Saturday 17 September 2011

The Entropy Argument

One argument agains evolution is called the 'Enropy Argument'. it goes something like this:

"The second law of thermodynamics says that order cannot come from chaos, so how can complex beings come from simple ones"

This shows a misunderstanding of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that 'Entropy (disorder) in a closed system must always increase'. Do you see the problem yet?

That's right - the Earth is not a closed system. It gets additional energy from the sun, so the second law of thermodynamics doesn't have to apply to it (it does apply to the universe, being a closed system).

--Thomas