In a brief article hosted by apologetics.org, Andy McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory at the University of Leeds, UK, attempts to that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics does prohibit evolution after all.
The odd thing about the article is McIntosh's failure to realise that any such argument applies to life itself as much as (or more than) it does to evolution. Yet it is rare to hear even the staunchest of Young-Earth Creationists argue that life cannot exist, because the Second Law says so....
Let's take a look through the article, point by point, and see what merit, if any, McIntosh's argument has.
The article begins with an introduction by Tom Woodward. Woodward's penultimate sentence contains the answer to the conundrum of how the Sun's energy can be used to reduce entropy:
"McIntosh argues that the sunlight flooding the earth is no help at all, unless machines are present which can harness the energy."
It is with some incredulity that I read that sentence and realised that Woodward wrote it without apparently noticing that he'd just described the role of leaves.
But on to Prof McIntosh:
After a brief preamble, he moves on to a subtle dishonesty, by referring to himself as a scientist who "believe[s] in intelligent design." This is perhaps disingenuous rather than outright dishonest, but it does not bode well for McIntosh's writing. The term "intelligent design" is generally used by Old-Earth Creationists as a means to make their ideas appear scientific, with the intention of shoe-horning them into school science classrooms – viz. the packages distributed by McIntosh's group, mentioned by Woodward. McIntosh is however a Young-Earth Creationist, apparently hopping on to the ID bandwagon. He's not the only one to do this, it's a blatant attempt to grab on to a pseudo-scientific mantle of credibility.
He then makes a basic error of understanding when he tries to rebut the idea that natural selection creates new biological structures. This is of course a straw man argument: no-one actually says that natural selection alone achieves that. There has to be some variation in a population for natural selection to work on.
His next paragraph comprises a half-decent layman's outline of the Second Law, followed by a really odd analogy, perhaps a mangling of Hoyle's 747-in-a-junkyard fallacy:
"Boeing 777s cannot be made in a car factory by adding loads of sunlight or electricity unless the machinery is available to use that energy to build Boeing 777s."
The thing is, even cars cannot be made in a car factory merely by letting sunlight in through the factory windows. What on earth is this Boeing 777 business? But mercifully he drops this bizarre attempt at an analogy by getting to the actual point:
"Similarly the human brain cannot be formed from simpler machines just by adding energy if there is no machinery available to do this."
And he's right, up to a point: complexity doesn't increase just by the addition of energy. It takes some other physics and chemistry for that to happen. Much depends on what exactly is meant by "complexity." Crystals are often cited as non-biological examples of a reduction of entropy in nature, to show that it can occur without Intelligent Intervention. But which is more comlex: a crystal, with its molecules in regular, ordered patterns, or the liquid formed by melting it, with the molecules in a randomised, disordered, mobile disarray? It seems pretty obvious that the liquid is more complex - and this complexity is acheived by adding energy, but with the additional physics of the phase change.
Prof McIntosh then does something commendable: he defines a machine as "a device for using energy to do work of some kind," and in a series of examples he includes leaves using photosynthesis to capture the energy of sunlight. I do wonder if Tom Woodward noticed that when he wrote his introduction.
McIntosh then spoils it, in the very same paragraph, by employing an argument from big numbers (which is of course a type of argument from personal incredulity, and as such is a logical fallacy: "I can't understand this, so it can't be true"). He says:
"... [C]hemical machinery at the molecular level involves setting up proteins of hundreds and usually thousands of polypeptides bonds linking a string of amino acids. And each of these bonds is in a raised energy state such that left to itself, it would break down and not stay in that state. To suggest, as some are saying, that the raised energy state would be maintained while natural selection favored over many generations single random mutations one by one to finally bring together the full complement of necessary amino acids is frankly thermodynamically absurd."
Of course, it doesn't require a Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory to spot where the real absurdity lies here: it's McIntosh's apparent assumption that these "raised energy state[s]" are inherited down the generations – that the actual individual molecules are passed down the family tree. That simply doesn't happen. Furthermore, even within a single living thing, no molecule's energy state is elevated for any longer than it would be in a non-biological chemical process: there's simply no mechanism with which to keep a molecule in an excited state. So where he's getting this "raised energy state [that is] maintained" for generations is anyone's guess.
Moving on, he astutely observes that:
"... [N]ew machines are not made by simply adding energy to existing machines."
He's expecting us to take the machine analogy a bit too literally, but as stated this is true. But then he makes a leap of logic so extraordinary that only a Creationist could read it with a straight face:
"Intelligence is needed."
This, quite simply, does not follow. In the case of actual machines, even, you can turn an LED into a laser-diode by passing a higher current through it (though I grant that it wouldn't work for long: you'd have to develop, or dare I say evolve the design so it wouldn't instantly fry itself). But of course life is not a machine. Evolution can make a more efficient leaf, but since car factory machinery does not reproduce it needs a designer of some kind. Since plants do reproduce, they need no Intelligent Intervention to pass on their "design." Natural Selection then chooses between the variations that result from the imperfections in the process.
He goes on:
"If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub part or latently coded for in the DNA template) then this argument would have been falsified. No one has ever achieved this."
This claim is patently false, of course. New capabilities have been observed to evolve, such as the bacteria that can digest nylon.
He then quotes another Creationist's argument from personal incredulity, and concludes with a risible attempt to portray his side as "experimental science," which doesn't even merit a rebuttal.
And that's that!