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Dispatches From The Culture Wars for Kossacks)
Creationists often claim there is a natural law against evolution called The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It's a damn scary sounding claim if you're not familiar with math and physics, isn't it? Creationists count on that intimidation to pull off their con on the unsuspecting public. But Thermodynamics, or thermo, just means the study of heat and work, and those properties of substance related to heat and work. One property of substance related to heat and work that pops up in thermo is called 'entropy'; another scary sounding word the creationist utilize to trick you with. But the idea behind entropy is simple. And besides, you can refute the classic creationist claim without doing a lick of study or knowing much about entropy at all!
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The second law of thermodynamics says: everything tends toward disorder"-Kent Hovind
There are a lot of ways to state the Second Law. Hovind's version above is not one of them! But of the legitimate formulations they all reduce to the same thing. What the Second Law boils down to is that heat cannot be moved from cold objects to hot objects unlessan input of energy flows into the system. Air conditioners and refrigerators for example can transfer heat from cold objects to hotter objects in a roundabout way precisely because they have an external input of energy used to run them. And as anyone with an energy bill knows, AC's and fridges don't run on nothing. Another way to state the Second Law uses that scary sounding term entropy as in, "The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed and bounded system cannot decrease without an input of energy from outside the system". Calling entropy 'disorder' as Creationists do is about as accurate as calling a symphony a 'noise'. It's that bad of an analogue.
So what is entropy then? Mathematically, we'd say that Entropy, written as "S", is proportional to the amount of heat an object gains or looses, divided by the total heat of the closed and bounded system in which it resides. That's all it is. In metric units S = DQ/T which is read "Entropy (S) equals the change in heat (DQ) divided by the temperature (T)". And the answer using metric units comes out in Joules per degree Kelvin. That's how entropy is defined, a mathematical ratio, just like velocity is a mathematical ratio of distance per unit time. And that's all entropy is, a simple ratio. If you lack either the change in heat of the object, or the total temperature of the closed and bounded system the object resides in, you cannot determine the entropy because you lack either the numerator or the denominator of the ratio in question. Just like if you lack the distance traveled or the unit of time, you cannot work out a velocity.</math>
Creationists like Kent Hovind love to use the term 'disorder' for entropy, because the term 'disorder' can easily be conflated with large scale organization, such as how disordered your room is, or how unorganized your files are. This double meaning is not an accident, it's exactly what the creationist intends. And conflation of one term or meaning with another is, of course, the friend of all creationists the world over. So they like to say that entropy means disorder, and thus if the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy can only increase, it means disorder can only increase, never the other way around. Order then cannot increase, or so the creationist argument goes, and since evolution can be poorly represented as a sort of increasing complexity or order, The Second Law forbids it! Bada-bing, bada-bang!
What's this have to do with evolution? Well, that's an interesting question, because the answer is; Not a hell of a lot! That's the whole point of my little foray into what entropy is really all about. Entropy has no meaning in evolutionary processes (Unless someone can define the temperature or heat change of 'evolution' whatever the hell that might mean), outside of the biochemical systems used by organisms to survive and reproduce. It is true that life and therefore reproduction does require an input of energy, and reproduction drives evolution, but that's no problem for organic systems because they are not a closed and bounded! We eat food! We live in an external universe that is over flowing with energy! Recall the Second Law; unless an external input of energy is provided to the CLOSED and BOUNDED system ... The energy needed to prime the systems in organisms happens to be in the form of a massive ball of hydrogen plasma housing a titanic fusion reaction sitting in our sky. And that's a boatload of energy folks, zillions of watts, more than enough to offset any decrease in entropy on our comparatively tiny planet. The sun (and to a lessor extent hot thermal vents in the earth and even the rotation of the earth itself) provide more than enough energy to drive the biological processes of plants and bacteria, and thus those organisms do not violate the Second Law by living or reproducing; or evolving. We humans and every other animal are also ultimately solar powered, for we basically steal that solar energy by consuming plants, or by consuming animals who consume plants.
IOW, the creationist is bullshitting you when he or she claims that the Second Law forbids evolution. Surprise surprise, eh? And if he or she has been using that shtick for any length of time, someone has almost certainly, patiently, explained to him that they're wrong and why they're wrong. I long ago lost track of how many times I've done exactly that. So if they're still saying that the Second Law precludes evolution, then not only are they bullshitting you, the Creationist knows they're bullshitting you. When a creationist says 'order' meaning entropy, and goes on to say the Second Law of Thermo forbids evolution, they're talking out of their ass: A condition so common among creationists they should come equipped with an anal microphone ...
To put the final nail in the creationist coffin in terms anyone can understand- even if you didn't follow my explanation above- if the Second Law worked like creationists claim when they conflate thermal entropy with large scale organization and disorder, then no order could ever form under any conditions. That means no tornadoes could form from thunderstorms, no hurricanes could develop, no Great Red Spot on Jupiter would be possible; oh, and no fertilized cells could grow into a new organism. Geez, every time you produce a mini-whirlpool in your bathtub as the water drains out, you're doing exactly what many Creationists would tell you is impossible according to their distorted and dishonest portrayal of the Second Law of Thermo. All those everyday events and many others are examples of pockets of 'order' arising from disorder, or less order anyway. Nature itself refutes the classic creationist claims about thermodynamics, order, entropy, evolution, and the Second Law. Systems, be they weather or biological, can and do self organize! The ability for such systems to self orgnaize is called an emergent property.
On a related note and as an introduction to a future essay: A sound engineer in the 1950s named Claude Shannon decided to call the way he measured information transitted in phone lines of his new information theory entropy; which creationists also like to conflate with the Second Law and say that "genetic information cannot increase via mutation because entropy (Disorder) can only increase" (I have a trivial proof falsifying this claim in comments below). The creationist trick here is that Shannon was using the term entropy to refer to a mathematical property that has nothing to do with heat or work. Just as the term 'element' means one thing in chemistry and another in set theory, the term entropy can mean one thing in thermo and another in information theory. Creationists love to use that little bit of deception to dazzle the uninformed.
Now it happens to be well understood analytically that not only can order arise from disorder in the colloquial sense, infinitely complex looking systems and behavior can arise from simple beginnings. This can be shown and proven in the mathematical sense, meaning to 100% metaphysical certainty. That's what fractals and strange attractors are all about; complex looking behavior arising from very simple rules, especially systems that iterate (Repeat). So even the more modern Intelligent Design Creationist claim that the deliciously undefined and vague "complex" systems cannot arise from simple ones is completely, dead-ass, wrong. This field of study is called "Chaos Theory" and it's a fascinating topic with lots of really cool pictures ... but that's a post for another day.
Resources: Thermodynamics for Two, Please (Great essay for those who don't like math), Talk Origins Brief Review of The Second Law, and the slightly more technical The SLoT Makes Life Possible