Origins Mini-Series Airs Tonight

SeaDour writes "The much-anticipated NOVA mini-series Origins begins tonight on PBS (check local listings for time). Hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the ambitious show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again, "blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself." MSNBC has an interesting write-up on the show that's been four years in the making."

Comments

Re: Should be a good night of television

[Black Parrot]

> It's not just the "ultra religious" who have concerns about the feasibility of macroevolution resulting in the world as we know it. Take a look at Darwin on Trial or Darwin's Black Box, both written by credible scientists, not religious fanatics.

FYI, Phillip E. Johnson is a retired law professor, not a credible scientist.

Re:Should be a good night of television

[Bingo Foo]

How does one reconcile the theory of macroevolution (species, over time, have evolved into more ordered organisms - humans - from less ordered organisms - one-celled animals) with the second law of thermodynamics (the natural tendency over time of any closed system is to enter into a *less* ordered state)?

The Earth is not a closed system. We are part of a driven out-of equilibrium system, with the sun's energy hitting our planet in a directed way and re-radiating in an isotropic way. Out of equilibrium process can create local regions of increasing order at the expense of dumping their entropy elsewhere.

Forget evolution for a minute and ask how anything grows at all. From a thermodynamic perspective, how does an acorn+soil+water+air become an oak tree? Can it be possible without appealing to the supernatural? Yes. The sun's energy comes in, and performs useful work, some energy becomes chemically stored through combinations of water and carbon dioxide in cellulose and carbohydrates plus oxygen, before the rest of the energy is re-radiated as mostly infrared back out to the environment. Overall this process increases the entropy of the universe (even though locally the oak tree becomes more ordered than soil+water+air), but most of that entropy is radiated away from the earth.

This is a coarse-level thermodynamic description, not a biological description, but your question was on the thermodynamic possibility. You'll notice that none of what I said here directly addresses where the genetic information and enzymes, etc. in the acorn came from, but it should show you an example where natural physical dynamics produce local order in an out-of equilibrium system. This can, in principle, be used to support the theory of evolution.