Thermodynamics and snowflakes, oh my...

The American Spectator contains an article by Granville Sewell, where he revisits one of the classic objections to evolutionary theory. To wit, the dreaded Second Law of Thermodynamics.

(cue thunder and lightning)

Sewell seeks to pit the theory of natural selection against the second law, and show that natural selection violates entropy. Since it is axiomatic that nothing can violate entropy, natural selection must be flawed. Or so the argument goes. Of course, we at the Whirling Blade require a much higher degree of precision than your garden-variety political newsletter, and I will show where Sewell's argument lacks such precision.

Scalpels out? Alright, lets begin.

Sewell states:

It is a well-known prediction of the second law that, in a closed system, every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease, as everything tends toward more probable (more random) states. Not only will carbon and temperature distributions become more disordered (more uniform), but the performance of all electronic devices will deteriorate, not improve.

We, of course, have no issue with this statement. In fact, it's worth restating the salient point, as it will eventually form the basis for a rebuttal:

every type of order is unstable and must eventually decrease

Do note the difference between the words "eventually" and "immediately". It is hard to imagine two words that, when interchanged, so completely alter the sense of a thought. One may learn, without fear, that he will eventually die. Swapping "immediately" in produces a rather different emotional state.

Onward. Sewell states:

Natural forces, such as corrosion, erosion, fire and explosions, do not create order, they destroy it.

And, unfortunately, we must disagree. There are very obvious examples of natural forces creating order. A dust cloud is less ordered than nine planets orbiting a Sun. Yet, according to current cosmological wisdom, a dust cloud formed our solar system. Atmospheric clouds are more disordered than rain, and if you continue to extract heat energy from THAT system, you get snowflakes. I would enjoy a discussion of how free water vapor is more highly ordered than fractal lattices of water molecules which are invariably hexagonal.

Natural forces can and do create order...temporarily. It is only in the great "eventual" that entropy wins out. To be fair to Sewell, mathematicians typically treat the time dimension as if the units were irrelevant. In the world of physical sciences, what is impossible in a second may be quite plausible in a century. Or vice versa. Sewell continues down this vein, building on his (incorrect) assumption:

The discovery that life on Earth developed through evolutionary "steps," coupled with the observation that mutations and natural selection -- like other natural forces -- can cause (minor) change, is widely accepted in the scientific world as proof that natural selection -- alone among all natural forces -- can create order out of disorder, and even design human brains with human consciousness.

Yet, as we have seen, natural selection is not the only natural force that can create order out of disorder. Gravity will do it. Electromagnetism will do it. Any of the four forces will, which is apparent in the fact that an atomic nucleus is more ordered than a cloud of quarks.

In a recent Mathematical Intelligencer article ("A Mathematician's View of Evolution," 22, number 4, 5-7, 2000), after outlining the specific reasons why it is not reasonable to attribute the major steps in the development of life to natural selection, I asserted that 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

I tend to believe that when dealing with an axiomatic proposition, disproving the axiom is sufficient to disprove the proposition. I believe we have sufficient evidence that Sewell's axiom ("natural forces cannot create order") is false. The truth of his argument (or lack therof) must follow.

However, I cannot resist uncovering the contradiction in the preceding passage. According to Sewell, creating computers via the four forces appears to be a spectacular violation of the second law. In fact, by his arguments, the existence of computers is impossible, unless we posit that a computer is more disordered than a pre-solar dust cloud.

In addition, one can infer from his arguments that additional forces beyond the basic four, might make computers more plausible. In order for that to be true in his framework, these additional forces would still have to violate the second law, or they must be supernatural forces. Oy.

This leads to an interesting version of Arthur C. Clarke's famous law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology must have been created by magic". Oh, poor Arthur.

Since we have shown that natural forces can in fact increase local order, we do not need to create new ones by way of explanation.

On a final note, there is a fascinating article in Taipei Times, which proposes not only that intelligent life does not violate the second law, but that it is the result of the second law. Interesting stuff, and thanks to island for the link!