I certainly am not advocating the preference of Creationism vs Evolution (not in GQ, anyway), nor am I intending to debate said arguement.
But, while perusing a different message board, I founf the following statement:
Now, while I’m certainly not the most avid reader of scientific literature, I’m pretty sure that I would have heard of this at some point.
Care to help me debunk this statement? While it seems pretty easy to do, I don’t consider myself enough of an “expert” to do so with any degree of confidence.
This page should have all the info you need, but suffice to say they don’t understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics that well. The argument is basically that evolution is not entropic and so violates the Second Law, but they fail to realize that life is not a closed system.
There’s nothing to debunk because the statement is too vague to be meaningful. By trying to guess what they are talking about and then debunking those guesses, the people making the claim are making you do their work. The correct answer is to put the ball back into their court and either ask for a cite or simply answer “no, they do not”.
A statement as general as “the laws of science prove X” deserves no more attention than “according to federal law you owe me $5000”. Tell 'em to come back when they can quote chapter and verse, so to speak.
The part about the laws of thermodynamics refer to the fact that the total entropy (disorder) will always rise in a closed system, so they deduce from this that a more complex and organized system like life can’t appear without some sort of miracle.
But the earth isn’t a closed system, since it receives energy from the sun. It makes as much sense as stating that the laws of thermodynamics make impossible for a tree to grow.
As for the probabilities, I assume it refers to the concept that it would be extraordinarily unlikely that mere molecules could spontaneously assemble in such a way that they would form a living organisms. So, they pull out of thin air an arbitrary and very low probability of life appearing, and pointing at this ludicrously low probability state “how can anyone seriously believe that it actually happened?”.
And they of course forget to mention not only that they just made up this figure, but also that the Earth is really huge and the lenght of time involved extremely long. It’s like saying “nobody can win the lottery because there’s only one in ten millions chance to win”, without mentionning that the lottery is organized countrywide and that 50 millions people are playing.
They also forget the anthropic principle, which implies that one would have to take into account the likehood of life appearing in the whole universe rather than just on earth. In this case, stating, say, “there’s only one chance in a million that life would appear one earth spontaneously, so we can rule out this possibility” is like saying : “the likehood of life appearing specifically in this particular pond is so low that we can rule out this possibility”. There are plenty of ponds, life can appear in any of them, and we necessarily must live in one of the ponds where life appeared, so this probability is actually way higher. Assuming once again that they would actually have a clue of the likehood of life appearing on earth. And they don’t, because nobody does.
For a really excellent examination of this idea, with the conclusion that life is not only not highly improbably, but actually highly probable, see the book “At Home in the Universe,” by Stuart Kaufman.
Clairobscur: I hate to nitpick such an excellent post, but I think you mischaracterized the anthropic principle in your last paragraph:
The AP is more about the relationship between the physical properties of the universe and the existence of life rather than just a mere numbers game dealing with the vastness of said univers:
And just to add my 2 cents worth, the probability of anything happening *after it * *has already happened * is 1. Life happened. It makes no sense to calculate the odds of it happening in any particular (unknown) way.
There’s also the Index to Creationist Claims at the talk.origins site that gives responses to practically every imaginable argument made by creationists. Creationist arguments are very often simple logical statements which they expect can be used to make evolution collapse in a puff of logic: ‘So it’s against the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Oh, well, I guess we’re wrong. I’ll burn my lab now.’ The Insitute for Creation Research must have heard of the defense to the Second Law argument when they were building their museum (see Exhibit 4). They suggest that the Second Law is part of God’s punishment after the Fall, and they completely neglect the idea that the Second Law applies only to closed systems by suggesting that entropy is higher in open systems. They argue that the input of energy from the sun increases entropy, because, after all, it makes things rust and melt. This is flawed, and what is yet more flawed is the idea that increasing order in biological systems is impossible because it is against the Second Law. The Second Law is a law of thermodynamics, and refers only to thermodynamic processes. It simply doesn’t apply to biological complexity (i.e. evolution), human knowledge, technology, etc.
Abiogenesis is a bit harder to deal with. There’s a lot out there on how life may have arisen from abiotic materials; the Miller-Urey experiment is the classic attempt to show how it might have happened, and further research has been done. Probably the simplest defense against creationist claims is that abiogenesis does not require that a whole protein or even a whole cell assembled itself by chance. (Most claims that abiogenesis is impossible will estimate the probability of this happening randomly, then give an absurdly high figure.) But abiogenesis is not about a whole cell randomly assembling. It is about chemical processes in the early earth preparing a set of organic molecules necessary for life, then a series of reactions between these organic molecules that eventually leads to more and more complex biological reactions. Three of the four bases in RNA can be prepared by very simple reactions, despite their complexity, as can many of the amino acids in proteins. Biological reactions, including replication, can occur with very short segments of RNA. Assuming that RNA bases are produced by simple reactions, and that RNA bases can react with each other to form chains, it is only a matter of time before a replicator arises, and then more and more complex reactions, and eventually proteins and cells. This ‘RNA world’ hypothesis is one of the current theories; there are several ideas as to how life may have arisen by chance, including some quasi-supernatural ones such as organic molecules coming to Earth on meteors.
