Entropy: The Enemy of Macroevolution

To give Christians a helpful framework for understanding evolution (beyond the general definition that evolution means change over time), I think it’s important to breakdown evolution into two major categories: microevolution (small changes) and macroevolution (large changes), and to share a simple way to assess whether macroevolution is reasonable using the concept of entropy.

Microevolution is small changes that occur within a species and can usually be observed on a shorter timescale. For example, observing how a litter of puppies differ from their parents, or perhaps, observing how bird beak lengths might change over the course of thirty years in response to changes in environmental conditions. Another example might be mutations occurring in a population of mice that gives certain mice a beneficial, camouflaging coat color in the desert. Mice with that coat color are more likely to survive, they are more likely to reproduce, and the prevalence of the trait in the population will likely increase over time.

Macroevolution, however, is large changes that might lead to speciation (new species) and occurs over longer periods of time. Macroevolution involves forensic-type investigations because it is an attempt to understand changes that would have occurred over a large timescale. For example, the hypothesis that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor would be a macroevolutionary investigation. Macroevolution is more theoretical and forensic, whereas microevolution, since it operates on a shorter timescale and is observable in real-time, is certainly more factual than it is theoretical.

For Christians, we don’t need to be opposed to microevolution. Small adaptations within a species to allow them to be better suited to their environment is an observable fact of nature, and it doesn’t contradict anything in Scripture. However, macroevolutionary theory calls into question the actual special creation events that Genesis teaches. Genesis teaches us that God created the kinds of organisms we see in nature, not necessarily every distinct species, but certainly every type of lifeform, which may mean that God created at the family level of taxonomic classification, rather than at the species level. This would still allow for the special creation of the categories of organisms described in Genesis, while also allowing for microevolutionary changes that could lead to the plethora of species within those categories that we observe today.

Macroevolutionary theory posits large changes over large amounts of time, leading to new creatures, with new body plans, and completely new traits. The fuel for this change is vast, but the most common explanation is that variation arises in offspring (possibly from mutations), that are then selected for over time by the environment (thus nature chooses who lives and who dies). The winners are more likely to reproduce, and thus their advantageous traits are preserved, and those disadvantageous traits often peter off into extinction because they weren’t fit for survival, or they stick around as vestigial structures.

Macroevolutionary theory attempts to make the case that nature can achieve the assemblage of new cellular structures, tissues, organs, organ systems, and organisms; the issue is that this must be done within what is essentially a disorganizing and dying Universe. In this sense, the theory is counterintuitive; it posits self-organization from a Universe that tends towards self-destruction. Now, many scientific discoveries have been counterintuitive and still true, but is this the case with macroevolution?

Our observations of the cosmos reveal that the Universe is expanding to what will ultimately be a form of heat death; where all the warmth will become so spread out that no life could possibly exist; it will simply be too cold, with too little molecular motion, for anything to survive. This isn’t a hopeful picture for the destiny of all species. And while that in and of itself doesn’t say anything about the validity of evolutionary events that may have occurred in the past, it does mean that all evolutionary events in the past, present, and future, are ultimately meaningless. These events may build beautiful creatures that can better survive in their changing environments, but in the end, every evolved creature will go extinct at the end of the Universe as heat death occurs.

But the concept of ultimate meaning is irrelevant to whether macroevolution is true. The most serious problem for macroevolution is that it isn’t justified by observation, our life experience, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which is the study of heat and its relation to other forms of energy). The Second Law, however, is justified by observation and life experience, and it illustrates the opposite claims of macroevolution.
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The Second Law has two major components: the Kelvin statement, which says that no process can convert heat completely into work in a cycle, there is always wasted heat that is released to the surrounding environment [1]; and the Clausius statement, which says that it is impossible for a colder object to transfer heat to a hotter object without the input of work, and that heat always flows from hot to cold [2-3].

These claims are empirically verified. But one major implication of these statements is the concept of entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorder (or how messy and disorganized things are). Empirical evidence reveals that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, it can only increase or stay the same. This means that all natural processes ultimately lead to an increase in the disorder, or the disorganization, of the Universe, because the Universe is an isolated system.

Therefore, the ultimate end to all things is disorder.

When I teach entropy to my science classes, I always use the example of someone throwing bricks into a pile. I’ll ask them, “Is it more likely that the bricks become a pile of rubble or a house?” The probability that the bricks become a pile of rubble is much more likely.

Another example I like to use is one of video game cords. When we were kids, we used to always place the power cords and controllers to our gaming consoles into a box when we weren’t using them. Somehow, eventually, the box of cords always got more disorganized and messier, even though we always wrapped the cords up before we put them back in the box! It was a massive headache trying to pull out the cords, find their ends, and re-organize the placement of everything in the box.

