MOLECULAR EVOLUTION AND

THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS.

Random genetic mutation, natural selection, and time offer the theoretical mechanism of biological evolution.  They do not, however, provide even a theoretical mechanism of how life arose in the first place.  Darwin foresaw this problem.

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present which could ever have been present.  But if (and oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity present that a protein was formed ready to undergo still more complex changes at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.^[1]

Since the days of Darwin, and even before Darwin, much has been said of this "pre-biotic soup."  The question however is not a complex one.  The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy in a closed system will never decrease.  Entropy is essentially disorder.  "A major consequence of the second law of thermodynamics is that all real process go toward a condition of greater probability.  The probability function generally used in thermodynamics is entropy. . . . Thus orderliness is associated with low entropy; randomness with high entropy. . . . The second law of thermodynamics says that left to itself any isolated system will go toward greater entropy, which also means greater randomness and greater likelihood."^[2] 

This concept was explored on the discrete level by James Clerk Maxwell, father of the electromagnetic field theory.  (Einstein had referred to Maxwell's electromagnetic field theory as "the most profound and most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."^[3])

Maxwell's statistical approach to thermodynamics was simple.  If one has a bucket of very hot water (say superheated steam at 1200 degrees F), and a bucket of very cold water (say 35 degrees F), and a steam turbine, one could extract energy from the heat differential and drive the turbine to produce energy.  But, if the hot bucket of water and cold bucket of water were mixed together, although the total amount of energy has not changed, order has become disorder.  The fast and slow moving molecules once segregated, have now been blended or mixed together.  The total energy has not changed, but the amount of available energy is zero.  That is, one cannot drive a steam turbine with a bucket of lukewarm water.  The mixing together of the two buckets of water increased entropy or disorder.  The total heat energy of the water remains the same, but the amount of available energy is zero.  Moreover, the hope of the fast and slow molecules realigning themselves is virtually nil.  The evolutionist is daunted by the question of probability.  It must begin with a study of classical thermodynamics.  The odds of one fast molecule going to the right side of the bucket are one in two.  The odds of two consecutive molecules so behaving are one in four.  And so the odds climb, one in eight, one in sixteen, etc.  Ten consecutive is less than one in a thousand, twenty--less than one in a million, and thirty--one in a billion.  With just two moles of water in our bucket (12.04 x 10²³), the odds of the fastest mole going to one side of the bucket are astronomically small -- one chance in 2 raised to the 6.02 x 10²³ power.

It is possible to re-segregate the fast and slow moving molecules.  Two things are needed: a mechanism, and energy.  For example, an air conditioner does exactly this.  It segregates fast and slow moving molecules (or the energy they contain) through compressors and heat transfer mechanisms.  But electrical energy is required to drive the air conditioner.  This is generated by burning fuel.  The entropy within the house has decreased as a result of air conditioning, for the slow moving molecules have been segregated inside the house, and the fast outside the house.  The decrease of entropy within the house is more than offset by the increase in entropy resulting from the burned fuel.  So local entropy may decrease, but the total entropy within a closed system must ultimately increase.  This is the second law of thermodynamics.  "The two laws of thermodynamics are, I suppose, accepted by physicists as perhaps the most secure generalizations from experience that we have.  The physicist does not hesitate to apply the two laws to any concrete physical situation in the confidence that nature will not let him down."^[4]

This was illustrated by James Clerk Maxwell on a statistical molecular level.  Imagine our bucket of lukewarm water, where the fast and slow moving molecules had blended together.  The bucket has a little opening at each end with a trap door.  Whenever a fast moving molecule comes along, the right hand door opens, admits the molecule, and then shuts.  Whenever a slow moving molecule would run into the left hand door, that door opens, admits the slow molecule, and then shuts.  When the bucket of water was totally resegregated, it can be re-used to drive a steam turbine.  If such a process were possible, our ships at sea would not have to fuel up.  They could just take in sea water and extract heat energy from it.  However, some mechanism is needed to open and shut the trap door.  This was "Maxwell's demon," the little demon who would operate the trap door.  Maxwell was able to demonstrate that the energy necessary to power such a little demon would be more than the energy that could ultimately be extracted from the bucket of lukewarm water.

