Posted by Seeker [Seeker] on April 02, 1999 at 15:32:21 {ppHCdFLRUMbkYYamxmSw79YAW9JMpc}:
In Reply to: Common Sense Argument posted by WW on April 02, 1999 at 12:59:17:
Sorry, WW, but this has been covered before. In addition to what Jan said, here is something Gedanken posted last December:
"2nd Law; As Jan has pointed out the 2nd law says that the total entropy of the universe increases (or at best stays constant) during any physical change. Life is one of the best examples of obeying the 2nd Law; Living things are highly organized but their birth, development and existence contribute to increasing the entropy of the Universe---don't tell me that a 2 year old baby doesn't mess the house up!
The problem is that people mis-state the 2nd law by saying something fuzzy and woolly like: "things must naturally tend to get more unorganized." But that is not true. Matter often self-organizes (e.g., Jan's snowflake). This local increase in order results in an overall increase of disorder (entropy) in the universe. The proper way to quantify this is with something called Gibb's Free Energy which addresses the spontaneity of change. Further, the 2nd law does not address the source of organization. By you ordering the books in your library you too increase the overall disorder in the universe.
Another point to make is that the "disordered" books in the library are only disordered because you see them that way. To a person whose alphabet was "X P T..." rather than "A B C" they might look perfectly ordered. The mistake is to think that the way life is today is "ordered" and no alternatives exist. They might. So, while the chances for matter organizing into what we see today as life might seem small, perhaps the chance that matter will organize into some kind of life is very large indeed. It's the same kind of argument as saying; "There was a 10 billion to 1 chance that a particular sperm and egg united at the right time to cause me to be born. Therefore I do not exist because the odd were heavily against it."
Seeker