[1.0] Creationism & Thermodynamics

* Creationists long persisted in devising arguments against evolutionary science -- but their core argument, precedes Darwin, being traceable back over two centuries to the theologian William Paley, who asserted that "complexity" was a sign of the work of a Higher Power. A century after the publication of Charles Darwin's ground-breaking book THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES in 1859, Paley's argument would be buttressed by the use of the laws of thermodynamics -- though, as it proved, not to its advantage.

[1.1] THE ORIGINS OF CREATIONISM

* In classical times, the general assumption was that all the species of plants and animals on the Earth had been established at Creation, which was believed to have occurred a few thousand years ago. In the 18th century, the notions of creationism were refined, in reflection of the scientific revolution embodied in the work of Isaac Newton, as what was known as "natural theology", the assertion that the organisms of the Earth demonstrated the work of a Deity, an "Intelligent Designer" -- with this doctrine established in detail by the book NATURAL THEOLOGY, published in 1802 by the British naturalist and theologian William Paley.

The Reverend Paley suggested, for example, that the organized complexity of the eye could not exist unless some Higher Power had specified it. He argued that if one found a watch, even if it were broken, its complexity and orderly structure would have to imply a "watchmaker", and the complexity and orderly structure of organisms similarly implied a "Divine Watchmaker". In more general and convenient terms, Paley was saying that the organized complexity of the eye showed it was the product of a "Divine Craftsman" -- or in more modern and evasive terms, a "Cosmic Craftsman" -- in the same way that human-made artifacts like watches were designed by a craftsman, a watchmaker.

The Scots scholar David Hume had asked penetrating questions about natural theology a half-century before. What verifiable facts about nature did it tell us beyond those determined by observation? Not one. What did it tell us about the Craftsman, except that He had crafted? Nothing. Paley simply disregarded such questions to blandly proclaim the work of the Craftsman as obvious.

The deep irony in Paley's work was that it was the endpoint of the doctrine of natural theology -- since by that time, the evidence was undermining its assumptions. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, scholars began to wonder if the natural processes, then becoming more apparent to them, that geologically reshaped the Earth implied a world that was very old and always in a state of change. Suggestions that species might also have been around for a long time and were in a continuous state of change -- having "evolved" in other words -- arose in parallel, being boosted by the discovery of long-lost beasts of the past, preserved as fossils.

The accumulation of skeptical doubts over the doctrine of creationism finally led to the work of Charles Robert Darwin, an English gentleman-scholar who -- after participating in the research voyage of the Royal Navy brig HMS BEAGLE from 1831 to 1836 -- on his return to England began to consider the notion of evolution in detail, performing detailed research to evaluate his ideas. The end result was the publication of his book THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES in 1859, detailing the case for evolution. It was one of the most significant books of the 19th century.

Although Darwin was an entirely reluctant radical, the fundamental premise of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES overturned creationism: the organisms of the Earth had not been created in their current forms, they had all emerged spontaneously from earlier species, all the species tracing back to a unified root in the mysterious origin of life. Very importantly, Darwin established a mechanism by which evolution took place: the spontaneous variations in organisms, easily observed in domesticated species, were pruned and, in a sense, directed by environmental pressures, with the less well adapted becoming extinct, while the better adapted prospered. Darwin called this process "natural selection", as a mirror to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders seeking to improve domesticated organisms.

Whatever the details, to the inflexibly devout THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES was a declaration of war on traditional religious doctrine. It rejected the fiddlings of a Cosmic Craftsman in the establishment of the organisms of the Earth -- and worse, suggested that humans had evolved as well, the implication being that they were another species of primate, related to monkeys and apes. The specific details of Darwin's case were of no real relevance to the zealous; its core assertions were enough to damn it. The result was an ongoing dispute that would linger into the 21st century.

[1.2] THE COMPLEXITY ARGUMENT

* The basic pattern of the creationist attack on evolutionary science was established early on, operating on two tracks. The first track was the "negative argument", seeking to find fault with evolutionary science through smear tactics, selective use of evidence, and willful misrepresentations of the science. There was a particular focus on "gaps" in the science, saying that any inability to answer a particular question represented the failure of the whole, with evolutionary science then proclaimed dead.