The significance of the second law of thermodynamics is hopefully obvious.  Beginning with molecules in a pre-biotic soup, the evolutionist hopes life can emerge.  The argument always begins: "Given enough time. . ."  But time does not produce more order, it produces greater disorder.  As Stephen Hawking observes, time is the friend of entropy (disorder), not order.  "First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time, the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases."^[5]  

Wilder-Smith used the following illustration:  throw a deck of cards out of an airplane.  In 30 seconds it will be a mess.  In 3 minutes, it will be a greater mess.  Wait 30 million years, and I can promise you the deck will not have rearranged itself.  In fact, the cards themselves will no longer exist.  They will have been victimized by the second law of thermodynamics.  They will have been oxidized by the atmosphere, disintegrated by sunlight, burned in fires, eaten by bacteria, and every other disaster imaginable.  Let there be no mistake about this, time is no friend of order.

The evolutionary argument however becomes a little more sophisticate at this point.  One might argue that with all that banging around of molecules and atoms in our pre-biotic soup, there must be an instance where some of them momentarily produce a more complex molecule.  This is certainly true.  If one goes to Las Vegas and shoots craps, part of the randomness is the reality that, on an average of roughly one in every forty seven thousand throws of the dice, someone will throw snake-eyes three times in a row.  But, even if someone had won lots of cash on three or four or five lucky consecutive throws, what would happen if he remained at the craps table?  He could not keep winning forever.  The laws of probability would eventually catch up with him, and he would "crap out."  "An irreverent physicist once rephrased laws of thermodynamics to read:  (1) you can't win, (2) you can't break even, (3) things are going to get worse before they get better and (4) who says they are going to get better."^[6] 

Or, as my college chemistry professor said, "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even get out of the game."  Unable to get out of the game and walk away from the craps table a winner, our craps shooter must continue risking his fortune for throw after throw.  He cannot win forever, and when he does lose, he will lose it all.  Time is not on his side.  It is his greatest adversary.

As with our intrepid craps shooter, some momentary complexity will surely arise from all the banging around in our pre-biotic soup.  The problem is, it has to keep shooting the dice.  Within moments, more molecules will bang into our complex molecule, and it will again decay into greater randomness.  In Maxwell's bucket of lukewarm water, no one denies that, given enough water molecules banging around, three, four, or even ten fast molecules in a row will bang off the right-hand trap-door.  But without the demon their to open and shut the door, the momentary random decrease in entropy cannot be preserved.  It is destined to return to disorder.  And the energy needed to keep the gate keeper alert is too expensive.  The reward cannot outweigh the investment.  Remember the first law of thermodynamics "You can't win."  In a similar way, there is no demon to preserve the slightly more complex molecule that has arisen in our pre-biotic soup.  No trap door will open to shelter it.  It is exposed to a sea of random molecules bombarding it.  Our ephemeral illusion is destined to again decay into disorder.  Although evolutionists uses various analogies to demonstrate their theory, this principle remains constant.  In evolutionary discussions, one often hears about millions of monkey's running across millions of type writer keys over millions of years.  The evolutionist maintains that words will occasionally be spelled.  He is correct.  But, within moments, the paper will either be obliterated by a new set of monkeys running over the key board, or the paper with the intelligible word will fall into the vast sea of paper already produced.  Random creation of order is, by its very nature, destined to return to disorder apart from some means of segregating the real words from the gibberish.

