Design Arguments from the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
A common design argument relates to the concept that abiogenesis and evolution violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. (Often unfortunately lost in the discussion is the distiction between abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection, however.)
An excellent example of the arguments for and against this concept are found here:
Argument for: Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure, By Granville Sewell (PhD, Mathematics)
Argument against: Sewell's Thermodynamic Failure, By Mark Perakh (PhD, Physics)
If you have an 30-60 mins, both articles are worth your time. My take:
Sewell’s claim can be reduced for the general reader. Consider the following, where he quotes himself in the article:
His issue is with the fact that the “order” added to the earth — “radiation and meteorite fragments” — does not appear to him to be the kind of order that could generate “humans, cars, computers, and encyclopedias.” He simply does not believe in a process that can change the kind of order added into the kind of order produced. The root of his claim is that any process that could make this change violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Therefore, the point of his article can be reduced to: There is no process that can decrease the entropy of an undeveloped earth in such a way that would result in the biological order around us without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
I think it helps to summarize his hypothesis in this way. Previous criticisms of this hypothesis apply; for the general reader, the criticisms should be similarly summarized.
(Sewell has more articles posted on his son's website.)
An excellent example of the arguments for and against this concept are found here:
Argument for: Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure, By Granville Sewell (PhD, Mathematics)
Argument against: Sewell's Thermodynamic Failure, By Mark Perakh (PhD, Physics)
If you have an 30-60 mins, both articles are worth your time. My take:
Sewell’s claim can be reduced for the general reader. Consider the following, where he quotes himself in the article:
...order can increase in an open system, not because the laws of probability are suspended when the door is open, but simply because order may walk in through the door…. If we found evidence that DNA, auto parts, computer chips, and books entered through the Earth’s atmosphere at some time in the past, then perhaps the appearance of humans, cars, computers, and encyclopedias on a previously barren planet could be explained without postulating a violation of the second law here (it would have been violated somewhere else!). But if all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments, it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here.
His issue is with the fact that the “order” added to the earth — “radiation and meteorite fragments” — does not appear to him to be the kind of order that could generate “humans, cars, computers, and encyclopedias.” He simply does not believe in a process that can change the kind of order added into the kind of order produced. The root of his claim is that any process that could make this change violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Therefore, the point of his article can be reduced to: There is no process that can decrease the entropy of an undeveloped earth in such a way that would result in the biological order around us without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
I think it helps to summarize his hypothesis in this way. Previous criticisms of this hypothesis apply; for the general reader, the criticisms should be similarly summarized.
(Sewell has more articles posted on his son's website.)
Labels:
Creationism,
Evolution,
God
5 comments:
I found the article by Sewell fascinating. I think that perhaps an important question that he does not address is the interaction of the various "kinds" of order (thermal order, carbon order, etc.). He seems to be asking a serious question about the second law and evolution, and I was glad to see that you had a link to a response. Unfortunately, I was not able to read through the response. I got to the following section (sorry this isn't indented nicely, I don't know how to make it do that):
"Regarding erosion, it certainly may cause destruction of information-rich structures. For example, erosion may result in a gradual deterioration of the Mount Rushmore carvings. However, in other cases erosion can create sculpture-like images. Has Professor Sewell never heard about erosion spontaneously creating amazing structures looking like animals, people, bridges, and the like? I’d recommend Professor Sewell travel to Russia and visit there the Dombai region in the North Caucasus. He may see there an amazing phenomenon – a mountain named Sulakhat — which looks like a sculpture by an accomplished artist in the shape of a young woman on her back, but is, in fact, an accidental grouping of rocks."
At this point I stopped, astounded. I have never heard of erosion spontaneously creating structures which look like people as much as Mt Rushmore looks like a set of faces. ("Oh," you object, "but he didn't mean that they look as accurate as Mt R!" On the contrary. He has intentionally brought up Mt R. to make me think of an obviously designed sculpture... a not so subtle linguistic trick). I immediately proceeded to google Sulakhat, and the few pictures of mountains that I was able to find look to me nothing like a "sculpture by an accomplished artist".
