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IKEA DIDN’T MAKE

NATURAL HISTORY:

GOOD DESIGN IS RARE, EXPENSIVE,

AND ACCIDENTAL

THE SECOND LAW MAKES THE MEREST SLIVER of an initial adaptation just barely possible. But it makes no guarantees. For all we know, it might happen only once every 13.7 billion years in an entire universe. If the first adaptation survives long enough, the second law allows for improvements, but only if they are rare, energetically costly, and just dumb luck. No one said adaptation would be easy.

So far so good. But scientism needs more from physics than just the possibility of adaptation. Physics won’t fix all the facts, it won’t be causally closed, unless the second law’s way of getting adaptations is the only way to get them. Scientism needs to show that blind variation together with environmental filtration is the sole route through which life can emerge in any universe. We have to understand why, in a universe made only by physics, the process that Darwin discovered is the only game in town.

There are only two things we need to keep in mind to do this. First, if we are out to explain how any adaptation at all can ever happen, we can’t help ourselves to some prior adaptation, no matter how slight, puny, or insignificant. Second, the second law requires that the emergence and persistence of orderliness of any kind be energetically expensive. An explanation of adaptation’s emergence and persistence is going to have to show that the process is wasteful. The more wasteful the better so far as the second law is concerned.

ADAPTATION HAS TO BE A BAD BET

The very first adaptation has to be a matter of nothing more than dumb luck. It has to be the random result of a very, very mindless process, like a monkey hitting the keys of a typewriter randomly and producing a word. Given world enough and time, the bouncing around of things just fortuitously produces adaptations. The second law insists that initial adaptations—no matter how slight, small, or brief—can’t happen very often. And the same goes for subsequent adaptations that build on these. They will have to be rare and random as well. So any theory that explains adaptation in general will have to have this feature: that the first adaptation is a fluke, the luck of the draw, just an accident, simply the result of the law of averages. The inevitability of a first adaptation is ruled out by the second law. To begin with, the second law says that nothing is inevitable, even the heat death of the universe. More important, the appearance of the merest sliver of an adaptation is an increase in order and so at most improbable.

None of this is a surprise to Darwinian theory, of course. That’s just what the theory says will happen: variations are random, they are almost always small, in fact they are almost always molecular; the first ones come out of nowhere, just as a matter of shuffling the cards; mostly they are maladaptive, and only rarely are they adaptive.

The second law also requires that the process through which later adaptations emerge out of earlier ones be energetically expensive and wasteful: expensive because building more and more order has to cost more and more disorder; wasteful because the early steps—the original adaptations on which later ones are built—will be locked in, so energetically less costly ways of building the later adaptations are not available. Every explanation of adaptation will have to share this feature, too. It will have to harness a wasteful process to create order.

We need only examine natural selection as it has played out on Earth to see how expensive and wasteful it is. The combination of blind variation and environmental filtration is great at increasing entropy. In fact, the right way to look at the emergence of adaptation on Earth is to recognize that it is the most wasteful, most energetically expensive, most entropy-producing process that occurs on the planet. The evolution and maintenance of adaptations by natural selection wins the prize for greatest efficiency in carrying out the second law’s mandate to create disorder. Forget design;