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My cousin is smart. Really smart. One of the smartest guys I know. So it was a surprise today when he remarked, offhandedly, that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. For those cats in the know, this is a creationist fallacy that is repeated frequently but is without merit.

Before I continue, I should mention that the following blog contains science content, and if you’re not interested, you may just want to dip out now. Pretend you’re going to the restroom or something so I don’t get my feelings hurt. Also, just so that you can feel like you took something away from this anyways: monkey banana raffle.

Creationists misrepresent our friend Mr. Second Law, and often state it as something like “a system will tend towards disorder rather than order.” In terms of evolution, they state that higher order organisms like humans represent more order, and therefore ye olde second law is being violated. This is not at all what the law states. The law concerns the amount of energy (heat) in an isolated system, and for our purposes is more appropriately stated as “a system without outside energy influence will tend towards a state of lower energy.” Note, however, that this is still technically incorrect, but it’s a fairly practical adaption of real-world circumstances.

For example, let’s suppose that you put some fresh water in a box and drop it to the bottom of the arctic ocean. As you can guess, the water in the box will likely freeze, dropping the energy of the molecules in the water towards a very low state. Unless something acts on that water to heat it up, the water will stay frozen. We can then say that it went from a state of high energy (liquid) to a state of low energy (solid), and will remain this way unless something changes the closed heat state of the water inside the box.

In the case of the surface of the earth, HUGE amounts of energy are being fed into it all the time. We get large amounts of energy from the sun, and we also get some from the molten core of the earth which radiates heat upwards, occasionally erupting and melting thousands of god-fearing believers in a horrifically painful way that only a benevolent god could devise. The surface of the earth is in no way a closed system at this point in time.

If, in 10 million years, the core of the earth cools down and becomes solid and our sun burns out, we can probably say, for all intents and purposes, that our world will have become a closed system as relates to biological processes. There will likely not be enough outside energy to allow for life, and evolution will stop. But, if our closed system suddenly got an outside energy source, it could become “open” again, and we’d be back in business. Well, not you, because you’ll be dead, but I’m assuming that I’ll probably rise from the grave because I’m pretty much the best thing to happen since always.

So as you can see, evolution doesn’t violate the second law at all, since the law doesn’t really have anything to do with biological complexity. If we want to frame it in terms of biological complexity, however, the law might be this: genetic complexity will be allowed to increase so long as there is sufficient outside energy introduced into the biological world. Once that energy flow ceases, the systems underpinning biological processes will lose energy until a period of equilibrium is reached,and life stops.

It’s as if creationists are telling you that you can’t make apple pie because you don’t have enough oranges. They’re completely unrelated.

If you want to read a great writeup on the real science behind the law, check out this link. Note, however, that if you thought this blog was boring, you’re in for pretty much a worse ride over there.