Re: entropy

Allan Harvey (aharvey@boulder.nist.gov)
Mon, 20 Apr 1998 11:10:08 -0600

At 11:41 AM 4/20/98 -0500, Wendee Holtcamp wrote:
>I have probably missed some of this discussion because of teh subject line
>- I'd been deleting them. But I am very interested in hearing the specific
>reasons why the "entropy" argument used by YECs is or is not valid. I have
>studied evolution and know that it just doesn't "make sense" but I'd like
>someone who has looked into this a bit more to clarify things. By the way I
>am a Christian but not a YEC. I have a YEC friend who likes to explain that
>things can't evolve to a more complex state because of entropy, but it
>still doesn't make sense to me. Even if the argument held water, to me it
>provides more evidence FOR God's hand in evolution as he can do the
>impossible!

Rather than go into that here, I'll point you to a Web essay I wrote a
couple of years ago:
http://home.earthlink.net/~schimmrich/scichr/essays/thermo.html

If I were writing it today, I'd probably say a few things differently
(and I might talk a little about Prigogine's nonequilibrium work, which I
was pretty unfamiliar with at that time), but it should still be enough
to dispel the simplistic 2nd law anti-evolution argument one usually hears.

Some of these matters are also addressed in a Web essay written by Doug
Craigen, a physicist in Canada:
http://www.winnipeg.freenet.mb.ca/iphome/a/accc/evol.html

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| Dr. Allan H. Harvey | aharvey@boulder.nist.gov |
| Physical and Chemical Properties Division | "Don't blame the |
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