5.7: How could living organisms arise "by chance"? (Creation versus Evolution)
Description
This article is from the Scientific Skepticism FAQ, by Paul Johnson Paul@treetop.demon.co.uk with numerous contributions by others.
5.7: How could living organisms arise "by chance"? (Creation versus Evolution)
This is actually a less sophisticated version of the question above.
Consider freezing water as an example. The wonderful arrangement
in crystals arises from the random movement of water molecules. But
ice crystals do not require divine intervention as an explanation, and
neither does the evolution of life.
Also, consider a casino. An honest casino makes a profit from
roulette wheels. The result of a spin of a particular wheel is purely
random, but casinos make very predictable profits. So in evolutionary
theory, even though the occurrence of a particular mutation is random,
the overall effect of improved adaptation to the environment over time
is not.
The actual origin of life is more problematical. If you stick some
ammonia, methane and a few other simple chemicals into a jar and
subject them to ultraviolet light then after a week or two you get a
mixture of organic molecules, including amino acids (the building
blocks of protein). So current theories propose a "primordial soup"
of dilute organic chemicals. Somewhere a molecule happened to form
which could make copies of itself out of other molecules floating
around in the soup, and the rest is history.
Ilya Prigogine's work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics (for which he
received a Nobel prize) shows that thermodynamic systems far out of
equilibrium tend to produce spontaneous order through what he calls
"dissipative structures". Dissipative structures trade a *local*
increase in orderliness for faster overall increase in entropy. Life
can be viewed as a dissipative structure in exactly this sense --- not
a wildly improbable freak of combinations but as a natural, indeed
inevitable result of the laws of thermodynamics.
For more on this, see the relevant chapter in "Paradigms Lost" by John
L. Casti (Avon paperback, 1989).
Continue to:
My Books
