There's now a follow-up entry to this post, written after the "museum" actually opened. If you want to read John Scalzi's reaction from his visit, or see his flickr set of photos from the museum, go to that entry.
Well, the grand opening of the Creation Museum is scheduled for this coming Monday, May 28th. I've blogged about this once before, lamenting the fact that $27 million was being wasted on this shrine to ignorance, but I figured that with the opening day approaching, it was worth making another post on this topic (and maybe get included in the upcoming Creation Museum Carnival, update - it's here).
There are two problems I had with this entry - the first being that this is a museum that I've never visited and that hasn't even opened yet. Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), the organization running the museum, even wrote a short entry on his blog the other day, Name-calling against Creation Museum, whining about this very issue. That isn't really all that big of a deal, though. Since this museum is being run by AiG, I'm assumimg that everything in the museum is going to be consistent with the AiG website. I wouldn't imagine that there are any new, ground breaking arguments being unveiled in this museum that AiG hasn't already put up on their website. The real problem, is that AiG is such a reposity of stupidity, it's hard to narrow down your focus to one manageable topic.
I'd been planning on writing a blog entry about a certain topic for a while now, so I might as well use this opportunity to do it, and that is to state a simple rule of thumb for dealing with creationists. Anytime somebody tries to use the Second Law of Thermodynamics to refute evolution, you should realize you're dealing with somebody who doesn't understand science or who is a liar. If it's a website, you should save yourself the time, and just leave and go look somewhere else. This may seem like a bit of an ad hominem attack, and maybe it is a bit, but life is short. You shouldn't waste your time dealing with idiots and liars. Maybe, just maybe, a website that uses the Second Law of Thermodynamics this way will have some thought provoking arguments, but it almost certainly won't be because the person running the website understood the science - they got lucky (in the same way as a million monkeys at typewriters would eventually reproduce Shakespeare), or they parroted it from somewhere else. But in any case, especially under the liar scenario, you'd have to really be careful to figure out just what you could trust from that source, and you'd be much better going somewhere more reputable.
And guess what, AiG has a page all about it, The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Answers to Critics. It's a little hard to figure out if it's based on ignorance or dishonesty. I'd guess a little bit of both, considering the author, Jonathan Sarfati, was competent enough to get a PhD. But the rule of thumb still applies - stay way from AiG if you're looking for good information.
This paragraph added 2007-05-24 After reading this, I'd imagine some people would think this rule of thumb could be even easier - anytime you're dealing with a creationist at all, you should realize you're dealing with someone who doesn't understand science or who is a liar. And, that could be true for the most part, but it's possible that creationists could be people that understand science, but haven't studied evolution/biology in particular, and don't actually know all the evidence in support of evolution, or that they have such strong faith, the evidence wouldn't matter to them, anyway. This misuse of the Second Law has nothing to do with fossil evidence, genetic evidence, or faith - it's just a complete misapplication of a scientific theory that should be obvious. So, that's why I still use this rule of thumb - it's not arguing over the interpretation of evidence (which still puts creationists on shaky ground), it's getting things wrong right from first principles. Creationists that use the Second Law of Thermodynamics argument really are the bottom of the barrel.
Okay, I guess I should first define the Second Law of Thermodynamics for anybody reading this who doesn't already know what it is. Wikipedia has three short definitions listed for it, which all seem consistent with what I was taught back in my college Thermo class:
"The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium." Rudolf Clausius
"Heat cannot of itself pass from a colder to a hotter body." Rudolf Clausis
"A transformation whose only final result is to convert heat, extracted from a source at constant temperature, into work, is impossible." Lord Kelvin
I guess you need to know what entropy is, too, to understand this. It's sometimes described as roughly equivalent to disorder, but that's to try to give students a better feel for it. Actually, I'll just go ahead and quote the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on entropy, which is pretty good.
The concept of entropy (Greek: εν (en=inside) + verb: τρέπω (trepo= to chase, escape, rotate, turn)) in thermodynamics is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which deals with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed. In contrast, the first law of thermodynamics deals with the concept of energy, which is conserved. Entropy change has often been defined as a change to a more disordered state at a molecular level. In recent years, entropy has been interpreted in terms of the "dispersal" of energy. Entropy is an extensive state function that accounts for the effects of irreversibility in thermodynamic systems.
Now, consider how evolution works - the DNA replication process isn't perfect, so organisms invariably produce offspring with slightly different genetic makeups. Since organisms have more offspring than the environment can support, it just stands to reason that the best adapted organisms will survive more often, and go on to produce even more offspring. Evolution seems inevitable.
Looking at the definition of the Second Law, and considering how evolution works, I just can't imagine at all how anybody with even the most basic understanding of the two could have dreamt up applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to trying to refute evolution. We know that the chemical reactions necessary for life occur, we know DNA replication takes place, and that there are often errors in this process. How the Second Law changes any of this is beyond me. It's just silly, and I could stop this whole blog post here. But, just for fun, let's take a look at a few of the worst things stated in AiG's article.
