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6/29/2015 Can Order Come Out of Chaos? | The Institute for Creation Research
http://www.icr.org/article/canordercomeoutchaos/ 1/7
Can Order Come Out of Chaos?by Henry Morris, Ph.D.
There is a new science abroad in the landthe science of chaos! It has spawned a newvocabulary—"fractals," "bifurcation," "the butterfly effect," "strange attractors," and "dissipativestructures," among others. Its advocates are even claiming it to be as important as relativityand quantum mechanics in twentiethcentury physics. It is also being extended into manyscientific fields and even into social studies, economics, and human behavior problems. But asa widely read popularization of chaos studies puts it:
Where chaos begins, classical science stops.
There are many phenomena which depend on so many variables as to defy description interms of quantitative mathematics. Yet such systems—things like the turbulent hydraulics of awaterfall—do seem to exhibit some kind of order in their apparently chaotic tumbling, andchaos theory has been developed to try to quantify the order in this chaos.
Even very regular linear relationships will eventually become irregular and disorderly, if left tothemselves long enough. Thus, an apparently chaotic phenomenon may well represent abreakdown in an originally orderly system, even under the influence of very minuteperturbations. This has become known as the "Butterfly Effect." Gleick defines this term asfollows:
Butterfly Effect: The notion that a butterfly stirring the air in Pekingcan transform storm systems next month in New York.
There is no doubt that small causes can combine with others and contribute to major effects—effects which typically seem to be chaotic. That is, order can easily degenerate into chaos. It iseven conceivable that, if one could probe the chaotic milieu deeply enough, he could discern tosome extent the previously ordered system from which it originated. Chaos theory isattempting to do just that, and also to find more complex patterns of order in the overall chaos.
These complex patterns are called "fractals," which are defined as "geometrical shapes whosestructure is such that magnification by a given factor reproduces the original object." If thatdefinition doesn't adequately clarify the term, try this one: "spatial forms of fractionaldimensions." Regardless of how they are defined, examples cited of fractals are said to benumerousfrom snowflakes to coast lines to star clusters.
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The discovery that there may still be some underlying order—instead of complete randomness—in chaotic systems is, of course, still perfectly consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.The trouble is that many wishful thinkers in this field have started assuming that chaos canalso somehow generate higher order—evolution in particular. This idea is being hailed as thesolution to the problem of how the increasing complexity required by evolution could overcomethe disorganizing process demanded by entropy. The famous second law of thermodynamics—also called the law of increasing entropy—notes that every system—whether closed or open—at least tends to decay. The universe itself is "running down," heading toward an ultimate"heat death," and this has heretofore been an intractable problem for evolutionists.
The grim picture of cosmic evolution was in sharp contrast with theevolutionary thinking among nineteenth century biologists, whoobserved that the living universe evolves from disorder to order,toward states of ever increasing complexity.
The author of the above quote is Fritjof Capra, a physicist at the University of California atBerkeley, one of the prominent scientists involved in the New Age Movement, which tends toassociate evolutionary advance with catastrophic revolutions. He believes that, in somemysterious fashion, chaos can produce evolutionary advance.
Paul Davies, the prolific British writer on astronomy, is another. He, like Capra, is not anatheistic evolutionist, but a pantheistic evolutionist. He has faith that order can come out ofchaos, that the increasing disorder specified by the entropy law (second law ofthermodynamics) can somehow generate the increasing complexity implied by evolution.
We now see how it is possible for the universe to increase bothorganization and entropy at the same time. The optimistic andpessimistic arrows of time can coexist: the universe can displaycreative unidirectional progress even in the face of the second law.
And just how has this remarkable possibility been shown? Capra answers as follows:
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It was the great achievement of Ilya Prigogine, who used a newmathematics to reevaluate the second law by radically rethinkingtraditional scientific views of order and disorder, which enabled himto resolve unambiguously the two contradictory nineteenthcenturyviews of evolution.
Prigogine is a Belgian scientist who received a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on thethermodynamics of systems operating dynamically under nonequilibrium conditions. He argued(mathematically, not experimentally) that systems that were far from equilibrium, with a highflowthrough of energy, could produce a higher degree of order.
Many others have also hailed Prigogine as the scientific savior of evolutionism, whichotherwise seemed to be precluded by the entropy law. A UNESCO scientist evaluated hiswork as follows:
What I see Prigogine doing is giving legitimization to the process ofevolutionselforganization under conditions of change.
The assumed importance of his "discovery" is further emphasized by Coveny:
From an epistemological viewpoint, the contributions of Prigogine'sBrussels School are unquestionably of original importance.