Creationists learned to throw up an endless stream of objections -- good, bad, irrelevant, or simply nonsense -- and defy their opponents to answer them all; to then ignore the answers, and often repeat the same objections after being answered. This became known as the "Gish gallop", after creationist Duane Gish, who was fond of the tactic.

In reality, anyone who understood the science saw the creationist negative arguments as contrived; just playing games to be troublesome, a pointless exercise in manufactured controversy that was wisest to ignore. In addition, to the extent evolutionary science left many questions unanswered, creationism had no real answer for them at all, simply proclaiming that the Cosmic Craftsman had made things that way, don't ask how. Creationist negative arguments are nothing but disinformation, and need not be discussed further here. If readers are interested in the details of evolutionary theory, there are many good texts available on the subject.

The second track did amount to a positive argument, the only one that creationists could offer: the "complexity argument". It effectively traced back through the notions of the Reverend Paley, in his insistence that the organized complexity of the eye -- or any other biostructure, or for that matter entire organisms -- revealed they were the work of the Cosmic Craftsman; they could not have been the product of the spontaneous workings of the laws of nature. Darwin himself had raised the issue in THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES:

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Creationists have long used this citation to show that Darwin knew perfectly well he was proposing ideas that any sensible intuition showed to be ridiculous. However, they rarely give the full citation, in which Darwin added that intuition was misleading:

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Darwin added support for that claim, but creationists dismissed it anyway, continuing to assert that evolution was "obviously" impossible. As an interesting example, in 1925 the Reverend William A. Williams, an American cleric, published a work titled THE EVOLUTION OF MAN SCIENTIFICALLY DISPROVED IN 50 ARGUMENTS, in which the author claimed to "mathematically disprove" evolutionary science. He actually fully cited the comments by Darwin about the evolution of the eye, though only to register his incredulity:

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After this dramatic declaration, he then went on to give a mathematical "disproof" that ended up being a bit of an anticlimax:

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The Reverend Williams went on in this vein to establish the probabilities of the location of the other eye, the ears, and so on, to finally multiply them together and show that the odds of simply throwing everything together and having it all be so neatly organized were vanishingly small. In other words, he was using what would become known as the "monkeys and typewriters" model of evolution, in which it was compared to the absurd idea that monkeys pounding on a typewriter would produce the works of Shakespeare -- a scenario that simply ignored the cumulative effects of long-term natural selection.

The Reverend Williams has been generally forgotten, but he appears to have been one of the first to present a complexity argument against evolutionary based on probability calculations. He wouldn't be the last, though the argument would still often be along the lines of "monkeys & typewriters", just rephrased in various ways -- and in all cases, amounting to no more than an assertion of incredulity.

[1.3] THE RISE OF MODERN CREATIONISM

* In the USA, at the time of the publication of the Reverend Williams' book, conservative groups opposed to the teaching of evolutionary science in American schools had been growing in influence, working through state legislatures to suppress it. A bill was introduced in the Tennessee House of Representatives in early 1925 to impose a maximum fine of $500 USD on any teacher who tried to "teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower form of animal." The measure passed.

The law had opponents, most significantly the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which felt the law violated the rights of free speech, academic freedom, and separation of church and state -- principles at the core of the ACLU's agenda, and which were not always respected by state law in those days. The ACLU offered legal backing to any Tennessee teacher who wanted to challenge the law. John Scopes, a teacher in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, took the ACLU up on the offer.

The "Scopes trial" took place in July 1925, to become a media circus. Scopes' defense team was led by Clarence Darrow, a lawyer well known for defending labor organizers and Leftist activists, who also wrote extensively on the influence of religious doctrine in American lawmaking. The most prominent member of the prosecution team was William Jennings Bryan, a well-known populist politician, who had run for the presidency three times.