Consider this statement, "Open systems still have a tendency to disorder. There are special cases where local order can increase at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere." What the hell does he mean by local? On the scale of the universe, the Earth is a pretty "local" system. And individual organisms on Earth are even more "local." If I define a local system as a cup of water, when I put it in a freezer it will freeze, when I take the ice back out and set it on the counter, it will melt. Where in my open system was it a special case of only a "local" increase in order? Oh well, he gets to this later on, even though he's still wrong.
Then, in the next paragraph, "The open systems argument does not help evolution. Raw energy cannot generate the specified complex information in living things." Oh, my fault, I thought we were talking about entropy, not some unquantifiable concept dreamed up by creationists.
And just a few paragraphs later, Sarfati writes, "I suggest that thermodynamic arguments are excellent when done properly, and the 'open systems' canard is anticipated. Otherwise I suggest concentrating on information content." There's a reason why it's anticipated - it's the proper, correct response. And then his next suggestion is to change the subject away from real thermodynamics to that unquantifiable term. Hmm, maybe it was more dishonesty, and not ignorance.
In a later section about crystals, he does address ice. First, he quotes somebody named Boyce Rensberger,
If the Second Law truly prohibited local emergence of increased order, there would be no ice cubes. The greater orderliness of water molecules in ice crystals than in the liquid state is purchased with the expenditure of energy at the generator that made the electricity to run the freezer. And that makes it legal under the Second Law.
Sarfati's response nearly made me crack up:
Rensberger is ignorant of the creationist responses to this argument. An energy source is not enough to produce the specified complexity of life. The energy must be directed in some way. The ice cubes of his example would not form if the electrical energy was just wired into liquid water! Instead, we would get lots of heat, and the water breaking up into simpler components, hydrogen and oxygen.
Hmm. What happens in the winter, then? Is it impossible for ice in a lake to freeze without human intervention, making sure all the energy sources are hooked up the right way?
A little later in this section, the article starts trying to further explain the complex specified information concept. Sarfati tries to show how DNA is so much different from crystals.
Many scientific experiments show that when their building blocks are simply mixed and chemically combined, a random sequence results. To make a protein, scientists need to add one unit at a time, and each unit requires a number of chemical steps to ensure that the wrong type of reaction doesn't occur. The same goes for preparing a DNA strand in a correct sequence.
I really fail to see how this supports the thermodynamic argument. Sure, it shows that proteins aren't simple, and that conditions need to be just right to create them, but that's to be expected. If anything, by admitting that scientists make proteins in the lab, Sarfati shows there's nothing mystical about them. The likelihood of abiogenesis is debatable (and yes, notice how he shifted the argument from evolution to abiogenesis), but it's not impossible, and it certainly doesn't violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
The third section is laughably silly, "Did the 2nd Law begin at the Fall?" As if God would completely change the nature of everything because Adam and Eve ate that apple, and that maybe in the garden of Eden, water would spontaneously crystalize into ice even on a hundred degree day. To be fair, AiG said that the Second Law must have been around from the beginning, but what does it say about their target audience that they even need to say it? I think Sarfati's wording is little funny, too, "No, I would not say that entropy/Second Law of Thermodynamics began at the Fall.' I would not say... You'd think he could have been a little more emphatic about it. He almost makes it sound like his opinion.
Entropy is used to figure out whether or not certain events will occur. We know that all the chemical reactions necessary for life do indeed happen, and we know that mutations do indeed occur. Thus the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't preclude evolution at all. (In fact,we have even directly witnessed genetic mutations leading to the evolution of bacteria in multiple ways - resistance to antibiotics, ability to digest new food sources like nylon, etc.). AiG has a page that actually defends this old fallacy, and even blatantly states, as was noted above, "I suggest that thermodynamic arguments are excellent when done properly..." So go ahead and use my rule of thumb - steer clear of AiG. Whether because its members are inept or dishonest, this group is not to be trusted. And unless their new museum is a complete break from everything they've done to this point, it is a complete waste of $27 million that could have been put to much better use.
(If you want to read another explanation of how the Second Law of Thermodynamics relates to evolution, just go to the appropriate entry in the Index to Creationist Claims on Talk Origins. They don't include my handy little rule of thumb, but they do have references.)
There's now a follow-up entry to this post, written after the "museum" actually opened. If you want to read John Scalzi's reaction from his visit, or see his flickr set of photos from the museum, go to that entry.
Modified 2011-07-18: I'd originally misspelled Sarfati's last name as Safarti. I corrected it following the convention of striking through the typo and following that with the correct spelling (i.e. Safarti Sarfati). Well, a friend of mine who just read this article thought I was playing a juvenile joke (fart) and that the misspelling was intentional. Of course, I wasn't trying to do anything of the sort, so I've decided to simply remove the struck out typos. I think that as long as people are aware of the correction, especially for a simple misspelling, there's no harm in changing what I wrote.)
