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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

I used to work with a young-earth creationist pharmacist who spent a lot of time talking about how evolution was impossible since the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time -- so it's impossible for evolutionary complexity to increase.

Wasn't sure how to respond to that one.

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I recommend enthusiastic and intentionally stupid agreement.

"You're right! For all this evolution stuff to work, you'd have to have some massive source of energy sitting in the sky or something."

<beat>

"Sure is hot today."

This is one of the old standbys. Deleting the clause "in a closed system" and pretending the 2nd law is still valid without it. I wonder what this person would say if you asked them why you needed a different flu vaccine each year.

Probably "I don't need a vaccine"

Well, given that the person a pharmacist, I would hope that's not the advice they give.

That always troubled me until I read an article a couple of months ago about a new discovery with regard to the attempts to recreate the start of life. Basically, it said that biological self-organization and replication satisfies the 2nd law if you count the excess heat that is given off during the process. In other words, the chemical processes that power life are a reduction from a complex form to a simpler form and and the generation of heat. For instance, most organisms eat food, digest the food, which breaks down the complex chemicals to simple ones, and generate heat. So, while an organism may evolve into a more complex form, in the environment, it is creating entropy overall. This satisfies the 2nd law and explains evolution (a higher order life process).

If the argument that evolution is impossible because thermodynamics was correct, everything humanity does would also be impossible. When we're not at war, most of the things we do is organizing matter, locally decreasing entropy. The key word is, locally. Our trucks and cranes burn fuel to organize matter. So do our bodies, and so do cells our bodies are made off.

Tell them they are exactly right, only exception possible would be if there is some massive energy source pouring energy into the system. This is best done outside on bright sunny days.

What is the relationship between energy and entropy? (Genuinely curios, I'm not a creationist, I personally rank Darwin right up there with Newton and Einstein)

Simply put, the earth isn't a closed system, so the laws can't be applied just to earth.

All arguments, for and against, on evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.

http://creationwiki.org/Index_to_Creationist_Claims#CF:_Phys...

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