Scopes was found guilty, being fined $100 USD, though the penalty was later thrown out on a technicality. The results of the trial in the American mainstream were inconclusive. Attempts to push more state laws to ban evolution from public high schools didn't amount to much, but such laws as had been passed remained on the books. Evolution wasn't generally taught in American secondary schools for decades anyway, mostly because few teachers thought it worth the bother, given the patchwork of inconsistent regulations and attitudes toward it in the USA. Those students going on to university biology studies learned about it with little fuss or controversy. The biological science community continued to investigate evolution with no concern for anti-evolution agitation; over the next decades, American researchers did much to establish modern evolutionary theory (MET).

* The earnest war over evolution began in the 1960s, and was a product of multiple factors. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik 1, creating public outcry in America that the USA was falling behind the Communists. The response to Sputnik 1 would ultimately drive America to land astronauts on the Moon, as well as lead to an overhaul of the teaching of science in American public schools -- which would, in a ripple effect, bring the struggle over MET to a boil.

The Federal government backed efforts to improve national science education, leading to work from 1959 on the "Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS)" to write modernized biology textbooks. They were written by scientists with good credentials, and established evolution as the basis for modern biology. By the early 1960s, BSCS textbooks were being used in about half of all American high schools -- even in states where anti-evolution laws were still on the books.

In 1967, the state of Tennessee fired a teacher named Gary Scott for teaching evolutionary science; he brought a lawsuit against the state, with a Federal court overthrowing the Tennessee law. The next year, 1968, in response to a similar case brought against the state of Arkansas -- by a biology teacher named Susan Epperson, at the instigation of the state education board -- the US Supreme Court overthrew all the state anti-evolution laws, on the grounds that the laws violated the "Establishment Clause", the separation of church and state specified at the beginning of the US Constitution's Bill Of Rights: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...

This fragment of a sentence would become the focus of a protracted legal war.

* Grassroots resistance to the BSCS textbooks had actually begun soon after they were introduced. To that time, creationism had been promoted on a disorganized basis, with creationists publishing tracts that had little or no scientific credibility, and didn't make the best-seller lists. A movement then emerged among creationists to construct a more imposing "creation science" -- which amounted to an effort by creationists to dress up their notions in scientific clothes.

The idea was not entirely new, a Canadian-born Seventh-Day Adventist science teacher named George McCready Price having attempted to justify creationist ideas as "science" in a series of books published from 1906 into the 1920s. Price's reach was limited, since he was an Adventist, a sect regarded as heretical by many other conservative Christian organizations. However, he was a prophet of things to come.

In 1961, a hydraulics engineer and Southern Baptist named Henry M. Morris and a theologian from the Grace Brethren church named John C. Whitcomb published THE GENESIS FLOOD, which would become a classic text of creation science. The two men insisted that the Biblical six days' creation and the Lord's creation of the species of the Earth had to be taken literally -- Christians had to "believe God's word all the way -- or not at all."

The "Young Earth" creationism of Henry Morris and the ICR was a bit too much for some creationists to swallow; taking the six days of creation as outlined in the scriptural Book of Genesis as a factual description of events stretched credibility beyond the breaking point. They preferred to take the "six days" metaphorically, seeing the "days" as ages of the Earth that could have lasted hundreds of millions of years. Such "Old Earth" creationists were still opposed to MET, claiming that the Deity had performed repeated re-creations of the world, repopulating it at the start of each age.

In any case, in 1963 Morris helped found the "Creation Research Society (CRS)". The CRS, which is still in operation, was basically an association of like-minded individuals who generated papers attacking MET. The defeat of the state anti-evolution laws in 1968 led a number of CRS folk, including Morris, to decide they needed to take more assertive action. After a few years of organizational shufflings -- the detailed history of creation science is complicated -- in 1972, Morris established the "Institute for Creation Research (ICR)" at the Christian Heritage College in San Diego. His son John would take over leadership of the ICR after his death.

Henry Morris was highly active in denouncing MET, contriving arguments against it and broadcasting them at every opportunity. One of his core arguments was a variation on the complexity argument: instead of probability calculations, Morris reached out to the laws of thermodynamics. It may not have been original to Morris; it is not easy to determine the origins of creationist arguments. However, Morris was its most prominent advocate, and it would become a long-standing argument of creationism.

