David E. Birren wrote:
> Just this morning I was reading _The Road Less Traveled_ by M. Scott Peck.
> He says that physical evolution appears to violate the second law of
> thermodynamics, namely that left to themselves natural processes will
> degenerate to a state of entropy, or complete lack of differentiation at
> the lowest energy level. He goes on to posit God as the basis for this,
> but I'm looking for a more satisfying answer. Can anyone explain how
> evolution works? I'm not talking about the process of mutation and
> natural selection; I'm wondering about why the second law of
> thermodynamics, as Peck expressed it, doesn't seem to operate. What is at
> work and how does it operate? How do natural systems emerge and increase
> in their complexity?
This sort of argument is based on a misunderstanding of the second law of
thermodynamics, which states that entropy always tends to increase in *a
closed system*, i.e. a system that has no inflow or outflow of energy.
Life on Earth, however, is not a closed system; there's a massive incoming
flow of energy from the sun. Furthermore, speciation actually represents
an *increase* in entropy, which refers to the number of possible states a
system can take on.
-- Eric Bohlman (ebohlman@netcom.com)