And in your own life, every day is a war against entropy. Clothes need to be washed, dishes need to be put away, car parts break down and need to be replaced, spoiled food needs to be thrown out, etc. My daughter is two years old, and she constantly runs around our house playing with toys, leaving chunks of food in different places, and generally makes things more disorderly. We have to teach her what order looks like. We have to teach her to battle entropy.

Everyone at some point in their life will make the same fundamental realization: our whole life is a battle against entropy. Almost everything we do throughout the day is a struggle to reestablish order in places where order is naturally breaking down, and the moment you lag behind, it will catch up with you. So even though our whole life is lived with this observation that entropy always increases, and that we must work extremely hard, using intelligence and grit, to battle against it, macroevolutionary theory would have us believe that we are actually the product of that chaos. Our whole life experience is a battle against this fundamental truth of the Universe, and yet we are supposed to be the product of it?

I find this hard to believe.

This would mean that all the order we see in a simple microbe, or in a more intricately designed eukaryotic cell, or in the assemblage of codependent organ systems in higher organisms, is all the product of time and chaos-generating processes. Even though, from our experience, we’ve only observed time and chaos-generating processes to create more chaos.

Another common illustration is that of a tornado running through a junkyard. If this occurs, how likely is it that the chaos slaps together a Ford F-150, fully functioning, with XM radio? While this is obviously impossible, that is essentially what we are to believe with macroevolution, given enough mutations, gene duplications, reproduction events, crossing over, neutral evolution, etc., and time (billions of years), we get more and more advanced forms of life until we achieve humans, the apex of nature.

But when you add more time and more chaos, you just end up with more bits of destructed material, you end up with more broken bricks, you don’t end up with highly optimized, codependent parts that mirror the designs of mechanical engineers. We’ve observed what causes the construction and design of a Ford F-150, and rather than being the result of natural processes, it is the result of intelligence.

Some opponents to this application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics would say that even though a closed system must increase in entropy, that doesn’t mean there can’t be isolated events or processes where entropy decreases in an open system (such as the Earth), where energy is added from the surrounding environment (such as by the Sun), so long as the total entropy of the Universe still increases. While this is true, as we can observe spontaneous reactions producing more organized molecules using energy from the sun (like what takes place in the atmosphere with the formation of ozone, or in the random assemblage of amino acid polymers in a simulated primordial soup), we still have to ask ourselves if these energy inputs from outside sources into an open system are likely to decrease entropy enough to create the type of complexity that is required for life, or even if it is capable of fueling the needed changes for the major advancements that may have taken place in the history of life.

Granville Sewel in his paper published in Bio-Complexity, has explained well how these undirected forces could not reasonably produce the complexity needed for life [4]. He essentially points out that even if a natural process could theoretically make something more orderly, that doesn’t mean it is probable to make something highly specific and complex. There are mountains of probability and entropy that must be overcome for life to get off the ground, as well as for large-scale changes to occur within living creatures, such as with the generation of new body plans or entirely new features. And the greatest enemy of all these needed developments is entropy.

Bill Dembski, the mathematician, detailed an argument relevant to this topic, where he makes the case that unintelligent forces do not produce specified complexity [5]. In an article written just this year (2024), Bill responded to the strange Wikipedia article about him that claims his concept of specified complexity is simply pseudoscience for creationists (even though the concept came from Watson and Crick’s study of the order of DNA!) [6]. He uses an example to explain what specified complexity is:

“Complex Specified Order: THISSEQUENCEOFLETTERSISACARRIEROFMEANING. Example in nature: A DNA sequence coding for a protein.” [6]

In this sequence of letters, there is a combination of multiple different characters (showing complexity), and they are arranged in a specific order (specified), thus, the sequence possesses specified complexity. That is the type of meaningful sequence that is not produced by natural processes. While natural processes might produce simple repeating units of specified information, such as in the case of repeating Na+ and Cl- ions in a crystal lattice of salt (this would be specified simplicity); and nature might even cause complex information to come together that is non-specified (random), such as in the random assortment of amino acid polymers in a synthetic primordial soup (unspecified complexity); but natural processes do not produce highly complex, specified sets of information like what is found in the digital code of computers, or in the information code of the cell (DNA). We have not observed meaningful, long-form specified complexity to arise from natural processes, nor has it been demonstrated that it is even possible to occur under natural conditions.

With this example provided by Bill Dembski, you could imagine, if you randomly started to change those letters, it’s going to degrade the sequence and lose its meaning long before you get a new sentence with a different meaning. The move from specified complexity to unspecified complexity is vastly more likely than a change to a more specific, more valuable, and more orderly arrangements of letters. The random letters that replace the specific ones will likely result in a less-meaningful sentence; it will likely break the necessary English conventions of vowel-consonant arrangements or create words that aren’t in the English vocabulary at all.

