Entropy, Thermodynamics and Prigogine
There has always been great interest in determining how biological systems maintain themselves in a state of low entropy. Prigogine analyzed chemical processes that take in material, degrade it, and expel it to the outside environment, thus reducing their own internal entropy at the expense of the outside world.[i] This explains how living organisms can reduce their own entropy, but not how the system got started in the first place.
Thermodynamics explains how organisms live, just as it explains how heat engines operate. Darwinism, however, is not about living but progressing. Darwinists are the only people who seriously claim to have found a natural, unattended process that spontaneously reduces entropy. We should examine their claim carefully.
We know that intelligent selection of characteristics can lead to new forms of organization. The most varied and highly organized nonhuman species in the world is probably dogs. People have bred dogs for different tasks for thousands of years. There are also many varieties of roses because of intelligent selection. Those examples do not show the spontaneous reduction of entropy because creative designers, in these examples dog breeders and rose fanciers, acted according to their insights. They had to attend to their stock carefully and diligently to get the desired results. In the same way, engineers improve heat engines by selecting those design variations that give greater efficiency.
Darwinists claim that the natural selection of the fittest to survive can also reduce entropy spontaneously. Their claim is equivalent to the idea that natural selection can create information out of the noise of random mutations.
Many Darwinists use romantic fantasy language in their books and articles about Darwinism. Some of them would have us believe that the genes inside the chromosomes in the nuclei of our cells are acting to preserve themselves and their posterity. A number of Darwinists personify nature as a skilled craftsperson who, even though lacking any foresight or purposes, builds functional structures far more complex than a jet engine. We have already seen that enzymes replicate DNA with digital precision. Some Darwinists say that the replication of DNA has to be nearly perfect but not quite for progress to occur. Obviously, if the reproduction were always digitally perfect and always produced the same sequence of identical atoms in the replicated genes, there could be no random changes and no mutations. On the other hand, if the reproduction were too erratic most of the organisms would be stillborn. According to those Darwinists we’re lucky that the error rate is just right. Some of them even claim that the error rate was higher in the past so Darwinian evolution could get started, but now the error rate is so low that ongoing evolution is unobservable, just at the time when scientists finally have techniques that make them capable of looking. Darwinists claim that the filter of natural selection produces information from replication errors.
We have already examined that claim. It is like saying that a machine with a simple filter can produce a decent lunch from garbage. Do Aeolian harps make symphonies like Tchaikovsky’s or Beethoven’s from the wind?
Darwinists say that natural selection produced all the varieties of life on Earth including the most advanced variety to date, humankind. Then why can’t intelligent human beings simulate and exploit the natural selection process to their own advantage? The only possible reason why not is that Darwinism is incomplete. Natural selection at most produces only small improvements and variations.
Here are the rules the American Physical Society lays down for acceptance of papers in Physical Review, the most prestigious world-class journal of the most precise natural science.
“It is the policy of The American Physical Society that the Physical Review accept for publication those manuscripts that significantly advance physics and have been found to be scientifically sound, important to the field, and in satisfactory form.”
“Papers must contain new results in physics. Confirmation of previously published results of unusual importance can be considered as new, as can significant null results. Papers advancing new theoretical views on fundamental principles or theories must contain convincing arguments that the new predictions and interpretations are distinguishable from existing knowledge, at least in principle, and do not contradict established experimental results.”
Notice that “significant null results” are acceptable. A null result is one that makes a competent, sufficiently sensitive search for a predicted effect and finds none. The Physical Review editors do not wish to be in a position that would have kept Albert Abraham Michelson (German-born American physicist, 1852–1931) and Edward Williams Morley (American chemist, 1838–1923) from publishing their famous null result of 1887. That result was the discovery of a zero fringe shift when one arm of an interferometer was parallel to the Earth’s orbital motion, and the other was perpendicular. The Earth’s motion did not alter the speed of light. The experiment destroyed the paradigm of the luminiferous ether, the all-pervasive, rigid, frictionless medium that supposedly carried light waves as air carries sound waves. The null result that debunked the ether conjecture led on to Einstein’s discovery of relativity.
