Researchers tend to get very specialized, working mostly in just one area. But every once in a while, it’s fun for a researcher to work on something completely different. UR Professor Ted Bunn, who normally does astrophysics, just had an article accepted for publication that talks about biological evolution and its relationship to the laws of thermodynamics.
Believers in creationism and intelligent design sometimes say that Darwinian evolution is impossible, because it conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics. The second law says, very roughly, that the total amount of disorder (or entropy) in the universe always increases, so, the creationists say, it’s impossible for the orderliness of life to arise spontaneously. This argument is wrong — there’s no conflict between evolution and thermodynamics. The point of this article is to explain exactly why it’s wrong.
