evolution

Since I operate a Web site called evolution, which is not at all named after the branch of science, I sometimes get bizarre e-mails with some claim or another about evolutionary biology. The following message was sent to me earlier this week by one “Joshua Brophy”, with the subject line “Hello there little fellow”; and is reprinted in its entirety, warts and all:

I was wondering how you mean to explain given the first & second LAW of thermodynamics how all things came into being LOL. Did you know that our bodies have a verry complex system that fights off mutations and without it we would die LOL. Did you know that all men share the same ancestry geneticly and are traced back 6,000 years to the time when the bible sais that God created Adam & Eve! Isnt that coincidental LOL. My God it gets better! Can you show any single incident anywheres where new information was ever found in the genome of anything?? LOL HAHAHA man it must suck to have sutch little foundation in your thinking WOW!

First of all, I am 6′2″ and 260 pounds, so unfortunately the last time I was a “little” anything was in 1988, when I was cramming down cream-cheese topped crackers and Swiss Cake Rolls in my sainted late great-grandmother’s living room while watching cartoons after school.

Now, how one gets to the creation of the Universe and everything in it from the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics is beyond me. I studied mathematics in college and graduate school, so the subtleties of physics may perhaps be beyond my grasp. According to Wikipedia, the First Law of Thermodynamics says:

The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings.

In essence, it says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. If energy increases in one part of the universe, it must decrease in another, preserving the balance.

I fail to see what that has to do with evolution or Creationism. If anything, it’s an argument against Creation — albeit a poor one, as I’ll later explain — but its effect on evolution is lost on me. Perhaps if there are any evolutionary biologists in the audience, they will enlighten us as to the connection.

I didn’t know this — mostly because I was a mathematics student, and thus again not cognizant of such subtleties — but apparently the Second Law of Thermodynamics is often cited in arguments against evolution, because TalkOrigins has a few paragraphs dedicated to refuting such arguments. For the record (again according to Wikipedia), the Second Law of Thermodynamics says:

It is impossible to obtain a process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work.

Well, what the hell does that mean exactly? The way it’s taught in schools is that “entropy in a closed system never decreases”, which is a misconception. Take a look at the mathematical formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the link I provided, and think back to your first calculus class. It says that the rate of change of entropy at any given instant is non-negative, meaning that entropy in the universe usually — but not always — increases. It can hold steady for systems in equilibrium, and it can decrease locally as long as it increases somewhere else.

As for the argument via evolutionary science, I’ll let TalkOrigins do the talking for me:

The thermodynamics argument against evolution displays a misconception about evolution as well as about thermodynamics, since a clear understanding of how evolution works should reveal major flaws in the argument. Evolution says that organisms reproduce with only small changes between generations (after their own kind, so to speak). For example, animals might have appendages which are longer or shorter, thicker or flatter, lighter or darker than their parents. Occasionally, a change might be on the order of having four or six fingers instead of five. Once the differences appear, the theory of evolution calls for differential reproductive success. For example, maybe the animals with longer appendages survive to have more offspring than short-appendaged ones. All of these processes can be observed today. They obviously don’t violate any physical laws.

That should be enough to convince you, whatever your feelings about Creationism and evolution (and these need not be mutually exclusive, mind you), that the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are irrelevant to the discussion. TalkOrigins maintains an archive of such arguments invoking the Second Law of Thermodynamics (not all of which I have read) here.

Mr Brophy also states that humans “share the same ancestry geneticly are traced back [genetically] 6,000 years to the time when the bible sais that God created Adam & Eve” and asks “Can you show any single incident anywheres where new information was ever found in the genome of anything??”

First, the idea that humans share the same genetic ancestry should surprise no one. One should expect to be somewhat similar genetically to one’s immediately-preceding relatives, and one should expect fellow descendents of those relatives to be genetically similar to oneself. My youngest brother looks a lot like me (except younger and skinnier); my middle brother is a dead ringer for my grandfather, and his children have blonde hair — which is not a surprise given that both he and his wife have blonde hair.