Up to this point, most educated evolutionists and creationists would agree.  It is at this point that the evolutionist invokes a fallacy.  It is true that an input of energy from an external source can be utilized to decrease local entropy.  An air conditioner will, when empowered by electrical energy, arrange your home so that the fast moving (hot) molecules of air are outside, and slow or cold molecules are on the inside.  A literate (and very patient) zoo keeper could read the pile of paper produced by the monkeys, and preserve any actual words which they produced, segregating those paper scraps from the vast sea of paper being produced.  Here, the zoo-keeping editor serves as Maxwell's demon.  Maxwell's demon, it will be remembered, needed energy to perform his task of reordering the molecules.  The zoo keeper, accordingly, will need to powered by the energy of a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.  Engineers and scientists eat lunch, and in burning this fuel, design everything from automobiles to space ships.  These are highly ordered designs.  At the expense of their lunch (which, when burned increased the overall entropy in the universe), entropy was decreased on paper, where a complex machine has been designed.  In attempting to apply this principle to evolution, Isaac Asimov writes:

Another way of stating the Second Law, then, is:  "The Universe is constantly getting more disorderly."  *    You can argue, of course, that the phenomenon of life may be an exception.  Life on earth has steadily grown more complex, more versatile, more elaborate, more orderly, over billions of years of the planet's existence.  From no life at all, living molecules were developed, then living cells. . . . How could this vast increase in order (and therefore that vast decrease of entropy) have taken place?

The answer is that it could not have taken place without a tremendous source of energy constantly bathing the earth, for it is on that energy that life subsists.  Remove the sun, and the human brain would not have developed."^[7]

The fallacy behind this statement is hopefully obvious.  Electricity flowing through a complex machine like an air conditioner can decrease local entropy at the expense of the power plant producing the energy.  But electricity has never cooled off any room by itself.  An air conditioner is needed as a conduit to channel the energy.  Highly educated engineers, endowed by their Creator with a brain of extraordinary complexity, powered by the sandwich they ate for lunch, are capable of creating highly ordered and complex designs.  But burning a sandwich, or burning down a whole delicatessen for that matter, has never produced an air conditioner, a Ferrari or a space shuttle.  An engineer is needed.  Maxwell's demon needed energy to monitor the trap door in the bucket of water.  But the demon himself also had to exist.  A device or being of complex design must exist to act as a conduit through which energy may be channeled before energy is capable of reducing entropy and creating further complexity.  Entropy has never been reduced simply by bathing an object in energy.  Quite the contrary, energy unguided by intelligent design will always increase entropy.  Lehninger attests to this, affirming that a complex device is necessary to channel energy in a way that reduces local entropy.

From the standpoint of thermodynamics the very existence of living things, with their marvelous diversity and complexity of structure and function, is improbable.  The laws of thermodynamics say that energy must run 'downhill,' as in a flame, and that all systems of atoms and molecules must ultimately and inevitably assume the most random configurations with the least energy-content.  Continuous 'uphill' work is necessary to create and maintain the structure of the cell.  It is the capacity to extract energy from its surroundings and to use this energy in an orderly and directed manner that distinguishes the living human organism from the few dollars' (actually $5.66 in today's inflated market) worth of common chemical elements of which it is composed.^[8]

Italics added.  As Lehninger observes, a cell of profoundly complex design. . . greater complexity than a space ship, is able to extract energy from its surroundings to maintain and create further complexity.  However, a pile of chemicals -- the same chemicals that made up the cell -- cannot.  They are unable to do so because more than simply energy is needed to reduce local entropy. . . an existing device of complex design is needed.  A brain cell for example can, working in concert with other brain cells, reduce the entropy on a sheet of paper by designing a complex nuclear generator.  It is capable of performing such complex functions because it is already a complex entity.  A pile of chemicals, the same chemicals that make up a cell, is incapable of utilizing energy in so purposeful a manner.  A system of complex design -- whether an air conditioner or a brain cell -- is needed to act as a conduit to focus energy in a way that decreases local entropy.  The orderly arrangement of lines on a paper designing a nuclear reactor requires more than the burning of a ham sandwich.  It requires an engineer, powered by that ham sandwich, to create that complex design.  The segregation of meaningful words produced by our monkeys running across typewriter keys cannot be achieved simply by unleashing the energy contained in a peanut butter sandwich.  It requires an intelligent, literate zoo keeper, powered by truckloads of peanut butter sandwiches to read through the sea of paper and ink, and so segregate the meaningful from the non-meaningful.  In reality, the monkeys have not really produced order by their spelling words with the type writer.  All they have produced is disorder, of which a random word is a part.  The only act of giving real order is the result of the segregation performed by the zoo-keeper and editor.  Similarly, the segregation of hot and cold water molecules requires more than electrical energy. . . it requires a complex device be that device an air conditioner or Maxwell's demon.