[1.4] THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS

* The laws of thermodynamics deal with the behavior of "heat energy". People have an intuitive understanding of the concept of "heat" and the related concept of "temperature" -- we go outside and notice that the temperature is high on a hot day, or low on a cold one; we put food in the microwave or in the oven to heat it up, and we put ice cubes in a drink to cool it down. However, properly defining such terms is tricky. Formally speaking, heat is not a property of an object like its color, but is instead a transfer of energy between objects. It follows a few simple rules:

• Heat flows from a hot object to a cooler one. We use a hot plate to boil water, for example, essentially pumping heat into the water.
  
  
• Heat never flows in the reverse direction by itself. We have to do work to cool something down, for example using a refrigerator to freeze water into ice cubes by pumping out the heat.

In modern times, we recognize that systems have "internal energy" or "thermal energy" due to the motions of their molecules; the more rapid the molecular motion, the higher the temperature. This thermal energy is not heat in itself; heat is the transfer of that thermal energy from one system to another. We can start a fire, chemically converting the fuel used to sustain the fire into a hot gas, and then boil water in a pot by a transfer of heat from the gas.

The behavior of heat is described by the "Laws of Thermodynamics". The Laws of Thermodynamics govern the efficiency of engines, and also rule out "perpetual motion machines" -- that is, machines that can run indefinitely without an energy supply.

There are four Laws of Thermodynamics. Originally, there were only three, but later physicists decided that a fourth law was required; since this law was basic to the other three, it was called the "Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics" instead of the "Fourth Law of Thermodynamics". The Zeroth Law just defines "temperature" as an index of the thermal energy of a system; there's not much else to say about it here.

The "First Law Of Thermodynamics" is essentially the "law of conservation of energy" -- that is, energy may be converted into different forms, but it is never gained nor lost -- phrased in terms of heat energy. The First Law states that when a warm object is brought into "thermal contact" with a cooler object, meaning a connection that allows the transfer of heat, there will be a transfer of heat energy between them that will eventually bring them to the same temperature. The First Law further implies that if any work is done by the system, it must drain the energy of the system. A system where work can be done without draining the energy of the system is referred to as a "perpetual motion machine of the first kind". The First Law rules out such machines.

The "Second Law Of Thermodynamics", informally known as the "2LOT" or "SLOT", requires definition of a property known as "entropy", defined by 19th-century physics as:

                   heat_transfer
   entropy  =  --------------------
               absolute_temperature

There's a more modern and more accurate formulation, but it's less intuitive to grasp; the classical formula is perfectly adequate for engineering analysis and the purposes of this discussion. The Second Law states that the entropy of an "isolated" or "closed" system, meaning one in which there is no transfer of energy across its boundaries, can never decrease; an "open" system, in contrast, features an input of energy that can create an increase in entropy. In the overall Universe, entropy is always increasing.

In more informal terms, entropy is a measure of dispersal or "smearing out" of energy. If we have a tank full of a hot gas and a tank full of a cold gas, energy is concentrated in the tank full of hot gas, and this difference in energy concentration can be used to do work. Mix the contents of the two tanks together until they're at the same temperature, then the concentration of energy has been lost and no work can be performed, even though -- given perfect insulation -- no energy has been lost in the mixing.

The concentration of energy in the tank of hot gas is expressed in a concept known as "free energy" -- the energy available to do work in a system, roughly the opposite of entropy. The free energy is used up doing work in a system, with entropy rising as the free energy is expended. In a closed system, eventually the free energy runs out, and no more work can be done; in an open system, the free energy is replenished from the outside Universe, and things will go on running as long as the replenishment continues.

A closed system where the entropy decreases is impossible; it is referred to as a "perpetual motion machine of the second kind". For example, the atmosphere around us is full of ambient energy even when there's no wind, and it would be nice if we could extract that ambient energy, sorting out the most energetic molecules of the air to, say, drive a jackhammer. However, the Second Law rules out such machines, even though they do not violate energy conservation -- and despite a great deal of effort, nobody has been able to figure out how any such device might be built, even in principle.

