The second law of thermodynamics and evolution

[Alex K]

-I've read that the law contradicts the evolution
-so i hope some one explain it for me
-i hope someone share links that explain it ‎ ‏
-is there any videos about the second law of thermodynamics and evolution

To paraphrase a stupid creationist - for evolution to work on a global scale, you'd need some sort of huge source of energy to overcome the increase in entropy which results from all natural processes.

Duh - If you look up on a sunny day, and your eyes hurt, you've found it.

In other words, this argument is spectacularly dumb if you know a bit about thermodynamics. Someone must have come up with it, and ever since creationists parrot it to bamboozle people who are not sure what the second law says.

But let me explain:

Energy is only useful for doing stuff if you have a differential: more energy in one place than in another. In going from one place to the other to equalize, it can do work. Take a water dam. You can only make electricity if the river beyond the dam is lower than the lake behind it. Entropy is one of the quantities one can define in physics that gives you a notion of how much everything is spread out already. If Entropy is maximal, everything is as spread out as possible and no processes (i.e. conversion of energy) are possible anymore.

The second law states (simply speaking) that entropy always increases towards this point. Why is this interesting for creationists?

Entropy is also a measure for order, and hence of information content (see Shannon entropy) - and DNA gaining information in evolution they think somehow violates this principle of ever increasing entropy and must hence be false.

In reality all you need is an (possibly absolutely minuscule ) energy source which locally in our organism decreases entropy (and hence allows for order to arise such as forming an organism) while entropy still strictly increases(*) if you take everything combined including the source into account. The entropy corresponding to the information in the DNA itself though is so tiny that it is completely negligible in the bigger picture of the energy flow that makes life.

So all in all, it's a profoundly silly "argument" to baffle unprepared people with sciency slang.

(*) for sufficiently large systems, on average