Second law of thermodynamics and evolution?

Question

I got handed a leaflet from a Austrailian group and on in it, it had an arguement saying that evolution violated the law of thermodynamics - could someone verify that my thinking in this statement being wrong? Cheers

1) The Earth is not an isolated system; it continually receives energy from the sun.

2)Most of the anabolic reactions in living things are driven by the hydrolysis of ATP in small steps.

3) Even though the production of ATP is catalysed by light; the fate of all energy in the ecosystem is eventually radiated back out into space as heat - heat is of thr highest entropy.

Oh yeah it was a christrian group - not saying anything!

Answer 1

Your handy reference guide to all these idiotic creationist claims is http://www.talkorigins.org.

They have an index of the various counterarguments to the thermodynamics rubbish at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html

And of course you're right, evolution doesn't violate the 2nd law any more than a tree growing from a seed does.

Answer 2

ATP is not hydrolyized, it's created and regenerated by substrate level phosphorylation and the electron transport chain. And ALL energy in the the ecosystem is NOT radiated back into space. Only a small percentage of light/heat is radiated back into space. Also, WHY does this violate the second law of thermodynamics? Also, light/heat and "energy" are two different things in this context. Light is the driver for SOME types of sugar production in plant cells. There IS a dark reaction for succulents and desert plants which is able to vent O2 and accept H2O. I still don't see why this proves that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics??

Answer 3

Evolution definitely does not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. As you said, it is fuelled by the Sun which has entropy to spare for billions of years. Someone making such a claim has not a single clue about physics.

Answer 4

Evolution certainly does violate the 2nd law.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/3727

The Second Law can be stated in many different ways, e.g.:

that the entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum (in simple terms, entropy is a measure of disorder)
usable energy is running out
information tends to get scrambled
order tends towards disorder
a random jumble won’t organize itself
It also depends on the type of system:

An isolated system exchanges neither matter nor energy with its surroundings. The total entropy of an isolated system never decreases. The universe is an isolated system, so is running down.
A closed system exchanges energy but not matter with its surroundings. In this case, the 2nd Law is stated such that the total entropy of the system and surroundings never decreases.
An open system exchanges both matter and energy with its surroundings. Certainly, many evolutionists claim that the 2nd Law doesn’t apply to open systems. But this is false. Dr John Ross of Harvard University states:
… there are no known violations of the second law of thermodynamics. Ordinarily the second law is stated for isolated systems, but the second law applies equally well to open systems. … There is somehow associated with the field of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics the notion that the second law of thermodynamics fails for such systems. It is important to make sure that this error does not perpetuate itself.1

Open systems still have a tendency to disorder. There are special cases where local order can increase at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere. One case is crystallization, covered in Question 2 below. The other case is programmed machinery, that directs energy into maintaining and increasing complexity, at the expense of increased disorder elsewhere. Living things have such energy-converting machinery to make the complex structures of life.

The open systems argument does not help evolution.

Answer 5

We're all destned to end up at 3 degrees Kelvin, which incidentally is a really good name for a cool rock band.

Answer 6

1) True, open sysytems don't follow the 2nd law.