledge the fact that they cannot even consider the idea of God working, and then somehow claim that they have found evidence of God not working, it is obvious to those listening that there is an error in judgment.

Any time I write a paper (although I am not in research, I do write technical tutorials for IBM) I try to have someone examine it who is not technical, for the simple reason that I am too close to the subject to see my own biases and distortions. In fact, I usually let my Dad read them, who has not done programming since college, to look over them, precisely because he is not part of the whole rigamorole.

And I think this is what has happened with evolutionary science. They get caught up in this whole way of thinking, and then cannot look back in an objective way and examine what they are doing. They don't see that by excluding an entire method of causality (intelligent causation) they have unnecessarily restricted themselves in what kinds of explanations are allowed.

For example, if I have a stone that is on the floor, and I leave for an hour, and come back, and it's on the table. If I don't acknowledge that an intelligent agent may have moved the stone, I have to come up with some sort of idea of wind gusts that moved the stone from the floor to the table. I will then become _convinced_ about these short-acting, high-velocity, spontaneous winds, simply because I _know_ that the rock moved, and I have a priori decided not to include intelligent causation.

In the words of Behe: "Still, some critics claim that science by definition can't accept design, while others argue that science should keep looking for another explanation in case one is out there. But we can't settle questions about reality with definitions, nor does it seem useful to search relentlessly for a non-design explanation of Mount Rushmore. Besides, whatever special restrictions scientists adopt for themselves don't bind the public, which polls show, overwhelmingly, and sensibly, thinks that life was designed. And so do many scientists who see roles for both the messiness of evolution and the elegance of design."

The question is, can God's action be allowed to be considered by science? If so, then we need to have explanations of why the similarities of organisms are the result of common descent rather than common design. We need to know why the idea of non-interventionistic abiogenesis makes _more_ sense than the nearly global idea that life came from God. We need to have an open dialog as to why happenstance changes make _better_ sense of life than design. In fact, this has happened once in recent history. Of course, the creationists did too well, and since then Dawkins now has a policy of not debating creationists, the AAAS lied about the outcome of the debate, and the Oxford Union "misplaced" all records of the debate. The creationists didn't win, but they made a good showing (115 to 198 I believe -- and this was AT OXFORD).

So why no open debate?

Now, if science has a methodological predisposition saying that it can't consider God, then theologians have a right and responsibility to say that it therefore cannot say anything remotely definitive about what happened in the past. They are flying blind, purposefully ignorant of an entire area of causation, attempting to come up with explanations that simply ignore what theology tells us. It would be the same as trying to construct chemistry without Hydrogen.

This is why the public doesn't trust science in this area. Science is making bold claims resting on unproved presuppositions. Certainly the scientists know more than the public about their area, but the scientists are also claiming to know more about God's actions than the theologians! Why is one alright and not the other?

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