Contrasting Darwinism and Thermodynamics
Let’s make a preliminary comparison. Both Darwin’s The Origin of Species and the second law of thermodynamics come to us from the 19th century. However the two ideas have developed very differently.
In the 19th century and well into the 20th century many people thought the Earth had existed forever more or less in its present state. That allowed an infinite amount of time for random action to try all possible variations, with natural selection always discarding unsuitable life forms. Darwinism’s originators didn’t know that their favorite mechanism had to succeed or fail in the limited period of some 3 800 million years since the crust of the Earth cooled.
Darwin had some 19th-century ideas that scientists have since invalidated, like the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Ignorance of the mechanisms of heredity flawed his speculations. Neo-Darwinists patched up the flaws they could and tried to enter an experimental phase. Their efforts culminated in the production of amino acids under very contrived conditions a hundred years after the publication of The Origin of Species. Yet even these achievements were unavailing. The results did not lend direct support to the evolutionary conjecture. In our days, Darwinist speculators try to explain why evolution is not subject to experimental verification.
No one has ever observed the origin of a species. All we see is the destruction of about a dozen species per year. Conservationists tell us that many other species are doomed to extinction, often because of human encroachment on the habitats of wild animals. Environmental biologists want to save the endangered species, but they cannot justify their concern from evolutionism. If the struggle to survive is what leads to progress, shouldn’t they be happy if the whales and lions and tigers and condors are dying out? Darwinists tell us that humankind is the greatest product of evolution to date. In their view, of course humankind is going to exterminate weaker species by taking away their ecological niche. Isn’t trying to save the endangered species a way of working against Darwinism in its supposedly onward and upward course?
Let’s lower the number of annual extinctions to ten for the sake of argument. The appearance of one or two new species every year is not enough to maintain the current number of species. No new species counts if it arose through deliberate human intervention or has achieved reproductive isolation because of behavioral changes only. The Darwinist process is mindless and purposeless. Since the publication of The Origin of Species more than 140 years have passed. Darwinists should supply a list of at least 1 400 new species before claiming that Darwinism is ongoing. If there is, just at present, a temporary lull in the appearance of new species, they should explain why.
Charles Doolittle Walcott (American paleontologist, 1850–1927, fourth director of the Smithsonian Institution) used to spend summers digging fossils out of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Between 1909 and 1919 he shipped more than 60 000 fossils back to Washington, D. C. When he found evidence that all the phyla are represented in the Pre-Cambrian era (more than 620 million years ago), he experienced so much cognitive dissonance with Darwinism that he never published his findings. He simply left the fossils in the drawers of the Smithsonian, to be rediscovered in 1966, long after his death. Paleontologists from the University of Cambridge found at least 15 animals that didn’t fit into any known phylum. All the phyla separated from each other in a few tens of millions of years. This finding ought to have shattered the Darwinist idea that different types of organisms came at different times, gradually, through a process of mutation and selection. But these days Darwinists just say that “Mother Nature suddenly got inventive,”—making nature seem intelligent and purposeful—and call Walcott’s find the “Pre-Cambrian Explosion.” Is this conscious imitation of the popular notion of the “Big Bang”?
People can only study the fossils that they and others find or have found, and then the results are at most descriptive. Is the study of fossils a dead end? Fossil human bones appeared in excavations in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. The first skeletal remains of Cro-Magnon man came out of a cave by that name in France in 1868. The discoverers of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man are now gone and can’t defend their claims. Darwinists now count these discoveries as varieties of present-day man. This leaves room for living Darwinists to make new, more important finds. News magazines publish a new chart for every find. The chart usually puts the find of the featured discoverer in the most prominent place. The new fossil is almost always the oldest or the most like modern people or the most prominent in some other way. All the other finds of other discoverers are usually charted as branches that lead to evolutionary dead ends. The charts contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. There is no consensus among the experts.
Sensationalism seduces, and non-specialists are defenseless. Meave Leakey, wife of Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (Kenyan paleoanthropologist, 1944– ) and head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya, made a very sensible comment in a recent article. The article did not feature her finds, but the reporters asked for her perspective on the claims of others. She said, “There are all sorts of hypotheses, and they are all fairy tales because you can’t prove anything.”[i]
[i] Quoted in Lemonick, Michael D. and Andrea Dorfman, “One Giant Step for Mankind,” Time, 158 (Number 4, 23 July 2001), pp. 46–53.
How far can survival of the fittest carry adaptive changes of form? DNA encodes a bag of tricks that necessity can activate to produce new varieties within a species. On the other hand, we never see a series of mutations that accumulate to make the vast changes in morphology required for a new phylum or body plan. Most mutations involve suppression of information, not new information. Body parts occasionally fail to develop, or they develop in the wrong places. New body parts or complex organs never appear.