Long ago many people thought there were just four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Later alchemists and early chemists believed that the fourth element, fire, was a material with negative weight called phlogiston. They thought that phlogiston flowed into heavy combustible materials like firewood or coal and reduced them to lightweight ashes. Joseph Priestley (British chemist, 1733–1804) discovered the role of oxygen in combustion and respiration. Eventually experimenters laid the phlogiston theory to rest by collecting the smoke of combustion and showing that its weight plus the weight of the ashes was greater than that of the original fuel. The added component was the oxygen that combined with the carbon and hydrogen of the fuel to make carbon dioxide and water. Junking the phlogiston theory of combustion in favor of oxygen made chemistry progress.
Louis Pasteur (French chemist and biologist, 1822–1895) showed that microscopic fertilized eggs produce maggots in garbage. Bacteria make milk and wine sour. Heating the milk or the starting sugar solution can kill the bacteria and prevent spoilage. Microorganisms do not arise from the “spontaneous generation of life,” as people thought in his day. A commission of the French Academy of Sciences officially accepted Pasteur’s results in 1864. Junking that idea should have led to great advances in biology, but five years earlier Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and people had already been thinking that life does arise spontaneously from inorganic matter given hundreds of millions of years.
Pasteur’s research produced the “significant null result” that life does not arise spontaneously. The French Academy of Sciences did not require him to produce a theory showing how life did arise on the Earth after its heat of formation thoroughly sterilized it. Similarly, those who disprove the Darwinist conjecture have a significant null result. They should not have to replace Darwinism with a “better” rationalistic theory to obtain recognition.
[i] Prigogine, Ilya, op. cit., pp. 91–92.
Thermodynamics explains how organisms live, just as it explains how heat engines operate. Darwinism, however, is not about living but progressing. Darwinists are the only people who seriously claim to have found a natural, unattended process that spontaneously reduces entropy. We should examine their claim carefully.
We know that intelligent selection of characteristics can lead to new forms of organization. The most varied and highly organized nonhuman species in the world is probably dogs. People have bred dogs for different tasks for thousands of years. There are also many varieties of roses because of intelligent selection. Those examples do not show the spontaneous reduction of entropy because creative designers, in these examples dog breeders and rose fanciers, acted according to their insights. They had to attend to their stock carefully and diligently to get the desired results. In the same way, engineers improve heat engines by selecting those design variations that give greater efficiency.
Darwinists claim that the natural selection of the fittest to survive can also reduce entropy spontaneously. Their claim is equivalent to the idea that natural selection can create information out of the noise of random mutations.
Many Darwinists use romantic fantasy language in their books and articles about Darwinism. Some of them would have us believe that the genes inside the chromosomes in the nuclei of our cells are acting to preserve themselves and their posterity. A number of Darwinists personify nature as a skilled craftsperson who, even though lacking any foresight or purposes, builds functional structures far more complex than a jet engine. We have already seen that enzymes replicate DNA with digital precision. Some Darwinists say that the replication of DNA has to be nearly perfect but not quite for progress to occur. Obviously, if the reproduction were always digitally perfect and always produced the same sequence of identical atoms in the replicated genes, there could be no random changes and no mutations. On the other hand, if the reproduction were too erratic most of the organisms would be stillborn. According to those Darwinists we’re lucky that the error rate is just right. Some of them even claim that the error rate was higher in the past so Darwinian evolution could get started, but now the error rate is so low that ongoing evolution is unobservable, just at the time when scientists finally have techniques that make them capable of looking. Darwinists claim that the filter of natural selection produces information from replication errors.
We have already examined that claim. It is like saying that a machine with a simple filter can produce a decent lunch from garbage. Do Aeolian harps make symphonies like Tchaikovsky’s or Beethoven’s from the wind?