A good example of how biological processes are chemically guided and thus do not obey rules of probability is Levinthal’s paradox. When a protein is unfolded, it is presented with a staggering number of possibilities for re-folding. If it re-folded randomly, it would take an enormous amount of time to ‘find’ the correct folding configuration again (longer than the age of the universe, for a reasonably complex protein). But it doesn’t – the protein very quickly re-folds into its original configuration, which suggests that other aspects of the protein’s structure play a role in protein folding.
trandallt: Yeah, that’s a nice argument of the sort creationists can understand and like to use. We know that life arose, so it must have a way of arising from abiotic materials, or else we wouldn’t be here. Arguments against abiogenesis also go against Wöhler’s (the Father of Organic Chemistry) observation that it is possible to prepare organic molecules (urea, in Wöhler’s case) from inorganic ones. That is, there is nothing special about organic and biological molecules that makes them impossible to prepare from simpler, inorganic molecules.
Well, we can still ask (if not answer) the question, “Supposing there were a large number of universes like ours, with the same physical conditions — in what portion of them would life arise?” Answering this question would be tantamount to finding the probability of life having occurred in our universe. Now you might have to declare what you mean by “life” very precisely, more precisely than anyone ever does, but otherwise it seems no different than asking the probability of any other physical event. Just a lot messier.
Even if we’re never able to assign a number to that probability, there are still two higher-level discoveries that could be made: the emergence of life in this universe was inevitable (the FAP cited by John Mace), or merely possible (the SAP). I doubt we’ll ever answer even that basic question, but that’s just my own personal hunch, not an argument.
I think the 2LOT argument shows how creationists fundamentally misunderstand what evolution is and how it works. Unless you think angels are involved with the growth of every seed, as you said, all evolution is about is that children are different from parents, and not all things live long enough to reproduce. There is nothing magical happening except birth, growth, reproduction, and death - with variations.
The next argument is usually that “microevolution” can happen but major changes, resulting in speciation, cannot. talkorigins.org covers that one also.
There’s a weaker version yet of the Anthropic Principle, which one might refer to as the Local Anthropic Principle, which is much more widely accepted than even the Weak Anthropic Principle you posted. It states, roughly, that of the properties which can vary within the Universe, we would expect that the values we measure locally for those properties would be the values most consistent with the existance of life. As a rather silly example, in most of the Universe, the local density of matter is about 10[sup]-29[/sup] grams per cubic centimeter. In our vicinity, however, the density of matter is more like 10[sup]-3[/sup] to 10 grams per cubic centimeter. Should we be surprised that our neighborhood is so much denser than most of the Universe? No, because we’re life, and life is more likely to arise in those rare spots where the density is high. Likewise, if life only arises once per galaxy, or once per ten billion galaxies, we should not be surprised that our planet is one of those rare ones where it happened.
I was refering to the weak anthropic principle. I sort of restricted it to the conditions on Earth alone and then went on a train of thought that eventually ended up in “since life happenedd on Earth, then arguing about the likehood of it happening specifically on Earth doesn’t make more sense than arguing that since the likehood of your parents, and their own parents before them, and so on, meeting and having sex precisely at the right time for a specific spermatozoid to fertilize a specific egg are ludicrously low, we can dismiss out of hand the possibility that you were born”.
IOW, if you don’t think “I can’t possibly be born” or "I can’t possibly have won the lottery " because the likehood of it happening were very low before you were born/won the prize, then there’s no reason to think “Life couldn’t have happened spontaneously on Earth”, either. What matters is only the likehood of someone, anyone, being born or winning the prize, or the likehood of life appearing somewhere, anywhere.
But it’s indeed a blatant mischaracterization of the anthropic principle to conflate it with this concept. And you’re right to point it out at me, since I’ve been for a long time taking as granted that the WAP somehow directly implied this concept or that they were similar or directly related. I’ll take care not to mix them in the future.
misunderstand what evolution is and how it works. Unless you think angels are involved with the growth of every seed, as you said, all evolution is about is that children are different from parents, and not all things live long enough to reproduce. There is nothing magical happening except birth, growth, reproduction, and death - with variations.