Field of Science

Gardeners delight - 2nd law of thermodynamics negates weeds!

After a while you get tired of trying to explain biology and especially evolution to people outside of the field, and this includes mathematicians like Granville Sewell. In a recent publication GS argues that the 2nd law of thermodynamics negates evolution because order increases and the 2nd law says entropy, disorder, must increase. Ah, but as has been pointed out to the critics of evolution every single time this comes up, the Earth is not a closed system which this law refers to. There's a constant input of energy. But Granville gets clever and says he's done the math to show that when "…all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments,[and] it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here."
Now the Phactor isn't a physicist or a mathematician, but let me have a crack at explaining this. Life itself has the ability to capture energy and grow which decreases entropy, locally, for a relatively short (on a cosmic scale) period of time. Life doesn't violate the 2nd law, it just slows down the increase in entropy, and no law says you can't do that. Eventually all the energy captured dissipates as heat increasing entropy. What Granville is arguing is that life is not possible, let alone evolution. Since he sees nothing entering the Earth that can increase order, evolution must be invalid. Let’s simplify things. Granville doesn’t understand biology or how life works at all, so he’s going to reject the whole thing. When a mathematician tries to unexplain biology, 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4, it equals baloney.
But as the Panda's Thumb pointed out this is great news for gardeners because weeds can't grow and increase in numbers in your garden. And Granville's got the mathematical proof! But here’s what will happen. This foolish paper, even after being thoroughly sliced and diced by better and more mathematical minds than mine, will become the darling citation of creationists and it will be touted as “science” demonstrating why evolution is invalid.

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