Set in stone: The Boltzmann entropy equation: Entropy as a function of statistical weight.
I was intrigued by this article on the
YEC web site Creation Ministries International*.
At last I have found some sensible advice on the second law of thermodynamics
coming from a fundamentalist source. The
article contains the replies by YEC guru Jonathan Sarfati to the queries of a YEC
follower who has an engineering degree but who was nevertheless struggling
to understand the second law of thermodynamics and whether or not it can be
used to support YEC opposition to evolution. In fact the article is entitled How useful is the Second Law of
Thermodynamics as an argument against evolution?
Below I quote bits of the article and interleave my comments.
My Comment: Observe the worry caused by this YEC’s
implicit dualism; he takes it for granted that the whole debate can be cast into a
dichotomized naturalism vs. God mold. Given this mold, if it were ever shown unequivocally that
the cosmic status quo has the informational wherewithal to generate life then this
YEC may have a problem; to him and, ironically, to atheist detractors who also subliminally hold on to this dichotomy, the
cosmos then looks suspiciously “autopoietic"; that is, able to generate living configurations "without help from God". This fear is in fact encouraged by the de facto
IDist’s botched
“god intelligence-of-the-gaps” epistemic filter, an epistemic which
requires physical explanations to fail before the presence of an intervening intelligent agency is declared.
YEC follower: My
first reaction when I heard this was to bring up the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Indeed, complexity seems to increase but at the expense of heat
loss as an exothermic reaction where some (or most? don’t remember right now)
of the heat is never to be recovered again. This shows entropy of the
system/universe as a whole, an enemy of their attempt to see this as an
autopoietic system…… Would the entropy of the heat/work available in
the system support a refutation on the biblical creationist’s part regarding
the impossibility of any system to ‘self-organize’ due to the Second Law. Am I
leaping too far at this point?
My Comment: He’s aware that the second law doesn’t
rule out local decreases in entropy as long as they are outweighed by increases
in entropy elsewhere in the closed system, but he is confused about the
implications of this for both evolutionists and fellow YECs: For evolutionists
(and not as this YEC follower suggests) the global rundown of the universe is
not a necessary problem because that run down is still consistent with local increases in order, increases which
potentially might include the
development of life. This YEC follower,
however, is troubled by the possibility of local increases in order because
from the perspective of his dualistic paradigm of God vs. nature he senses it may ultimately play into the hands of evolutionists.
YEC follower: I may
be heading in two directions at once on this since a discussion of
Thermodynamics may be all that’s needed without dragging in a secondary one
regarding Information Theory or something. Although I’m not sure how to apply
Information Theory to the water molecule formation yet, I would like to if it
fits somehow or helps the creationist refutation.
My Comment: He’s hankering after the common YEC canard
that the second law is a self-contained mathematical argument refuting
evolution with all the certainty of physical law. This, as it turns out, is a will-o-the-wisp
for YECs. He’s better following through with information theory (as Sarfati
himself advises. as we shall see below), but
that will take him into deep waters he wants to avoid.
YEC follower: Next, I
was stumped for a while on trying to decide what to do with ‘endothermic’
reactions. If an endothermic reaction borrows heat from its surroundings then
it only temporarily stores heat until released by another type reaction later
perhaps. Maybe like a tree? Would not a tree be something like an endothermic
reaction that increases in apparent complexity from a seed to a full grown
specimen drawing in energy from its surroundings, IE. the sun?
My Comment: Once again the recurring theme is that our YEC follower senses those manifest local increases in order set a bad precedent for his
subliminal God vs naturalism paradigm;
for perhaps somehow evolution is one of these temporary local increases in
order? And yes, biological systems routinely increase local order by organising
huge quantities of less ordered matter. They can do this because they have the
informational recipes in the form of DNA instructions along with mechanisms to
read them and thence churn out proteinised matter. So, if life is a "natural" system that can considerably increase local order perhaps hidden up in the
physical status quo is sufficient information to bring about local increases in
order such as would be needed for evolution? Or perhaps not! Who knows! The
proof of this either way may be computationally irreducible and therefore beyond
human analytical solution.
YEC follower: With
Information Theory and molecular genetics telling us that the seed has all it
needs to be a tree, it indeed then ‘borrows’ energy from the sun for a time
building in ‘apparent’ complexity through a type of endothermic system. However,
in the end the tree would finally give up this ‘borrowed’ energy in the form of
heat exothermically by way of being burned, eaten, or chemically rotted away
perhaps. This would then be an end process like the exothermic formation of a
water molecule in a ‘Second Law supporting’ event, again upholding the previous
idea of increased entropy in the system.
So, do I drag in Thermodynamics,
Information Theory, Autopoiesis, or what to draw up a good article on this idea
of the humble water molecule?
My Comment: He’s confused. Yes, as he suggests
there is the run down into a total entropy increase which ultimately will effect everything, but in the meantime our physical regime clearly allows local increases of order as the routine growth of
life shows. So the question remains; could those local increases of order become so
large as to allow macro evolution ? If they did then somewhere the requisite information is implicit.
Sarfarti, YEC guru, responds: (My emphases in bold): The reaction 2H2 + O2 → 2H2O
occurs because it is exothermic, which pumps heat (Q) into the surroundings,
thus by definition increases their entropy by Q/T. This outweighs any loss
because of the higher ordering of the water molecules.
