Does evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics?

Post Reply New Topic

I have heard some people say that it does and therefore it must not have occurred. They also say that the Big Bang violates the second law of thermodynamics and Newton's laws of motion.

It sounds like the sorts of claims that 'creation scientists' and their ilk like to peddle, and those claims are often based on intentional misrepresentation or flawed understandings of what they're seeking to discredit.

I don't think so, because energy is required for it to happen. Growing, reproducing, growing again--it takes a lot of energy. It's like how organizing your house doesn't violate the second law because you're using energy to do so.
But even if it worked, the problem with that argument is it could just as easily disprove the second law of thermodynamics as it could evolution. But people use it against evolution because that's more controversial among non-scientists who don't know what they're talking about. Generally, if two well-proven scientific theories seem to contradict each other, neither one is wrong; we just haven't yet figured out how they fit together.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is...that things go from order to disorder. Disorder (aka entropy) increases.

Living things on Earth, whether they evolve or not, SEEM to violate this law because seeds grow into plants and grow, and feed animals, and animals grow. And and the cells and tissues of living things are highly organized so...living thing decrease entropy. Right?

But this bucking of the trend toward entropy by earth's biosphere is at the expense of the must vaster increase in entropy by the Sun burning its nuclear fuel. The sun lights and heats the whole solar system because of the increase of disorder/entropy at its core via nuclear fusion. And living things on earth capture a minute amount of the energy so created to swim upstream a little and get more organized as they grow. And if over millions of years living things evolve it still doesnt violate the said law because its still power by the Sun's vast and steady increase in entropy.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a physical law based solely on universal empirical observations concerning heat and energy inter-conversions.  A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or 'downhill' in terms of the temperature gradient).  Another statement is: "Not all heat can be converted into work in a cyclic process."

This law explicitly relates to HEAT, not evolution.  Of course, those who do not understand science might enjoy misapplying this principle to everything from evolution to male-pattern hair loss.