Next, the statement that humans “are traced back [genetically] 6,000 years to the time when the bible sais that God created Adam & Eve” is obviously false, as this genealogy research project shows:

On the Internet, Carvin located Family Tree DNA, a small Houston firm created to answer such questions. He mailed in a sample of his DNA, gathered by swabbing the inside of his cheek, and waited. In late October, he got a call from Bennett Greenspan, president of Family Tree DNA. Not only did his Y chromosome have the cohanim markers­, but other markers matched with those of another man in the database, making it likely that they share a forefather within the past 250 years.

So, just before Thanksgiving, Carvin set off on a DNA-induced family reunion. He took the train from his home in Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and met Bill Swersky, a 59-year-old federal official. “We immediately hit it off,” says Carvin. “I felt like I was visiting one of my uncles.” Over smoked whitefish and bagels, they paged through family photos. Andy’s dad looks like Bill’s father. Bill’s son looks like Andy when he was younger. “He’s a hell of a lot better looking than I am,” Swersky says of his new relative. “I’m jealous.”

It’s exceedingly unusual to find such treasure in the genetic attic. Humans are very much alike genetically, with most of the variation within­rather than between­ethnic groups. Carvin and Swersky struck gold because they’re part of the small cohanim group, which is itself a subset of an insular group, Jews. Finns, Sardinians, and Basques are among other groups with small founding populations that also have highly distinctive genetic pedigrees. By contrast, most people of European origin are so genetically mixed that it’s impossible to tell German from Frenchman, Bosnian from Serb.

But the tools of biotechnology have become so powerful that it’s now possible to deduce ancient human history from a drop of blood or a few shed skin cells. This molecular view of the past is already being employed to trace the cause of ailments such as cancer and heart disease, as well as aiding individuals like Carvin in tracking their roots. Most significantly for scientists studying past human life and culture, it offers the best insight yet into the abiding mystery of how modern Homo sapiens arose out of archaic hominids who first left Africa about 1.7 million years ago. “It’s a very exciting time,” says Colin Renfrew, a professor of archaeology at the University of Cambridge. “In the next 10 years the whole course of early human history is going to become very much clearer.”

Indeed, in recent months, two groups of geneticists have published sweeping chronicles of the peopling of Europe, one tracing maternal DNA lineages, the other, paternal. These findings portray the majority of European forebears arriving from the Middle East as hunter-gatherers 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. During the last Ice Age, these first Europeans fled south to Iberia, Ukraine, and the Balkans. As the ice retreated, the Ice Age survivors spread out and flourished. The last major migration from the East 9,000 years ago brought agriculture and domestic animals but did not displace the earlier settlers, as some researchers had thought.

Furthermore, the Creation story in the Book of Genesis does not mention any specific time of creation, thereby making the statement that the Bible says God created Adam and Eve “about 6,000 years ago” false. I’ll grant that the Bible may implicitly suggest such a timeframe, but I have no idea where; I’m not a Biblical scholar, so I have no idea where the 6,000 years comes from.

As for “new information” in the human genome, I cite the fact that I walk upright and am smart enough to buy meat at the grocery store rather than attempting to hunt it in the back yard using a sharp stick, tripping over my knuckles all the while. However, I remind you that I am not an evolutionary biologist, and that my understanding may be imperfect.

As I noted earlier, fervent belief in Christianity and a solid grounding in science need not be incompatible. No less a scientist than the celebrated Stephen Hawking writes often in his book A Brief History of Time of the wonder he feels when he thinks about the universe, and mentions God and Creation several times. It’s rather sad that so many, such as Mr Brophy, do not see it that way.

UPDATE: Josh Rosenau appears on cue in the comments and delivers an explanation of the “6,000 years” number: counting all the “begats” in the Book of Matthew and then claiming that all generations of humanity are accounted for; hardly a scientific process. He also points out some interesting reading from Prof. Keith Miller of my alma mater, Kansas State University, who appears to defend a “theistic” model of science.