Also, the order in the water
molecules is based on the chemical properties of the component atoms. This is
very different in kind from the organization of proteins and DNA. My response
to an evolutionary science writer explains this in more detail as does my book
By Design.
Endothermic reactions I’ve
touched on in this article I co-authored for the homeschooling magazine The Old
Schoolhouse: Scientific experiments for homeschoolers.
I tend not to use entropy arguments at all for biological systems.
I must admit that I hardly ever refer to the second law, although as a
Ph.D. physical chemist I am well qualified to do so. Without meaning to brag,
if I don’t use it, then few people should; instead, concentrate on the
information argument. I’ve seen both creationists and evolutionists
make mistakes in their discussions; see for example The Second Law of
Thermodynamics: Answers to critics. But for a sound discussion on second law
arguments, which are strongest when dealing with chemical evolution (origin of
life from non-living chemicals), see the chapters from The Mystery of Life’s
Origin.
I tend not to use entropy arguments at all for biological systems. I have
yet to see the calculations involving either heat transfer or Boltzmann
microstates involved for natural selection. Until creationists can do that,
they should refrain from claiming that organic evolution contradicts the Second
Law; a trite appeal to “things become more disordered according to the Second
Law” is inadequate.
Origin of first life is
different, since natural selection can’t occur without two or more
self-reproducing entities.
I hope these comments are
helpful.
My Comment: That’s the most sensible statement I’ve seen
from a YEC about the second law of thermodynamics; I largely agree with it. But
at what point do those awkward local increases in order permitted by the second
law become taboo for a dualist YEC? The
second law in and of itself is far too loose a law to be used as a standalone
disproof of evolution. As Sarfati rightly implies it all swings on the question
of the ultimate origin of the information present in living structures. We know for
example that biological systems routinely and massively increase local order - "naturally"!! In
this case, however, we know where the "natural" informational mechanisms are located;
namely, the DNA recipes and their associated reading and “writing” machinery. It
is therefore conceivable that information for evolution resides somewhere in
the physical regime; perhaps in the laws of physics or some other aspect of the
physical regime not yet understood; basically there is no unassailable argument
which pins down the source of that information; either it’s part of the physical regime’s status quo or it
is patched in ad hoc by a deity or alien intelligence. As regards the
possibility that this information is implicit in our physical regime, Sarfati implies
we need to know the breakdown of the microscopic statistical weights per
macrostate. This would then tell us the likely path the physical system will
take through the space of macrostates as
its global order runs down. But this calculation is a huge many body problem and no one knows the answer, and
that includes YECs as Sarfati frankly admits. But the second law in and of
itself provides no short cut answer to that problem as some naive YECs and IDists have tried to maintain.
Sarfati mentions the book The
Mystery of Life’s Origins. I looked at three of the relevant chapters of
this book in the Darwin centenary year of 2009 (See here, here and here) and it
became clear to me that these chapters don’t address the question of how the
information needed for life is applied; whether through the constraints of the
physical status quo or whether that information is patched in ad hoc on occasions by some alien intelligence.
***
Where many YECs and IDists go wrong is that they don’t acknowledge the
potential and critical role of the information implicit in the constraints introduced by the
physical regime. It is these constraints which determine the macro evolution of
the system. The second law only tells us that the system will likely move
toward the macro states of greatest statistical weight – not a particularly startling conclusion.
But it is the constraints of the physical regime which will tell us if the macro
states through which the system passes as it moves from a macro state of lower statistical weight to a macro state of higher statistical weight include localised regions of high order
such as organic structures.
The pertinent question, a question not answered by the second law, is
how the information implicit in the system is applied: Is it
part of the God ordained constraints of the physical status quo or does God behave like an “alien-of-the-gaps”
who on occasion down loads information into the system? Dualists who hold to an implicit God vs nature
paradigm have little option but to support the alien-of-the-gaps concept of divine
intervention in the "natural order" of things. Given the immanence of God and the failure of alien-of-the-gaps' science
of interventions, at least in its YEC and IDist manifestations, this seems an
unlikely option.
However, if the information needed for evolution is part of the physical status quo
that would require the
spongeam to exist, a mathematical object whose existence I doubt**. Hence, through
my two projects, Melancolia
I and the Thinknet
project I’m probing the idea that the physical regime has bestowed upon it
some of the necessary features of an intelligent system; chiefly the ability to
embark on searches of huge numbers of cases using expanding parallelism and then collapsing the search envelop in favor of some sort of selection.
This activity, as I show, is capable of creating (local) information especially
if teleological selection is adopted. But even under these conditions
it doesn’t necessarily follow that the second law is contravened.
But be all that as it may I concede that Sarfati has done science a service in advising
YEC followers not to use the second law against evolution. In a future post,
however, I intend to look at what Ken
Ham’s tame research guru, Danny Faulkner, has written on the second law. I have
not been impressed with Faulkner’s work (See here
and here
for example) and it’s no spoiler to let it be known he makes a pig’s ear
of it as do many YECs and IDists.
Relevant link:
Footnotes
* On CMI: Creation Ministries International are the YEC organisation who had the
misfortune to get caught up in the sordid John MacKay Affair.
** The reasons for this doubt are based on the overwhelming statistical weight of disorder. See this paper for details.
** The reasons for this doubt are based on the overwhelming statistical weight of disorder. See this paper for details.
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