12.29.05
Second Law: The problem remains
When you look at the individual steps in the development of life, Darwin’s explanation is difficult to disprove, because some selective advantage can be imagined in almost anything. Like every other scheme designed to violate the second law, it is only when you look at the net result that it becomes obvious it won’t work.
American Spectator, why this magazine, and never Scientific American? has this: Evolution’s Thermodynamic Failure.
Darwinists have so savaged common sense (which admittedly can often be wrong) that many of the key problems with Neo-Darwinists have been shouted out of the debate, or webpaged at Talk.origins. It is nice to see the standard thermodynamic problem reappear.
A National Geographic article from November 2004 proclaims that the evidence is “overwhelming” that Darwin was right about evolution. Since there is no proof that natural selection has ever done anything more spectacular than cause bacteria to develop drug-resistant strains, where is the overwhelming evidence that justifies assigning to it an ability we do not attribute to any other natural force in the universe: the ability to create order out of disorder?
WhirlingBlade said,
December 29, 2005 at 6:32 am
The ability to create order out of disorder - in the short term - is not unique to natural selection. Nine planets, each with internal geological structure, formed out of an amorphous cloud of dust. Closer to home, snowflakes form out of clouds of water vapor. Surface tension in liquids produces minimal surfaces, etc.
Mr. Sewell is essentially stating that the existence of planes and computers (and by extension planets and snowflakes) violates the second law. This is a much bolder position than intelligent design or even YEC. By Mr. Sewell’s logic, every increase in order requires supernatural intervention. Every computer, every soap bubble, every snowflake, every star, every atom. If increases in order cannot happen by natural means, and those things are increases in order, then they were not natural.
Oddly enough, even if you take this very strong proposition as true, it is not necessarily a criticism of evolution. Assuming that divine intervention were necessary, it could have come as a massive injection of “order” early in the universe’s creation. One form of order would be the creation of “laws of evolution” that eventually result in…computers.