Darwinists say that natural selection produced all the varieties of life on Earth including the most advanced variety to date, humankind. Then why can’t intelligent human beings simulate and exploit the natural selection process to their own advantage? The only possible reason why not is that Darwinism is incomplete. Natural selection at most produces only small improvements and variations.
Here are the rules the American Physical Society lays down for acceptance of papers in Physical Review, the most prestigious world-class journal of the most precise natural science.
“It is the policy of The American Physical Society that the Physical Review accept for publication those manuscripts that significantly advance physics and have been found to be scientifically sound, important to the field, and in satisfactory form.”
“Papers must contain new results in physics. Confirmation of previously published results of unusual importance can be considered as new, as can significant null results. Papers advancing new theoretical views on fundamental principles or theories must contain convincing arguments that the new predictions and interpretations are distinguishable from existing knowledge, at least in principle, and do not contradict established experimental results.”
Notice that “significant null results” are acceptable. A null result is one that makes a competent, sufficiently sensitive search for a predicted effect and finds none. The Physical Review editors do not wish to be in a position that would have kept Albert Abraham Michelson (German-born American physicist, 1852–1931) and Edward Williams Morley (American chemist, 1838–1923) from publishing their famous null result of 1887. That result was the discovery of a zero fringe shift when one arm of an interferometer was parallel to the Earth’s orbital motion, and the other was perpendicular. The Earth’s motion did not alter the speed of light. The experiment destroyed the paradigm of the luminiferous ether, the all-pervasive, rigid, frictionless medium that supposedly carried light waves as air carries sound waves. The null result that debunked the ether conjecture led on to Einstein’s discovery of relativity.
Long ago many people thought there were just four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Later alchemists and early chemists believed that the fourth element, fire, was a material with negative weight called phlogiston. They thought that phlogiston flowed into heavy combustible materials like firewood or coal and reduced them to lightweight ashes. Joseph Priestley (British chemist, 1733–1804) discovered the role of oxygen in combustion and respiration. Eventually experimenters laid the phlogiston theory to rest by collecting the smoke of combustion and showing that its weight plus the weight of the ashes was greater than that of the original fuel. The added component was the oxygen that combined with the carbon and hydrogen of the fuel to make carbon dioxide and water. Junking the phlogiston theory of combustion in favor of oxygen made chemistry progress.
Louis Pasteur (French chemist and biologist, 1822–1895) showed that microscopic fertilized eggs produce maggots in garbage. Bacteria make milk and wine sour. Heating the milk or the starting sugar solution can kill the bacteria and prevent spoilage. Microorganisms do not arise from the “spontaneous generation of life,” as people thought in his day. A commission of the French Academy of Sciences officially accepted Pasteur’s results in 1864. Junking that idea should have led to great advances in biology, but five years earlier Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and people had already been thinking that life does arise spontaneously from inorganic matter given hundreds of millions of years.
Pasteur’s research produced the “significant null result” that life does not arise spontaneously. The French Academy of Sciences did not require him to produce a theory showing how life did arise on the Earth after its heat of formation thoroughly sterilized it. Similarly, those who disprove the Darwinist conjecture have a significant null result. They should not have to replace Darwinism with a “better” rationalistic theory to obtain recognition.
[i] Prigogine, Ilya, op. cit., pp. 91–92.
Darwinism and Thermodynamics
Darwinism is the only natural process that claims to move spontaneously toward greater organization and complexity. The second law of thermodynamics says that all processes without exception tend toward disorder. Darwinism and thermodynamics are therefore diametrically opposed.
Darwinists say that the universe is a closed system. No information can reach their universe from such outside sources as Divine intelligence. In any closed system the entropy always increases, or at best holds steady, but it never declines. Shannon established that information is the negative of entropy. Therefore, in the closed universe of the Darwinists, information always decreases, or at best remains constant for a time, but it never increases. The scientific information we know now did not exist when the universe was filled with hot subatomic particles and cosmic rays. At that time, soon after the beginning of the universe, the information of the genetic code did not exist, either. Random processes do not create information even when there is natural selection. How did present, highly specific information enter the universe of the Darwinists?
