Creationist Bill Kettenhoffen in his letter “Origins Matter” of September 3 argues against the evolutionary origin and maintenance of life with a mistaken application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The Second Law states that in all closed systems, changes made tend toward disorder. Mr. Kettenhoffen”s conclusion is that “Our world is gradually wearing out and deteriorating.” What he is missing is that living systems are open, that is, capable of importing energy and matter. While it may be true that the Universe as a whole is “gradually wearing out and deteriorating,” living things have the capacity of using energy derived from chemical reactions and sunlight to locally reverse this tendency toward increased entropy. In the process they may accelerate the disorder in some neighboring location.
The second misapplication of the Second Law comes in his analogy of a garden that has been ignored and reverts to a tangle of weeds. While this might look to a human to be an increase in disorder, the fact may very well be that the weedy plants are simply those that use energy more efficiently to create their own internal order (growth) than the pretty domesticated plants.
When invoking the laws of nature, it is important not to let one”s aesthetic sensibilities prejudice one”s conclusions.
Steve Harness, Witter Springs