Darwinists based their evolutionary progression of species on morphological classification systems, but they did it in ignorance of the full genomes of the organisms. Now that we can sequence the DNA in a genome, we are finding that genetic similarity is showing up big errors in the morphological scheme of evolutionary progression. If the first Darwinist conjecture was wrong, is that any reason for believing them now?
We might think that these days, when peer-reviewed journals cover their publication costs by charging each author’s institution an amount proportional to the number of pages, people simply cannot fill up half an article with idle speculations that cannot be proved. A flagrant example of fruitless speculation is the dispute about whether one-celled organisms with a cell nucleus (eukaryotes) came before or are more evolved than one-celled organisms without a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). The “proof” some people offer for the faster evolution of prokaryotes is that they don’t need a nucleus and are therefore more advanced though less complex than eukaryotes. This senseless controversy still rages in hundreds of thousands of Internet articles (just look up “eukaryotes prokaryotes evolution”) and it can never be resolved with evidence because one-celled organisms don’t leave fossils. Even if evolutionists ever do come to a consensus it will be meaningless. But Darwinists need publications like everyone else to keep their academic positions. Their institutions pay the publication charges to boost their institutional prestige. The system actually rewards authors for extending their remarks.
During the 1950’s and 1960’s nearly every article in biology had to pay lip service to Darwinism. There were even a few new articles about variations in the Darwinist story. Most of these now are limited to semi-popular magazines or monographs with no peer review at all. Darwinism is stagnant, presently degenerated into a morass of competing, mutually contradictory ideas.
On the other hand, the second law of thermodynamics has been confirmed again and again. Extensions cover situations where there is no apparent temperature involved. At present the laws of thermodynamics apply to all physical phenomena. There are no known exceptions. Let’s take note of three major extensions of the second law of thermodynamics.
First, Ludwig Boltzmann (Austrian physicist, 1844–1906) found a formulation of the second law that later could be extended to 20th century quantum mechanics. Boltzmann could not have anticipated the special needs of a theory that arose years after his death. He was working with classical, 19th-century knowledge of heat and radiation. At the beginning of the 20th century Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (German physicist, 1858–1947) discovered a new, more accurate, quantum-mechanical description of heat and radiation. Yet Boltzmann’s formulation still applied, because both the second law of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are accurate descriptions of nature.
Second, Claude Elwood Shannon (American applied mathematician and electrical engineer, 1916–2001) modified Boltzmann’s formula and used it to measure information.[ii] Information theory developed from this insight. The second law of thermodynamics is about a measure of disorder called entropy. We need information to restore order, so information is the negative of entropy. We can state that more clearly. Since we normally consider order and information to be positive, desirable quantities, it is better to think of entropy as negative information or the disordering of information.
[ii] Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1963), p. 53.
We need a little background to understand the third extension. Black holes are foci of incalculably strong gravity. They are spheres of a radius called the Schwarzschild radius, after Karl Schwarzschild (German astronomer, 1873–1916). Light and matter can fall in through the surface of the sphere toward the black hole, but nothing can come out.
To escape from a gravitating body an object must start upward with a certain minimum speed. The minimum speed is called the escape velocity. An object rising with less than escape velocity eventually comes to a stop and then falls back. No one is strong enough to throw a baseball into orbit around the Earth, much less to make it escape from the solar system. It usually takes multistage rockets to reach escape velocity from the Earth.
To come out of a black hole, matter or light would have to rise with an extremely high speed. However, matter can never be accelerated to the speed of light. Light projected upward from a black hole stops at the Schwarzschild radius and then falls back. Inside the Schwarzschild radius even the speed of light is less than the escape velocity. If light cannot escape, nothing else can, either.
Recent observations confirm that black holes exist. There are three stars close to the center of our own galaxy orbiting around an invisible central body. That is evidence for a black hole at the center. The mass of the black hole is at least 2 million times the mass of our Sun.[iii]
[iii] Schwarzschild, Bertram, “Infrared Adaptive Optics Reveals Stars Orbiting within Light-Hours of the Milky Way’s Center,” Physics Today, 56 (Number 2, February 2003), pp. 19–21.
Now that we know something about black holes, we can give the third extension of thermodynamics. Stephen William Hawking (British theoretical physicist, 1942–2018 ) applied the second law of thermodynamics to black holes. Hawking found that the surface area of the Schwarzschild sphere around a black hole is proportional to the black hole’s entropy. He related the black hole’s entropy to the minimal information preserved when material and energy fall into the black hole.
In the light of the three examples above one can see that the second law of thermodynamics is on the cutting edge of ongoing research. Darwinism, however, never gets past arguments about what seems likely to this or that proponent. It has never made quantitative predictions, so it is just a conjecture. It is hardly what physicists and chemists call a theory. It has never become an experimental science. People who call evolution a fact are displaying their ignorance or prejudice.