The SLOT tells us that any engine that runs off heat can only extract work if there's a temperature difference -- there must be a "source" of heat and a "sink" of heat -- and the greater the temperature difference, the more work that can be extracted from the transition between source and sink. In general terms, to obtain work we need an energetic transition between a source at a high energy and a sink at a low energy state, the work being obtained from the difference in energy between those two states.

For a very simple example, consider a wind turbine mounted in the middle of a chimney, with the turbine's shaft driving an electric generator. If the temperature at the bottom of the chimney is the same as the temperature at the top of the chimney, there won't be any airflow up the chimney, and the turbine will just sit there motionless. If we light a fire at the bottom of the chimney, the hot air will rise, rotating the turbine; the hotter the fire, the greater the airflow, the faster the turbine will rotate, and the more electricity will be generated.

The "Third Law of Thermodynamics" is a bit of an anticlimax after the other laws, simply stating that there is an "absolute zero" of temperature that can never be reached. A cooling system can in principle approach absolute zero by a narrower and narrower margin, but it will never actually reach absolute zero.

[1.5] EVOLUTION & THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

* The quick introduction to the Laws of Thermodynamics given above can't give much of a handle on thermophysics, but it does show what the laws are all about: thermal energy and its transfers. It also suggests that the Laws of Thermodynamics have nothing much specific to say about MET, living objects obeying exactly the same rules of thermal physics as do nonliving objects. Certainly there's nothing in MET that suggests any clear violation of the Laws of Thermodynamics, such as perpetual motion machines of the first or second kind.

Despite that, creationists often claim that MET does violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The issue is that entropy was often fuzzily defined in the past as "disorder" -- it sometimes still is these days, but that bad habit is gradually being chipped away. Since the SLOT says that the entropy of the Universe is always increasing, then if entropy is defined as "disorder", the Universe must be getting more disorderly all the time. MET, in contrast, seems to imply order spontaneously arising from disorder, and so the SLOT supposedly proves MET must be impossible. A typical example used to demonstrate this idea is: "A bed will never spontaneously make itself. Somebody has to straighten it up."

After groaning, the usual reply to creationists is that the SLOT only says entropy must increase in a closed system; within elements of a closed system there may actually be increases in order, just as long as the overall system goes "downhill". Free energy is used up doing work in a system, with entropy rising as the free energy is expended. In a closed system, eventually the free energy runs out; however, in an open system, the flow of free energy from the outside can keep things running for as long as the flow continues.

Technically speaking, that's a perfectly correct answer, but it's giving a sensible answer to an insensible question. The real problem with the SLOT argument against MET is the bogus definition of entropy as "disorder". The SLOT argument against MET is not so much wrong as "not even wrong" -- it doesn't strike out, it's not even in the ballpark.

Defining the term "entropy" simply as "disorder" is, if not absolutely wrong, at least very misleading. It can be interpreted as disorder of a certain well-defined sort, once again a "spreading out" or "dispersal" of energy. If we mix a hot gas and a cool gas, we no longer have a temperature difference to do work, we've lost our free energy. The problem with defining entropy as "disorder" without qualification is that people have much broader ideas of "disorderliness" -- unmade beds, for example -- but entropy has nothing in particular to do with general disorderliness and untidiness.

From an energetic point of view, what difference is there between making up a bed neatly; or making it up incorrectly, with the sheets over the blankets; or carefully arranging the blankets in some untidy fashion? None. Indeed, if we crawl into a made bed, are we "disordering" it by putting it into use? Both making up a bed and getting into it are acts of intelligent purpose in the arrangement of a physical system. It's silly to talk about the "entropy" of an unmade bed, and impossible to calculate it.

Most other attempts to equate entropy with general human disorderliness are equally silly. To be sure, it is an obvious fact that all human artifacts -- cars, buildings, shoes, roads -- wear out over time, but the SLOT has little directly to do with such processes of ruin. These processes don't give much insight into the broader operation of nature, either. Mountains are slowly eroded, with the sediments accumulating to become sedimentary rock, and possibly being uplifted into mountains again. Nature has a tendency to work in cycles.