Capra elaborates further:
In classical thermodynamics, the dissipation of energy in heattransfer, friction, and the like was always associated with waste.Prigogine's concept of a dissipative structure introduced a radicalchange in this view by showing that in open systems dissipationbecomes a source of order.
The fact is, however, that except in the very weak sense, Prigogine has not shown thatdissipation of energy in an open system produces order. In the chaotic behavior of a system inwhich a very large energy dissipation is taking place, certain temporary structures (he calls
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them "dissipative structures") form and then soon decay. They have never been shown—evenmathematically—to reproduce themselves or to generate still higher degrees of order.
He used the example of small vortices in a cup of hot coffee. A similar example would be themuch larger "vortex" in a tornado or hurricane. These might be viewed as "structures" and toappear to be "ordered," but they are soon gone. What they leave in their wake is not a higherdegree of organized complexity, but a higher degree of dissipation and disorganization.
And yet evolutionists are now arguing that such chaos somehow generates a higher stage ofevolution! Prigogine has even coauthored a book entitled Order Out of Chaos.
In far from equilibrium conditions, we may have transformation fromdisorder, from thermal chaos, into order.
It is very significant, however, that all of his NobelPrize winning discussions have beenphilosophical and mathematical—not experimental! He himself has admitted that he has notworked in a laboratory for years. Such phenomena as he and others are trying to call evolutionfrom chaos to order may be manipulated on paper or on a computer screen, but not in real life.
Not even the first, and absolutely critical, step in the evolutionary process—that of the selforganization of nonliving molecules into selfreplicating molecules—can be explained in thisway. Prigogine admits:
The problem of biological order involves the transition from themolecular activity to the supermolecular order of the cell. Thisproblem is far from being solved.
He then makes the naive claim that, since life "appeared" on Earth very early in geologichistory, it must have been (!) "the result of spontaneous selforganization." But heacknowledges some uncertainty about this remarkable conclusion.
However, we must admit that we remain far from any quantitativetheory.
Very far, in factand even farther from any experimental proof!
With regard to the claim that the "order" appearing in fractals somehow contributes to evolution,a new book devoted to what the author is pleased to call "the science of selforganizedcriticality," we note the following admission:
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In the popular literature, one finds the subjects of chaos and fractal geometry linked togetheragain and again, despite the fact that they have little to do with each other.... In short, chaostheory cannot explain complexity.
The strange idea is currently being widely promoted that, in the assumed fourbillionyearhistory of life on the earth, evolution has proceeded by means of long periods of stasis,punctuated by brief periods of massive extinctions. Then rapid evolutionary emergence oforganisms of higher complexity came out of the chaotic milieu causing the extinction.
On the one hand, a catastrophic extinction of global biotas mightnegate the effectiveness of many survival mechanisms whichevolved during background conditions. Simultaneously, such a crisismight eliminate genetically and ecologically diverse taxa worldwide.Only a few species would be expected to survive and seedsubsequent evolutionary radiations. This scenario requires highlevels of macroevolution and explosive radiation to account for therecovery of basic ecosystems within 12 my after Phanerozoic massextinctions.
Such notions come not from any empirical evidence but solely from philosophical speculationsbased on lack of evidence! "Since there is no evidence that evolution proceeded gradually, itmust have occurred chaotically!" This seems to be the idea.
If one wants to believe by blind faith that order can arise spontaneously from chaos, it is still afree country. But please don't call it science!
REFERENCES
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James Gleick, ChaosMaking a New Science (New York: Viking,1987), p. 3. Ibid., p. 8. McGrawHill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms (4th ed.,1989), p 757. Stan G. Smith, "Chaos: Making a New Heresy Creation ResearchSociety Quarterly (Vol. 30. March 1994), p. 196. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), p.48. Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1988), p. 85. Capra, op cit., p. 49. As quoted by Wil Lepkowski in "The Social Thermodynamics ofIlya Prigogine," Chemical and Engineering News (New York,Bantam, 1979), p. 30. Peter V. Coveny, "The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Entropy,Irreversibility, and Dynamics" Nature (Vol. 333. June 2, 1988), p.414. Capra, op cit., p. 89. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New
York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 12. Ibid., p. 175. Ibid., p. 176. Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of SelfOrganized
Criticality (New York. SpringerVerlag, 1996), p. 31. Erle G. Kauffman and Douglas H. Erwin, "Surviving Mass
Extinctions," Geotimes (Vol. 40. March 1995), p. 15.
* Dr. Henry Morris is Founder and President Emeritus of ICR; Dr. John Morris is President ofICR.Cite this article: Henry Morris, Ph.D. 1997. Can Order Come Out of Chaos? (http://www.icr.org/article/canordercomeoutchaos/). Acts & Facts. 26(6).
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6/29/2015 Can Order Come Out of Chaos? | The Institute for Creation Research
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