I'm trying to get to the bottom of your trouble with evolution with
respect to the second law. At first you said it was with 'macroevolution,'
which we agreed meant 'speciation.' Speciation is exactly this: two
groups of organisms which at one point *can* interbreed at some later
point *cannot* interbreed. There have been excellent posts pointing out
that the simplistic version of the second law of thermodynamics is a) wrong,
b) doesn't apply anyway. These are all well and good, but they may not
address your conceptual objections (which are fine to have). I'm not sure
how to address your conceptual objections, though, since development over
eons of time (imaginary or not) is proposed to happen through evolution
within a lineage (which is 'microevolution' according to you, and therefore
apparently not of conceptual difficulty) and speciation, which is where
you seemed to be having the problem.
If I am understanding correctly, then, your major conceptual difficulty
involved with the second law is that the idea of 'decrease in order' is
somehow prohibitive to speciation. This doesn't seem clear to me at
all--while Brian has valiantly proposed that colloquially it is *less*
orderly to have two groups which can't interbreed (that is, the second
law should be a push *towards* speciation) I'm not sure my intuition
agrees. But what Brian's and my intuition is doesn't necessarily reflect
*your* intuition.
Right now, I guess I'm doubting whether your conceptual objection can be
narrowed down to speciation as versus 'microevolution' (or evolution within
a lineage--anagenesis). It seems, rather, to be with the whole sweep of
"simple to complex" evolutionary history. While it is OK to harbor
conceptual difficulties with that story, I think you need to realize that
the second law has nothing to do with it. The second law is applicable to
specific events. If you see no second law problem with speciation, and
none with 'microevolution,' then that is all evolutionists propose has
gone into the process, and so this particular conceptual objection has
been answered decisively. That doesn't mean you can't have others, but
it will be helpful when you discuss it to identify them in other terms,
since thermodynamics seems at best tangential. Language from others
that I've seen goes like...."How can complex organisms arise from simple
organisms just by random processes?" "Why is there a progressive trend
from simple to complex things?" "What makes particular complex features
arise when those features don't seem creatable through small steps?"
These questions are all of more or less currency, but none of them say
anything about the second law of thermodynamics.
Was this clear enough? Unfortunately, our friends the thermodynamics
people haven't gotten around to writing nice popularized books on the
subject :-), so it is up to folks like me who have had a bit of it to
try to explain it properly (with mixed success). If something isn't clear,
just point it out and I'm sure there are others here who can take a
better stab at it than I. :-)
-Greg