In every case, and by whatever model one chooses to depict the thermodynamic problem of molecular evolution, a complex device is needed.  Energy alone is not enough.  Neither, as Lehninger accurately observed, is a few dollars worth of chemicals sufficient to meaningfully produce order from available energy.  And neither is our "pre-biotic soup." 

But here we return to a circular argument.  Complex devices cannot create themselves.  We have already seen that the second law of thermodynamics prohibits this.  And so we are back to square one.  Energy plus a device of complexity can create further complexity.  But from where did this first complex device arise?  Science cannot answer this because it is not a scientific question.  We have come full circle from science to questions of theology and philosophy.

Conclusion

The second law of thermodynamics, an incontrovertible law of nature, demands that systems move toward the state of greater disorder (entropy).  Those who naively see evolution as a "principle" by which things are getting better utterly fail to understand this principle.  Most educated evolutionary scientists, however, are aware of the implications of the second law of thermodynamics.  Those who would circumvent the second law correctly assert that external energy is necessary to produce higher order.  This local reduction in entropy, or course, is at the expense of the energy source, which will in the process of providing available energy, increase its own entropy or disorder.

It is simply wrong, however, to assert that energy is sufficient to perform this process.  Not one single example has ever been cited by evolutionists where, by energy alone, entropy has been decreased, or random momentary events of order have been preserved.  This process has never taken place apart from a conduit of complex design, be it an air conditioner or the brain of an engineer.  Sunlight falling on the surface of our pre-biotic soup will not increase order.  It will only make the molecules move faster and bang each other harder--making it even harder for nature to preserve whatever momentary complexity might have arisen from the random mixing.  It is therefore wrong to assert that an input of energy alone is sufficient to reduce entropy.  Anyone who has ever started a fire in their home can attest to the fact that the vast amounts of energy produced by the fire did not decrease the entropy of their house.  The house does not straighten itself up, pay the bills and file the paper work in the presence of a fire.  It becomes a charred cinder that burns to the ground.  Random, un-channeled energy does not increase order, it increases disorder.  Only when energy is channeled by a complex device can it serve to reduce local entropy and create order.

Evolution is fatally flawed on the molecular level in that it seeks for the impossible to happen.  It seeks order to create itself out of disorder, complexity out of chaos.  Evolutionists rightly assert that energy is needed to accomplish this.  In their naive optimism however, many of them forget that energy, by itself, is not sufficient.  A complex or highly ordered device able to channel and utilize that energy is required.  Man, empowered by a ham sandwich, can create order by his complex and highly ordered brain.  Complex and brilliantly designed air conditioners are capable of producing order by separating air hot and cold portions.  But we are arguing in a circle.  But before any devices, before any living beings of complexity existed, when there was only our "pre-biotic soup," what was it that brought forth complexity from this chaos?  The evolutionists are still looking.

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The two laws of thermodynamics are, I suppose, accepted by physicists as perhaps the most secure generalizations from experience that we have.  The physicist does not hesitate to apply the two laws to any concrete physical situation in the confidence that nature will not let him down.

P.W. Bridgman, "Reflections on Thermodynamics"

American Scientist, vol 41, Oct. 1953, p. 549

If living matter is not, then, caused by the interplay of atoms, natural forces of radiation, how has it come into being?. . . I think, however, that we must. . . admit that the only acceptable explanation is creation.  I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it.

H.S. Lipson, "A Physicist Looks at Evolution," Physics Bulletin, vol. 31 (May 1980), p. 138.

The goal of providing a more comprehensive science curriculum is not furthered by. . . requiring the teaching of creation science.

Supreme Court Justice William Brennan

Edwards v. Aguillard, p. 586

For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to these at which I have arrived.  A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this is here impossible.

Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species, Great Books of the Western World,  p. 6 col. 2

Chapter 9: Thermodynamcs and the Genesis of Life