I couldn't bring myself to read any more. Perhaps there is good content further on, but Perakh lost me with his unfounded grandiose claims. There is a fuller (and well reasoned) response to Perakh at http://www.xanga.com/Arthenor/422029850/response-to-perakhs-critique-of-sewell.html
Friend,
I spent quite a while trying to make out what Dr. Perakh was talking about with the Sulakhat reference, too. It’s a bit of a weak analogy. Without a direct interaction between the two of them, reading Sewell and Perakh is a bit like reading essays by Behe and Dawkins. One sees design everywhere, the other the proof that natural processes can maintain the illusion of design. A fault of Perakh is a lack of concision.
Sewell’s analogies to “auto parts, computer chips, and books” are equally weak. Perakh takes something clearly naturally formed and claims an applicability to design; Sewell takes things clearly designed and claims an applicability to biology. The bridge from physics (2nd law) to biology cannot be crossed by simple analogy. The process – evolution – Sewell claims cannot have happened without violating the 2nd law must be itself examined to determine if it does.
To clarify what I was saying in the post: It seems from Sewell’s writing that he does not claim that the order on earth violates the second law of thermodynamics. It’s not the order itself but whatever process would be required to bring about that order. It is that process that claims to answer the question he has about one "kind" of order becoming another. (Please forgive the loose use of terminology.)
Prior to concluding a violation, we enter the realm of biology to examine that process, and we are back to the classic ID/evolution discussion.
I will read the Arthenor article soon, after I finish my work.
Zeteo,
Your point concerning Sewell's vs Peraks differing points of view regarding design is well taken. However, I think that there is more than just analogy in what Sewell is talking about when he refers to things that were obviously designed by humans. These are real things that exist on the earth, and, if evolution sans intelligence is true, then they have all arisen by natural processes in what is at first glance a violation of the 2nd law.
*thought train jumps tracks here*
I'd like to follow up for a moment on my first comment where I mentioned the interaction of different "kinds" of order. If there were only thermal order, and the thermal distribution[footnote 1] follows a diffusion equation as is commonly accepted, then there would be no escaping the implications of the 2nd law for the development of life. However, our universe doesn't work like that. There are different kinds of particles, different chemicals, and all sorts of intricate interactions that can occur between them. So, the question that is important in the evolution debate is not one of equilibrium thermodynamics (dominated by the diffusion equation, entropy increases, and the second law) but rather one of non-equilibrium dynamics (where the interactions of the various types of distributions is taken into account mathematically). Can the large thermal gradient generated by the sun drive the entropy (of some non-thermal parameter, like the distribution of carbon atoms) down? Will it be driven down sufficiently for "rare" reactions to occur spontaneously? Specifically, can it drive the biochemical reactions necessary to produce life?
I realize that I've asked a slew of questions, many of which are very difficult. However, I think these would need to be addressed in any complete discussion of thermodynamics and order.
[1] As a mathematical physicist, I found it irksome that Perakh picked on Sewell for using the term "temperature distribution". He claims that a gradient can be defined in a way that does not require an infinitesimal volume, while a distribution does. Fine then, simply integrate the temperature gradient. You then get the temperature as a function of position (since the integral is path independent). This temperature "function" is what most physicists that I know would think of when you say "temperature distribution". They aren't using "distribution" in the mathematical sense of a wild, non-L_2 function like Dirac's delta function, but rather in the sense of describing how the temperature is "distributed" throughout a material. Besides, Sewell never needs the actual "distribution" in each infinitesimal volume, but only gradients and integrals of it. So the whole discussion is moot anyway.
It's worth noting that Jacob Bronowski himself had something to say about Evolution and the second law, as this text is an extract. Googling may turn up more:
Thermodynamics and the Arrow of Time
by Jacob Bronowski
(from "Evolution Extended", Connie Barlow, ed., MIT Press, 1994)
It is often said that the progression from simple to complex runs counter to the normal statistics of chance that are formalized in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, we could avoid this criticism simply by insisting that the Second Law does not apply to living systems in the environment in which we find them. For the Second Law applies only when there is no overall flow of energy into or out of a system, whereas all living systems are sustained by a net inflow of energy.
But though this reply has a formal finality, in my view it evades the underlying question that is being asked. True, life could not have evolved in the absence of a steady stream of energy from the sun -- a kind of energy wind on the earth. But if there were no more to the mechanism of molecular evolution than this, we should still be at a loss to understand how more and more complex molecules cam to establish themselves. All the energy wind can do, in itself, is to increase the range and frequency of variation around the average state: that is, to stimulate the formation of more complex molecular arrangements. But most of these variant arrangements fall back to the norm almost at once, by the usual thermodynamic processes of degradation; so that it remains to be explained why they do not all do so, and how instead some complex arrangements establish themselves, and become the base for further complexity in their turn.
