Evolution and Entropy

EVOLUTION AND ENTROPY MOST biologists today would agree with George Gaylord Simpson that, " the factual truth of evolution is taken as established and the enquiry goes on from there." 1 Yet as Andre Lalande has shown, there are paradoxes in our commitment to the theory of evolution/ and one may face them without necessarily opposing the theory itself. One of these apparent antinomies is raised by the law of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Since evolution, at least in the living world, is regarded by probably all its advocates as an uphill thrust, how can it co-exist with entropy, the so-called downhill tendency of the cosmos? Many observers take the view expressed by Norbert Wiener that evolution or entropy is only a temporary phenomenon and that in the end entropy will exert its universal dominion to end all life processes 8 in our universe. But even within scientific cosmology, the solution can hardly be so simple. For it has been customary to speak of the past and continuing evolution even of the inorganic world. Thus in a paper delivered at the University of Chicago's Darwin Celebration and significantly entitled, " On the Evidences of Inorganic Evolution," Harlow Shapley intended "to suggest that terrestrial biological evolution is but a rather small affair, a complicated sideshow, in the large evolutionary operation that the astronomer glimpses." 4 Has the term " evolution ," as though it were not already ambiguous enough, been extended to cover all the events believed governed by the second law of thermodynamics? If this is so and if evolution 1 The Meaning of Evolution (New York, 1951) p. 11. • Les illusioM evolutionnistes (Paris, 1981). 3 The Human Use of Human Beings (New York, 1954) pp. 40-47. L. Whyte regards entropy in the title of his book as The Unitary Principle in Biology and Physics (New York, 1949). 'The Evolution of Life, Vol. 1 of Evolution after Darwin, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1960) p. 28. 441 442 VINCENT E. SMITH thus becomes a universal cosmic tendency, what becomes of entropy and of the opinion that " it is difficult to conceive of circumstances that would invalidate the statistical proof of the Second Law"? 6 Obviously, the paradox suggested by Lalande remains unresolved and probably exists in more pointed form than the cosmologies of his own day would have urged. If the apparent antimony between evolution and entropy is to be frankly faced, there is clear need for carefully tracing each of the two concepts to their empirical evidence. Despite all of its obscurity, entropy is understood well enough to be embodied in mathematical equations. Yet evolution , even apart from the greater attention paid to it in the popular press, is probably easier to illustrate at a physical level. All natural change, e. g., the development of an oak from an acorn, a frog from a tadpole, and flesh and bone from food materials, is in a loose sense of the term an evolutionary process in which the better comes into existence.6 Because progress is more intelligible in the physical world than the down-hill drive of entropy, evolution may be more profitably discussed first. I Like other leading ideas in modern science, e. g., the heliocentric theory in physics or the atomic theory in chemistry, the theory of evolution has analogues going back as far as the Greeks, for instance Anaxagoras/ and appearing in Christian writers like St. Augustine with his "seminal reasons." 8 Yet the theory of evolution, as we now know it, together with the empirical evidence adduced in its favor, is an original achievement of modern science. Collingwood, despite his frequent exaggerations, had an insight in taking the post-Newtonian conception of matter to be nature as history.9 Even • C. F. von Weizsacker, The History of Nature (Chicago, 1949) p. 57. • Sum. cont. Gent., ill, cc. 8, 4. • Cf. Aristotle's report, Phys., I, 4, 187a!!O fl'.; the best secondary source on Anaxagoras is F. Cleve's, The Philosophy of Anaxagoras (New York, 1949). • Cf. for instance, L.-M. Otis, La doctrine de l'evolution (Montreal, 1950). • The Idea of Nature (New York, 1960) pp. 9 fl'.; 133 fl'. EVOLUTION AND ENTROPY 443...