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Asked by lwebb to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 21 Mar 2011 in Categories: General.
Question: Is evolution contrary to the second law of thermodynamics?
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Geoff McBride answered on 18 Mar 2011:
I’m not sure what your trying to say on this one but it sounds fun can you expand on your thinking
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Suzie Sheehy answered on 18 Mar 2011:
The 2nd law says that entropy always increases – things get more chaotic as time goes on and don’t get more ordered. Its a good question that you’ve asked because it would seem that somehow evolution might create more order than there was before by ‘natural selection’ in an orderly way. But in many cases, evolution creates diversity rather than getting rid of species, which in my mind makes me think that the 2nd law is fine. Interesting thought…
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Adam Tuff answered on 18 Mar 2011:
I doubt it – the laws of thermodynamics dictate systems that exchange heat and energy, I can’t see how it can be applied to the interaction of animals and their environment.
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Sheila Kanani answered on 20 Mar 2011:
Wow lwebb where do you think of these? 😀
OK so the first law is that energy cant be created or destroyed. The second law is of increasing entropy (chaos). Does this go against evolution? Well I guess it depends on how you look at it.
The universe is constantly losing energy and never gaining any (or so we think). We thus conclude the universe is not eternal ie it had a finite beginning – the moment when it was at “zero entropy” (its most ordered possible state).
Like a wind-up clock, the universe is winding down, as if at one point it was fully wound up and has been winding down ever since. The question is who wound up the clock?
Creationists believe that the second law of thermodynamics does not allow order to arise from disorder, and therefore the evolution of complex living things from single-celled ancestors could not have occurred. The creationist argument is based on their interpretation of the relationship between probability and entropy.
But we don’t know for sure, because we don’t know what happens after death. Maybe everything works itself out then!
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Robert Simpson answered on 21 Mar 2011:
I see what you mean – animals evolve into lower entropy states over time. Surely though, when you consider the system as a whole, entropy still vastly increases because of all the death and decay that had to go on to get to that point.
Comments
lwebb commented on :
Thanks for the interest! 😀
As I understand it, the second law is “the tendency that over time, differences in temperature, pressure, and chemical potential equilibrate” – therefore things tend to disorder. But isn’t evolution a tendency to order, and create more complex structured things? So my question is, is there a conflict between this law and evolution?
freddie commented on :
Organisms are constantly mutating and some of these are useful and some of them aren’t. So if you think that the first ever organisms (only a few different types) are order we are now certainly more disordered – looking at the huge variety of life we have now. Evolution isn’t creating order out of chaos because the animals which don’t die out are continually changing and getting more disordered. Extinction is just one of the random processes which comes with evolution and could be considered exactly the same type of entropy increasing process as surviving organisms evolving.
Adam commented on :
I see where you are coming from. The real thing you have to be careful with here is the definition of disorder – the second law talks about a quantity called entropy, which is sometimes explained through an example of a system becoming disordered, but entropy is not a measure of disorder.
Another question would be how would you measure the “disorderedness” of a living creature? my answer is that I don’t think this arguement is a valid one. As a scientist, and as someone who also believes we don’t know everything about how we came to be, I still think arguements for and against evolution should be put forward.