While we could theorize how the sentence could be changed to also carry another type of meaning (such as a change from “carrier” to “barrier”), the issue is that when changes occur in random locations within the sentence, especially in multiple locations, the result will almost certainly create meaninglessness, just as throwing bricks into a pile will almost certainly create rubble. And the longer entropy works with the sentence, the more meaningless it will become.

And it’s not just the adaptation of the sentence into a new type of sentence that’s the problem (a Darwinian framework could at least provide an explanation on how that could occur); the real issue is getting the sentence in the first place. How does a long meaningful sentence (specified complexity) arise by purely natural processes? And more importantly, how does an entire book’s worth of information come together by natural processes?

When you read a book, you find purposefully arranged letters that form coherent sentences, sentences that form paragraphs, and paragraphs that form chapters, all of which contribute to the broader narrative or topic. What we see in every cell of our bodies is very similar. We observe purposefully arranged nucleotides that make up each gene in the human body, with each gene contributing to the structure of each chromosome, and all the chromosomes contributing to the genome (all our DNA). With upwards of 20,000 genes, you could think of the human genome as the most sophisticated book ever written.

Another more accurate analogy is that of a computer program. A computer program has lines of code that are processed, translated, and executed by the computer to render certain actions, processes, or graphics for the benefit of the user. This is similar to how DNA works, DNA is transcribed to make RNA copies, and the RNA copies are translated by a ribosome to make proteins, and these proteins facilitate certain actions or processes for the benefit of the cell, and in multicellular organisms, for the benefit of the creature overall. In this sense, the DNA is a computer program, it works at the information-level to cause broader effects. The question we should ask ourselves is where did this information (long-form specified complexity) come from? Where did the lines of code come from?

Many would say that billions of years (time) and slight modifications (adaptation through various mechanisms) are the cause, and the effect is that the cell becomes more advanced. But if entropy has anything to say about DNA, its natural course would be one of degradation, not of vast innovation and assembly. Just as randomly changing a computer program will cause it to lose its function, and randomly changing the letters and sentences in a book will cause it to lose its meanings, entropy will cause the degradation of DNA sequences. A computer programmer is required for a computer program, and an intelligent agent is required for the DNA program.
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Bill Gates once wrote in 1995 in The Road Ahead, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created” [7]. If we are not to believe that great books and great computers can arise from natural processes, then we shouldn’t believe that the most sophisticated nanotechnology in the Universe can arise within the cell by natural processes either. The foundational intuition in our minds that highly specific and ordered systems (those that move against entropy), are often better explained by intelligence than by natural processes. Naturalists have attempted to marry the two most disparate observations of the Universe: (1) that entropy destroys order in the Universe, and (2) that living systems are highly ordered; however, it is clear that such an endeavor ignores the commonsense intuition that highly ordered and specific systems arise from intelligence.

Cite: Faucett, D. (2024). Entropy: The Enemy of Macroevolution. Science Faith and Reasoning. Retrieved from: https://www.scifr.com/articles/entropy-the-enemy-of-macroevolution​ 
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References:
1. Thomson, W. (1851). "On the Dynamical Theory of Heat, with numerical results deduced from Mr Joule's equivalent of a Thermal Unit, and M. Regnault's Observations on Steam". Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. XX (part II): 261–268, 289–298.
2. Clausius, R. (1854). "Über eine veränderte Form des zweiten Hauptsatzes der mechanischen Wärmetheorie" (PDF). Annalen der Physik. xciii (12): 481–506. Bibcode:1854AnP...169..481C. doi:10.1002/andp.18541691202. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 March 2014. Retrieved 24 March 2014.
3. Libretexts. (2022, November 7). 6.4: The second law of thermodynamics- Kelvin-Planck and Clausius statements. Engineering LibreTexts. https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Mechanical_Engineering/Introduction_to_Engineering_Thermodynamics_(Yan)/06%3A_Entropy_and_the_Second_Law_of_Thermodynamics/6.04%3A_The_second_law_of_thermodynamics-_Kelvin-Planck_and_Clausius_statements#:~:text=Clausius%20statement%3A%20it%20is%20impossible%20to%20construct%20a,higher-temperature%20body.%20Figure%206.3.2%20illustrates%20the%20Clausius%20statement.
4. Sewell G (2013) Entropy and evolution. BIO-Complexity 2013 (2): 1-5. doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2013.2
5. Dembski, W. (2006). The Design Inference: Cambridge Studies in Probability, Induction and Decision Theory. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge).
6. Dembski, B. (2024, March 8). Specified complexity made simple. Bill Dembski. https://billdembski.com/intelligent-design/specified-complexity-made-simple/
7. Gates, B,  Myhrvold, N., Rinearson, P. (1995). The Road Ahead (1st ed.). Viking Penguin. ISBN 978-0-670-77289-6.

Daniel Faucett

M.S. Biology
B.S. General Science & Education