Information is just as rigorously subject to the laws of physics as entropy. The law of non-decreasing entropy has no known exceptions. Likewise there are no known exceptions to the law of non-increasing information. Therefore there is no way that the information coded in the genome of living organisms could ever have arisen spontaneously, by random action or any other mechanism, even with the filter of natural selection working all the time. Darwinism contradicts the most widely applicable and most firmly established law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics.
Just before 1900 the laws of physics seemed quite clear. Michelson said that the only work remaining to physicists was just to measure physical constants with greater and greater precision. Then, in 1905, relativity and quantum mechanics had their beginnings. Physicists put these theories forward in response to some rather small discrepancies between classical theories and some new experimental results. The physicists did the right thing. When they found discrepancies between theory and experiment, they changed their theories until they agreed with all the experiments.
Darwinists constantly change their theories, but they seem unable to do experiments that confirm some hypotheses and disprove others. Why is this? Scientists propose, design, and do experiments to discriminate among various hypotheses. If there is only one accepted hypothesis in a particular branch of knowledge and the people working on it will not entertain alternative ideas, they will never gather evidence that could modify their views. Such people are simply repeating the medieval error of holding allegiance to a dogma or an old authority. Clearing away the claptrap of outworn conjectures is the first step toward advancing new, testable, workable theories.
Many Darwinists try to combat what they perceive as the dogmas of others by clinging to and advancing their own dogmas. Who can convince people to be scientific by being dogmatic? Discerning people know that one error will not destroy another.
Darwinism is at variance with information theory and the second law of thermodynamics. Junking Darwinism will lead on to many great scientific discoveries.
Darwinists say that the universe is a closed system. No information can reach their universe from such outside sources as Divine intelligence. In any closed system the entropy always increases, or at best holds steady, but it never declines. Shannon established that information is the negative of entropy. Therefore, in the closed universe of the Darwinists, information always decreases, or at best remains constant for a time, but it never increases. The scientific information we know now did not exist when the universe was filled with hot subatomic particles and cosmic rays. At that time, soon after the beginning of the universe, the information of the genetic code did not exist, either. Random processes do not create information even when there is natural selection. How did present, highly specific information enter the universe of the Darwinists?
Information is just as rigorously subject to the laws of physics as entropy. The law of non-decreasing entropy has no known exceptions. Likewise there are no known exceptions to the law of non-increasing information. Therefore there is no way that the information coded in the genome of living organisms could ever have arisen spontaneously, by random action or any other mechanism, even with the filter of natural selection working all the time. Darwinism contradicts the most widely applicable and most firmly established law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics.
Just before 1900 the laws of physics seemed quite clear. Michelson said that the only work remaining to physicists was just to measure physical constants with greater and greater precision. Then, in 1905, relativity and quantum mechanics had their beginnings. Physicists put these theories forward in response to some rather small discrepancies between classical theories and some new experimental results. The physicists did the right thing. When they found discrepancies between theory and experiment, they changed their theories until they agreed with all the experiments.
Darwinists constantly change their theories, but they seem unable to do experiments that confirm some hypotheses and disprove others. Why is this? Scientists propose, design, and do experiments to discriminate among various hypotheses. If there is only one accepted hypothesis in a particular branch of knowledge and the people working on it will not entertain alternative ideas, they will never gather evidence that could modify their views. Such people are simply repeating the medieval error of holding allegiance to a dogma or an old authority. Clearing away the claptrap of outworn conjectures is the first step toward advancing new, testable, workable theories.
Many Darwinists try to combat what they perceive as the dogmas of others by clinging to and advancing their own dogmas. Who can convince people to be scientific by being dogmatic? Discerning people know that one error will not destroy another.
Darwinism is at variance with information theory and the second law of thermodynamics. Junking Darwinism will lead on to many great scientific discoveries.