In the 19th century and well into the 20th century many people thought the Earth had existed forever more or less in its present state. That allowed an infinite amount of time for random action to try all possible variations, with natural selection always discarding unsuitable life forms. Darwinism’s originators didn’t know that their favorite mechanism had to succeed or fail in the limited period of some 3 800 million years since the crust of the Earth cooled.
Darwin had some 19th-century ideas that scientists have since invalidated, like the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Ignorance of the mechanisms of heredity flawed his speculations. Neo-Darwinists patched up the flaws they could and tried to enter an experimental phase. Their efforts culminated in the production of amino acids under very contrived conditions a hundred years after the publication of The Origin of Species. Yet even these achievements were unavailing. The results did not lend direct support to the evolutionary conjecture. In our days, Darwinist speculators try to explain why evolution is not subject to experimental verification.
No one has ever observed the origin of a species. All we see is the destruction of about a dozen species per year. Conservationists tell us that many other species are doomed to extinction, often because of human encroachment on the habitats of wild animals. Environmental biologists want to save the endangered species, but they cannot justify their concern from evolutionism. If the struggle to survive is what leads to progress, shouldn’t they be happy if the whales and lions and tigers and condors are dying out? Darwinists tell us that humankind is the greatest product of evolution to date. In their view, of course humankind is going to exterminate weaker species by taking away their ecological niche. Isn’t trying to save the endangered species a way of working against Darwinism in its supposedly onward and upward course?
Let’s lower the number of annual extinctions to ten for the sake of argument. The appearance of one or two new species every year is not enough to maintain the current number of species. No new species counts if it arose through deliberate human intervention or has achieved reproductive isolation because of behavioral changes only. The Darwinist process is mindless and purposeless. Since the publication of The Origin of Species more than 140 years have passed. Darwinists should supply a list of at least 1 400 new species before claiming that Darwinism is ongoing. If there is, just at present, a temporary lull in the appearance of new species, they should explain why.
Charles Doolittle Walcott (American paleontologist, 1850–1927, fourth director of the Smithsonian Institution) used to spend summers digging fossils out of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. Between 1909 and 1919 he shipped more than 60 000 fossils back to Washington, D. C. When he found evidence that all the phyla are represented in the Pre-Cambrian era (more than 620 million years ago), he experienced so much cognitive dissonance with Darwinism that he never published his findings. He simply left the fossils in the drawers of the Smithsonian, to be rediscovered in 1966, long after his death. Paleontologists from the University of Cambridge found at least 15 animals that didn’t fit into any known phylum. All the phyla separated from each other in a few tens of millions of years. This finding ought to have shattered the Darwinist idea that different types of organisms came at different times, gradually, through a process of mutation and selection. But these days Darwinists just say that “Mother Nature suddenly got inventive,”—making nature seem intelligent and purposeful—and call Walcott’s find the “Pre-Cambrian Explosion.” Is this conscious imitation of the popular notion of the “Big Bang”?
People can only study the fossils that they and others find or have found, and then the results are at most descriptive. Is the study of fossils a dead end? Fossil human bones appeared in excavations in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. The first skeletal remains of Cro-Magnon man came out of a cave by that name in France in 1868. The discoverers of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man are now gone and can’t defend their claims. Darwinists now count these discoveries as varieties of present-day man. This leaves room for living Darwinists to make new, more important finds. News magazines publish a new chart for every find. The chart usually puts the find of the featured discoverer in the most prominent place. The new fossil is almost always the oldest or the most like modern people or the most prominent in some other way. All the other finds of other discoverers are usually charted as branches that lead to evolutionary dead ends. The charts contradict each other, so they can’t all be right. There is no consensus among the experts.
Sensationalism seduces, and non-specialists are defenseless. Meave Leakey, wife of Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (Kenyan paleoanthropologist, 1944– ) and head of paleontology at the National Museums of Kenya, made a very sensible comment in a recent article. The article did not feature her finds, but the reporters asked for her perspective on the claims of others. She said, “There are all sorts of hypotheses, and they are all fairy tales because you can’t prove anything.”[i]
[i] Quoted in Lemonick, Michael D. and Andrea Dorfman, “One Giant Step for Mankind,” Time, 158 (Number 4, 23 July 2001), pp. 46–53.
How far can survival of the fittest carry adaptive changes of form? DNA encodes a bag of tricks that necessity can activate to produce new varieties within a species. On the other hand, we never see a series of mutations that accumulate to make the vast changes in morphology required for a new phylum or body plan. Most mutations involve suppression of information, not new information. Body parts occasionally fail to develop, or they develop in the wrong places. New body parts or complex organs never appear.
