Why Darwin Matters_ The Case Against Intelligent Design - Michael Shermer [40]
Yet on any scale other than the grandest of all—the three-billion-year history of life on earth—species do not evolve from simple to complex, and nature does not simply move from chaos to order. The history of life is checkered with false starts, failed experiments, small and mass extinctions, and chaotic restarts. It is anything but the textbook foldout of linear progress from single cells to humans.
Further, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed, isolated systems. Since the earth receives a constant input of energy from the sun, it is an open-dissipative system, and entropy may decrease and order increase (though the sun itself is running down in the process). The earth is not strictly a closed system, and life can evolve without violating natural law. As long as the sun is burning, life may continue thriving and evolving, just as automobiles may be prevented from rusting, burgers can be heated in ovens, and all manner of things in apparent violation of Second Law entropy may continue. As soon as the sun burns out, entropy will take its course—and life on earth will cease.49
In addition, an open-dissipative system such as we find on the earth slips in and out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The sciences of nonlinear dynamics and of chaos and complexity theory show that systems can spontaneously self-organize into more complex systems when they are in states of thermodynamic nonequilibrium. When a system is out of balance, energy flowing in and out of the system triggers the parts of the system to interact with one another locally, and these coupled interactions reverberate throughout the system to sustain it. Autocatalysis, or feedback loops within the system, can cause it to grow in complexity. From these self-organized autocatalytic interactions emerge complexity and order.50 All of this happens without any top-down input. Evolution no more breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics than one breaks the law of gravity by leaping into the air.
Evolution is random, and randomness cannot produce complex specified design.
It seems obvious that even the simplest of life forms are too complex to have come together by random chance. Take a simple organism consisting of merely 100 (102) parts. Mathematically there are 10158 possible ways for the parts to link up. There are not enough molecules in the universe, or time since the Big Bang, to account for these possible ways to come together in even this simple life form, let alone to produce human beings. It is the equivalent of a monkey randomly typing Hamlet, or even just the sentence “To be or not to be.” It cannot happen by chance.
An understanding of evolutionary theory, however, makes clear that natural selection is not “random,” nor does it operate by “chance.” Natural selection preserves the gains and eradicates the mistakes. The eye evolved from a single light-sensitive cell into the modern complex eye through thousands of intermediate steps, many of which still exist in nature. Yes, in order for the monkey to type the first thirteen letters of Hamlet’s soliloquy by chance, it would take 2613 trials (approximately 1018 times 2) to guarantee success—a number sixteen times as great as the total number of seconds that have elapsed in the lifetime of the solar system. But if each correct letter is preserved and each incorrect letter eradicated, as happens in natural selection, the process operates much faster. How much faster? My friend and colleague Richard Hardison constructed a computer program in which letters were “selected” for or against, and it took an average of only 335.2 trials to produce the sequence of letters TOBEORNOTTOBE, which on his computer took less than ninety seconds. The entire play can be generated in about four and a half