It is therefore relevant to discuss the Second Law, which is usually interpreted to mean that all constituent parts of a system must fall progressively to their simplest states. But this interpretation quite misunderstands the character of statistical laws in general in nonequilibrium states. The Second Law describes the final equilibrium state of a system; if we are to apply it, as here, to stable states which are far from equilibrium, we must interpret it and formulate it differently. In these conditions, the Second Law of Thermodynamics becomes a physical law only if there is added to it the condition that there are no preferred states of configurations.
In itself, the Second Law merely enumerates all the configurations which a system could take up, and it remarks that the largest number in this count are average or featureless. Therefore, if there are no preferred configurations (that is, no hidden stabilities in the system on the way to equilibrium), we must expect that any special feature we find is exceptional and temporary, and will revert to the average in the long run. This is a true theorem in combinatorial arithmetic, and (like other statistical laws) a fair guess at the behavior of long runs. But it tells us little about the natural world which, in the years since the Second Law seemed exciting, has turned out to be full of preferred configurations and hidden stabilities, even at the most basic and inanimate level of atomic structure.
The Second Law describes the statistics of a system around equilibrium whose configurations are all equal, and it makes the obvious remark that chance can only make such a system fluctuate around its average. There are no stable states in such a system, and there is therefore no stratum that can establish itself; the system stays around its average only by a principle of indifference, because numerically the most configurations are bunched around the average.
But if there are hidden relations in the system on the way to equilibrium which cause some configurations to be stable, the statistics are changed. The preferred configurations may be unimaginably rare; nevertheless, they present another level around which the system can bunch, and there is now a countercurrent or tug-of-war within the system between this level and the average. Since the average has no inherent stability, the preferred stable configuration will capture members of the system often enough to change the distribution; and, in the end, the system will be established at this level as a new average. In this way, local systems of a fair size can climb up from one level of stability to the next, even though the configuration at the higher level is rare. When the higher level becomes the new average, the climb is repeated to the next higher level of stability; and so on up the level of strata.
When there are hidden levels of stability, one above another, as there are in our universe, it follows that the direction of time is given by the evolutionary process that climbs them one by one. Indeed, if this were not so, it would have been impossible to conceive how the features that we remark could have arisen. We should have to posit a miraculous beginning to time at which the features (and we among them) were created ready-made, and left to fall apart ever since into a tohubohu of individual particles.
Time in the large, open time, takes its direction from the evolutionary processes which mark and scale it. So it is pointless to ask why evolution has a fixed direction in time, and to draw conclusions from the speculation. It is evolution, physical and biological, that gives time its direction; and no mystical explanation is required when there is nothing to explain. The progression from simple to complex, the building up of stratified stability, is the necessary character of evolution from which time takes its direction. And it is not a forward direction in the sense of a thrust towards the future, a headed arrow. What evolution does is to give the arrow of time a barb which stops it from running backwards; and once it has this barb, the chance play of errors will take it forward of itself.
THE FUNDAMENTAL OXYMORON OF THERMODYNAMICS
The absurdity that entropy always increases would not hold "the supreme position among the laws of Nature" (A. Eddington, 1935) if Clausius had not deduced it gloriously from the fundamental oxymoron of thermodynamics:
THE FUNDAMENTAL OXYMORON OF THERMODYNAMICS: Any irreversible process is reversible; that is, any irreversible process can be closed by a reversible process to become a cycle.
Any textbook author who relishes deducing the supreme absurdity should initially introduce the fundamental oxymoron:
Peter Atkins, Physical Chemistry, 5th ed., p. 127: "Let the original change in the entropy of the system when the process of interest occurs be dS (this is the change we want to measure). The process need not be reversible, but we suppose that we can find a path that joins the same initial and final states and which is reversible."
For 140 years (Clausius deduced the supreme absurdity in 1865) the fundamental oxymoron of thermodynamics has been questioned once:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ p.39: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that Clausius bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht umkehrbar [irreversible] process on the assumption that such a process can be closed by an umkehrbar [reversible] process to become a cycle. This is essential for the definition of the entropy difference between the initial and final states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a system more complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from equilibrium, or for processes other than the simple exchange of heat and work."
Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com
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