"There is no need of explaining the origin of life in terms of the miraculous or the supernatural. Life occurs automatically whenever the conditions are right. It will not only emerge but persist and evolve."¹-Harlow Shapley"

"In its own way, matter has obeyed from the beginning that great law of biology to which we shall have to refer time and time again, the law of complexification. "² -Teihard de Chardin

Such statements are easy to find when one is discussing the origin of life. All one has to do is wait for the right conditions, and life will appear. The ease with which these statements are made disguises the difficulties which are encountered when examining the physics of the origin of life. The two writers above, one a respected scientist, the other a famous philosopher, ignore the second law of thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics is a law of physics. It has governed every chemical, physical or biological interaction ever studied. Basically, the law states that everything tends to run down. Clocks run down; wind-up toys run down; rocks fall down off cliffs but never fall up. In fact, the universe is running down. Physicists tell us that the end of the universe will be cold and black with no light, motion or heat.

The second law of thermodynamics could well be stated as follows: "In any ordered system, open or closed, there exists a tendency for that system to decay to a state of disorder, which tendency can only be suspended or reversed by an external source of ordering energy directed by an informational program and transformed through an ingestion-storage-converter mechanism into the specific work required to build up the complex structure of that system."³

Another way of explaining this second law is to say that everything tends ultimately to fall apart. Houses deteriorate. Toys break. Certain chemicals spontaneously decompose. Even the diamond in a beautiful ring slowly changes back to black, messy carbon; for a diamond is nothing more than a special form of carbon.

What does all this have to do with the origin of life? Well, if the tendency of all chemicals is to fall apart rather than get more complex, the theory of the chemical evolution of life is in serious trouble and the two statements cited above would be wrong. The second law is a law of simplification, and its work has been observed in every laboratory in the world. It is opposite in effect to deChardin's "law of complexification. "

"Scientists constantly talk about how improbable the origin of life is, then state that given eons of time the improbable would become probable and life would arise. However, the second law of thermodynamics indicates that this is not true. Every substance, according to the second law, displays a finite probability of occurrence, but also displays a finite probability of dissolution.⁴ Very little is spoken of the probability of break-up of the chemicals being formed by evolution.

George Wald writes,

"In the vast majority of the processes in which we are interested the point of equilibrium lies far over towards the side of dissolution, That is to say, spontaneous dissolution is much more probable and hence proceeds much more rapidly than spontaneous synthesis."⁵

This means that when the chemicals were "evolving" into life, the long biological chemicals, once synthesized, were far more likely to break up than they were to form. If these chemicals were breaking up faster than they formed, how did enough of them accumulate to form the first cell?

Arthur Eddington notes,

"But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."⁶

The usual approach taken to escape the conclusions of the second law as it applies to the early evolution of life is to claim that the second law is not applicable to the problem since the earth is an "open" system. Thermodynamics was developed using chemical and mechanical systems which were prevented from either gaining or losing energy or matter with the external world. The earth is receiving energy from the sun all the time and therefore it is claimed that the chemical evolution of life could occur.

Time magazine, criticizing the creationist position on the second law, states,

"In 1977 Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born professor at the Free University of Brussels, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for proving that the second law does not apply to 'open systems' such as living creatures, because living things can acquire new energy. Plants grow healthy by soaking up sunlight, even though the sun, the source of the solar system's energy, is slowly burning out.”⁷

This work of Prigogine's applies only to living systems as they presently are structured

Photosynthesis is the process by which a plant captures energy from the sun and stores this energy in the form of chemical bonds. When we eat the plant, our bodies utilize the energy to grow bigger and to maintain our present type of body structure. The chloroplast is the motor which captures and directs the sun's energy toward useful work. Burning gasoline does not produce useful work unless there is a mechanism which directs the energy in the proper direction-. That function is accomplished by the engine in a car.

When referring to the chemical origin of life, however, we are talking about a time before the chloroplast was made; a time before there was a machine which captured stored and directed the solar energy toward the manufacture of complex chemical compounds. It doesn't matter whether the earth is "open" or "closed" as a system since, without a machine to direct the energy, the chemical evolution of life cannot utilize the solar energy. Thus as far as the chemicals are concerned, they could just as well be in a closed system, surrounded with solar energy, but with no way to use it. It is much like being on a raft in the ocean with no fresh water. There is water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

As George Wald noted,

"What we ask here is to synthesize organic molecules without such a machine. I believe this to be the most stubborn problem that confronts us-the weakest link at present in our argument. I do not think it by any means disastrous, but it calls for phenomena and forces some of which are as yet only partly understood and some probably still to be discovered."'8

Even in an "open system”, Prigogine had reservations about the origin of life: He writes,

"The point is that in a non-isolated system there exists a possibility for formation of ordered, low-entropy structures at sufficiently low temperatures. This ordering principle is responsible for the appearance of ordered structures such as crystals as well as for the phenomena of phase transition"

Unfortunately, this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures. The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly-ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of the billions of years during which pre-biotic evolution occurred."9

The most he said was that he hoped his studies might someday lead to a solution of the problem of the origin of life from non-life. But he acknowledged that we are nowhere near such a solution. He showed that in certain liquid systems, a highly "dissipative" environment might generate some kind of "structure" in one corner of that environment (e.g., vortices in a rapidly heating coffee pot). However, this has been known for a long time, and in no way proves t hat living systems might emerge from non-living systems simply by placing them in a rapidly dissipating energy milieu.

The very real conflict between evolution and the second law (in open as well as closed systems) is nowhere near to being solved. Even if it were solved in the future, the evolution model still would not be as good as the creation model. That is, at best, the evolution model might possibly someday be able to "explain" the second law in an evolutionary context, but the creation model predicts it!

NOTES

1. Harold Shapely, Science News Letter, July 3, 1965, p. 10, cited by A.E. Wilder Smith, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, Wheaton: Harold Shaw, 1968, p. 163
2. Tielhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Matt, New York: Harper & Row, 1959,p. 48
.3. Morris, Henry M., King of Creation, San Diego: CLP Publishers, 1980, p. 114.
4. George Wald, "The Origin of Life", Scientific American, Vol. 191: 1954, p. 49.5. Ibid.
6. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, New York: MacMillan, 1930, p. 74, cited by Bolton Davidheiser, Evolution and Christian Faith, Grand Rapids: Baker Bookhouse, 1969, p. 221.
7. Kenneth M. Pierce, "Putting Darwin Back in the Dock", Time, March 16, 1981, p.81
.8. George Wald, op. cit. p. 50.
9. Ilya Prigogine, Gregoire Nicolis & Agnes Babloyants, "Thermodynamics of Evolution," Physics Today Vol. 25, November 1972, p. 23.