Darwinists based their evolutionary progression of species on morphological classification systems, but they did it in ignorance of the full genomes of the organisms. Now that we can sequence the DNA in a genome, we are finding that genetic similarity is showing up big errors in the morphological scheme of evolutionary progression. If the first Darwinist conjecture was wrong, is that any reason for believing them now?
We might think that these days, when peer-reviewed journals cover their publication costs by charging each author’s institution an amount proportional to the number of pages, people simply cannot fill up half an article with idle speculations that cannot be proved. A flagrant example of fruitless speculation is the dispute about whether one-celled organisms with a cell nucleus (eukaryotes) came before or are more evolved than one-celled organisms without a cell nucleus (prokaryotes). The “proof” some people offer for the faster evolution of prokaryotes is that they don’t need a nucleus and are therefore more advanced though less complex than eukaryotes. This senseless controversy still rages in hundreds of thousands of Internet articles (just look up “eukaryotes prokaryotes evolution”) and it can never be resolved with evidence because one-celled organisms don’t leave fossils. Even if evolutionists ever do come to a consensus it will be meaningless. But Darwinists need publications like everyone else to keep their academic positions. Their institutions pay the publication charges to boost their institutional prestige. The system actually rewards authors for extending their remarks.
During the 1950’s and 1960’s nearly every article in biology had to pay lip service to Darwinism. There were even a few new articles about variations in the Darwinist story. Most of these now are limited to semi-popular magazines or monographs with no peer review at all. Darwinism is stagnant, presently degenerated into a morass of competing, mutually contradictory ideas.
On the other hand, the second law of thermodynamics has been confirmed again and again. Extensions cover situations where there is no apparent temperature involved. At present the laws of thermodynamics apply to all physical phenomena. There are no known exceptions. Let’s take note of three major extensions of the second law of thermodynamics.
First, Ludwig Boltzmann (Austrian physicist, 1844–1906) found a formulation of the second law that later could be extended to 20th century quantum mechanics. Boltzmann could not have anticipated the special needs of a theory that arose years after his death. He was working with classical, 19th-century knowledge of heat and radiation. At the beginning of the 20th century Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (German physicist, 1858–1947) discovered a new, more accurate, quantum-mechanical description of heat and radiation. Yet Boltzmann’s formulation still applied, because both the second law of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics are accurate descriptions of nature.
Second, Claude Elwood Shannon (American applied mathematician and electrical engineer, 1916–2001) modified Boltzmann’s formula and used it to measure information.[ii] Information theory developed from this insight. The second law of thermodynamics is about a measure of disorder called entropy. We need information to restore order, so information is the negative of entropy. We can state that more clearly. Since we normally consider order and information to be positive, desirable quantities, it is better to think of entropy as negative information or the disordering of information.
[ii] Shannon, Claude E. and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1963), p. 53.
We need a little background to understand the third extension. Black holes are foci of incalculably strong gravity. They are spheres of a radius called the Schwarzschild radius, after Karl Schwarzschild (German astronomer, 1873–1916). Light and matter can fall in through the surface of the sphere toward the black hole, but nothing can come out.
To escape from a gravitating body an object must start upward with a certain minimum speed. The minimum speed is called the escape velocity. An object rising with less than escape velocity eventually comes to a stop and then falls back. No one is strong enough to throw a baseball into orbit around the Earth, much less to make it escape from the solar system. It usually takes multistage rockets to reach escape velocity from the Earth.
To come out of a black hole, matter or light would have to rise with an extremely high speed. However, matter can never be accelerated to the speed of light. Light projected upward from a black hole stops at the Schwarzschild radius and then falls back. Inside the Schwarzschild radius even the speed of light is less than the escape velocity. If light cannot escape, nothing else can, either.
Recent observations confirm that black holes exist. There are three stars close to the center of our own galaxy orbiting around an invisible central body. That is evidence for a black hole at the center. The mass of the black hole is at least 2 million times the mass of our Sun.[iii]
[iii] Schwarzschild, Bertram, “Infrared Adaptive Optics Reveals Stars Orbiting within Light-Hours of the Milky Way’s Center,” Physics Today, 56 (Number 2, February 2003), pp. 19–21.
Now that we know something about black holes, we can give the third extension of thermodynamics. Stephen William Hawking (British theoretical physicist, 1942–2018 ) applied the second law of thermodynamics to black holes. Hawking found that the surface area of the Schwarzschild sphere around a black hole is proportional to the black hole’s entropy. He related the black hole’s entropy to the minimal information preserved when material and energy fall into the black hole.
In the light of the three examples above one can see that the second law of thermodynamics is on the cutting edge of ongoing research. Darwinism, however, never gets past arguments about what seems likely to this or that proponent. It has never made quantitative predictions, so it is just a conjecture. It is hardly what physicists and chemists call a theory. It has never become an experimental science. People who call evolution a fact are displaying their ignorance or prejudice.