Thursday, August 24, 2006
Law of entropy applied to Evolution - Discuss
Most Science-minded people agree that the second law of thermodynamics is fundamental. However, it has often been postulated that just as in other natural processes things can become "messed up" but there is no natural process where things "become more ordered". At a casual glance, evolutionary theory is saying that natural process of evolution is making things more advanced and "ordered" in a subjective way at least. Clearly, there must be some scientific tool or experiment which can demonstrate this objectively one way or another.
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First of all, lots of natural processes make things more ordered. The crystallisation of a nice regular lattice of salt out of a brine where all the ions were merrily zipping about in a disordered way, for instance. But in all processes, natural or unnatural the total entropy of the universe increases. An increase in local order in the system (the salt crystal) must be accompanied by a greater decrease in order in the surroundings. Similarly, the high level of organisation of living things is not a stable state of affairs, but is sustained by continuously increasing the entropy of their surroundings- converting highly organised molecules into carbon dioxide and water, f’rinstance.
Second of all, the entropy ‘problem’ does not lie with evolution as such. Evolution, despite its etymology, has no preferred direction. Lots of ‘branches’ seem to have led to organisms losing functionalities they once had and becoming simpler on the macroscopic scale. We cannot observe what has happened on the biochemical scale, but it is likely that the same sort of thing has happened. From our point of view we might seem to be ‘ordered’ and ‘advanced’ than a microbe, but from a thermodynamic view we are much of a muchness. Shuffling bits and pieces of life about, and modifying them in one way or another, seems to happen quite readily with the sort of chemical basis for life that we have.
The ‘problem’ lies with the origin of life in the first place: lots of the writing of the intelligent design people, and of the ‘continuously existing universe’ people, goes into silly calculations of how unlikely it would be for a functional protein to spontaneously come together from random ingredients. I have to run off now, so I will address this problem next!
This is what I had to say about the origins of life- I thought it was just a little while ago, but it turns out to be last October. Where has the year gone? There is no very good or generally accepted scientific theory for the origins of life, and the nature of DNA-based life seems to be consistent either with (a) something that has developed in an ad hoc fashion via countless preliminary stages of which all traces have vanished, or (b) something that has greatly degenerated via countless preliminary stages from a life that was originally intelligently designed. The only halting way forward on this is to get data on life from places other than Earth.
Neither (a) nor (b) are inconsistent with the second law, which I ought to be able to demonstrate if someone gives me an argument that they are inconsistent so I can refute it...
We come back to preferred direction again. Great evolution vs Creation debates still dwell on the "evolutionary progress" axiom that we are only concerned with what happened in the upward direction, and how it can move in that direction at all. My answer is that progress only comes at the expense of extreme increases in entropy all around. Civilisation progress, for instance, generates randomness evident as global warming etc. Progress also risks the entire system via capabilities to destroy the entire planet that potentally ensue
Yep! The 'preferred direction' idea that is implicit in the word 'evolution' and the common non-scientific understanding of the term is a load of toss. So survey results that say how many people 'accept evolution' are meaningless, because they might be accepting somethingn that is nothing like the scientific understanding of evolution.
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