Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Time For Class Proving Evolution

The laws of thermodynamics demand that the universe as a whole is winding down. This shows more a misconception about thermodynamics than about evolution. The second law of thermodynamics says, "No process is possible in which the sole result is the transfer of energy from a cooler to a hotter body." [Atkins, 1984, The Second Law, pg. 25] What does this have to do with evolution? The confusion arises when the 2nd law is phrased in another equivalent way, "The entropy of a closed system cannot decrease." Entropy is an indication of unusable energy and often (but not always!) corresponds to intuitive notions of disorder or randomness. Creationists thus misinterpret the 2nd law to say that things invariably progress from order to disorder.
However, they neglect the fact that life is not a closed system. The sun provides more than enough energy to drive things. If a mature tomato plant can have more usable energy than the seed it grew from, why should anyone expect that the next generation of tomatoes can't have more usable energy still? Not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law, but order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it seen so often in nature?


Agreed. I have heard estimates (more like wild guesses) that 98% of all species that ever lived are now extinct. It would be mighty crowded if they weren't. If a species died out without leaving descendents its genome is lost. Many, now extinct, species left decendents and their evolved genome caries on. Every time a new individual is sprouted, hatched or born its genome is a variation of that of its parents, so variations appear just as fast as they disappear.

There are obviously plenty of gaps in the fossil record. Name a scientist in a relevant field who said otherwise.
The rest of your second point is incoherent. I guess, and it is only a guess, that you are talking about Gould and rapid evolution. When the prevailing view was tha evolution took place at a steady rate Gould came up with the idea that it takes place in fits and starts. I posted this before but here is what Gould, himself had to say in Punctuated Equilibria, Eldredge & Gould, 1972.
From the Statement: (3) "The theory of allopatric (or geographic) speciation suggests a different interpretation of paleontological data. If new species arise very rapidly in small, peripherally isolated populations, then the great expectation of insensibly graded fossil sequences is a chimera. A new species does not evolve in the area of its ancestors; it does not arise from the slow transformation of all its forbears. Many breaks in the fossil record are real.
(4) The history of life is more adequately represented by a picture of �punctuated equilibria� than by the notion of phyletic gradualism. The history of evolution is not one of stately unfolding, but a story of homeostatic equilibria, disturbed only �rarely� (i.e., rather often in the fullness of time) by rapid and episodic events of speciation".
From the final paragraph: "The norm for a species or, by extension, a community is stability. Speciation is a rare and difficult event that punctuates a system in homeostatic equilibrium. That so uncommon and event should have produced such a wondrous array of living and fossil forms can only give strength to an old idea: paleontology deals with a phenomenon that belongs to it alone among the evolutionary sciences and that enlightens all its conclusions�time".

The entire paper is easily found on the net.