There are dead-end processes in nature, of course, such as the decay of a radioactive isotope, which releases energetic radiation as it transmutes down its decay chain into a stable isotope that decays no further. However, that is truly an example of the SLOT in action, since as the radioactive isotope decays, it uses up its "store" of free energy, releasing it as energetic particles, dispersing that energy to the world around it. The SLOT doesn't say the Universe is falling apart; it says that it's just slowly running out of fuel, of free energy.

* In fact, the observation that the nature tends to work in cycles makes it obvious that order of various sorts arises spontaneously from disorder on a normal basis. For example, elaborate and orderly crystals -- grains of salt, snowflakes -- are easily formed; the thermodynamics of crystal formation are well understood, and there's an increase in entropy in the process. For another example, if a colored dye is mixed with water, it will be impossible to sort out the mix -- unless the dye is in the form of a light oil, in which case it will promptly segregate from the water to form a thin layer on the surface.

The SLOT is not directly concerned with the spatial arrangement of atoms or other particles. Consider a bin with a partition separating a mass of blue balls and a mass of red balls; pull out the partition and shake the bin, the two colors of balls will mix up and will never spontaneously sort themselves out again. However, if the red balls are twice the size of the blue balls, shaking will cause the red balls to rise to the top of the mix and the blue balls to sink to the bottom. Separation techniques operating at about that level of sophistication are common industrial processes, for example in the refining of ores. Those are of course human-directed processes, but unwanted spontaneous separation of mixtures can be a real problem in materials handling. Geologists can point out that normal geological processes often create concentrated deposits of minerals.

Are these processes violations of the SLOT? No. The SLOT is not directly concerned with the spatial ordering involved in the formation of a crystal structure or of mineral deposits. To the extent the SLOT affects various forms of order, it can promote them: as energy rolls down the "hill" towards increasing thermal disorder, it has a tendency to produce complex phenomena, including some that seem counter-intuitive For example, would anyone think that water will spontaneously flow back upstream, against the law of gravity? It is actually easily seen that it can, if fleetingly, from observation of vortexes in streams.

It should also be pointed out that matter features a scale of energetic interactions, from the very strong energies that hold atoms together, to the moderate energies that hold molecules together, down to the mild energies that cause interactions between molecules. The interesting thing is that this hierarchy of energies directly corresponds to the number of possibilities for interactions:

• The consequence of the strong energies that hold atoms together is that there's less than a hundred possible stable atoms.
  
  
• The moderate energies that hold molecules together correspond to vast numbers of molecular arrangements.
  
  
• The mild energies involved in interactions between molecules permit unbounded opportunities for complex arrangements of matter.

In other words, the decreasing energies associated with an increase in entropy are linked to a vast increase of the number of possibilities for interactions. Such interactions are selective, occurring in some circumstances but not others -- and they can operate in cycles, which as noted are nothing unusual in nature, with the cycles potentially driving open-ended increases in complexity.

* On the basis of a simple-minded interpretation of the SLOT, we couldn't imagine a Universe that ever amounted to much more than it did at the beginning, a dispersed thin fog of hydrogen with traces of helium evenly distributed throughout space. In reality, heavier elements were synthesized by natural processes from lighter ones; stars and planets were formed from the elements, making up intricate stellar and planetary systems; elaborate molecules and crystals arose on the planets, with the planets also developing surface features like mountains and oceans, as well as complex weather patterns. There is no scientific controversy over this scenario.

Given this far-reaching emergence of structures, then how can the SLOT suddenly rule out the emergence of life and its continued evolution? Where is the "magic barrier" that breaks the chain? In fact, if the SLOT ruled out the emergence of order, that would also make cars, airplanes, and personal computers impossible.

After all, if the emergence of organization by evolution is a violation of the SLOT, then the emergence of organization through human construction is a violation of the SLOT as well -- and we can't violate the SLOT. The glib reply is that evolution is not an "intelligent agent" while humans are, but that's another silly answer: no human to date has been able to figure out any way of getting around the SLOT, we'd be able to build perpetual motion machines of the second kind.

The claim that the SLOT forbids MET is bogus on the face of it. Organisms are based on biochemistry, which is just a subset of chemistry and obeys all the normal rules of chemistry, including the rules of thermodynamics. In its core concept, MET envisions that those organisms reproduce, with mutations or other sources of genetic variation leading to minor alterations in form in the next generation. Those organisms with variations that make them better able to survive and reproduce will gradually predominate over those that are worse off -- this process being, of course, natural selection. The organisms themselves do not violate the SLOT in their biochemical operation; none of the three basic elements of MET -- reproduction, variation, and selection -- do so either; and there's no credible basis for claiming that they do so in combination. Nobody has ever been able to perform any rigorous analysis that shows precisely how evolution violates the SLOT. It makes about as much sense to claim the law of gravity outlaws MET as to say the SLOT does.

* Physicists understand that the spontaneous emergence of various forms of order observed in nature isn't all that well defined on a theoretical basis, a gap that has helped encourage misunderstandings of the SLOT, and have puzzled over means of reconciling the matter. Some, for example, focus on what is known as "emergence" -- the simple but subtle principle that a system of simple objects may have collective behaviors not seen in any of its constituent elements. Not all have been impressed by such work, being skeptical that complex phenomena can be conveniently reduced to any simple laws of nature.

Creationists are evasive about the spontaneous emergence of order in nature. They reject examples such as crystal formation and the formation of mineral deposits as "trivial", but they find it difficult to explain why order can arise spontaneously in crystals, while ruling it out in organisms. If the SLOT absolutely rules out the spontaneous emergence of order, then it should do so at all scales. It's doubletalk to say: "There is no free lunch!" -- and then waffle around the obvious response: "But free snacks are OK." -- dodging the question of why enough free snacks don't add up to a meal.

Creationists make much of the complexity of organisms, but neither they nor anyone else has ever come up with a good definition of what "complexity" means; and they have never been able to explain how complexity makes a problem for evolution. We could attempt to define "complexity" as a function of the number of cells in an organism, the variety of different types of cells, and their overall organization and interactions; but none of these factors are inexplicable under MET.

After all, if an organism can evolve from one cell to two, then it can evolve to four, then eight, then sixteen, and so on. Similarly, an organism can evolve two different types of cells, then four, then eight, and also so on. The overall structure and inter-relationships of an organism seems a bit more of an obstacle -- but it's not. Any one cell simply provides a contribution to the entire organism. If a cell exists as an element in a complicated matrix, any change in that cell may have a wide range of effects, with selection encouraging that change if the total effect benefits the survival and propagation of that organism. If the cell proves troublesome, it will be weeded out by selection.

A complex system can be broken down in simpler elements; if it couldn't, we wouldn't regard it as complex. By the same coin, the basic elements of a system are necessarily simple, with levels of systems of increasing elaboration built up to create the complete system. If the basic elements of a biosystem each "microevolve", then overall their effects may well be the "macroevolution" of the entire organism.

On a more fundamental level, creationist objections to MET over complexity amount to an unjustified assertion that things exist in nature that, for some vague reason, shouldn't -- a notion along the lines of believing that rain should be expected to fall up, not down, and then asserting that why it falls down instead of up is inexplicable. Our observations clearly show that elaborate organisms are a part of nature, just as certainly as we observe that rain falls down, and so it is hard to understand what reason we would have to consider them "unnatural".

No law of nature presents an obstacle to MET. Everyone admits that, on the face of it, living organisms are much more elaborate than nonliving structures, but organisms still obey exactly the same laws of physics and chemistry as inanimate matter. What fundamental "magic barrier" separates the two? Nobody has been able to point to one. The idea that there is some unique physical property of life -- what was once called "elan vital", sometimes translated as "life force" -- that distinguished it at a fundamental level from non-life was a popular notion up to about a century ago, but it finally faded out when it was generally realized that nobody had any clue of what "elan vital" was. It was nothing but empty verbiage.