Kevin Drum asks a germane question on heat transfer and the insulating properties of window blinds, but then (in an obviously tongue in cheek way) asks a much more interesting question:
Next up: Does evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics? Please provide a minimum of 20 typed, single-spaced pages of word salad to justify your answer.
Challenge accepted! And just a couple paragraphs will do, thanks. First, some background. The second law of thermodynamics states that:
“in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state.” This is also commonly referred to as entropy.
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Entropy is a measure of disorder: cells are NOT disordered and so have low entropy. The flow of energy maintains order and life. Entropy wins when organisms cease to take in energy and die.
So according to the second law, a system will always lose energy unless some is added, a system should slowly break down over time, going from more to less complex until it breaks down entirely. But evolution goes the opposite direction, creating complex multicellular organisms where previously there were single cells and before that some protein floating around in some primordial ooze.
So why is the second law not violated? If you consider the earth, or just the biosphere, it would seem to be. It’s getting more complex! But energy is being added to the biosphere in the form of food energy, and its being added to the earth as sunlight. The second law allows complexity to increase if energy is added, so it hasn’t been violated. The only way for evolution to violate the second law is if you forget the universe.
Consider a much larger scale and you see that energy is added to the biosphere via the sun, and so it can evolve. But energy leaving the sun is precisely what the second law says should happen. And not all of that energy enters the biosphere to feed evolution. Some of it is dissipated as heat, some gets absorbed by inanimate objects, some misses the earth entirely, etc. More disorder is created by energy leaving the sun than order is created by energy entering the biosphere. So the second law, writ large, holds.
Science!
Hey, its this or I bitch about Paul Ryan some more…
520 Chestnut 
Also, if the Sun becomes a super nova, black whole, white dwarf, or really changes in any significant way, the Earth will become a whole lot less complex (like Mars).
If weI are consideringthe the evolutionservers of thethe Universe, the real question is, does the theory of the Big Bang violate the second law of thermodynamics? 🙂
That’s a question that we are far from being able to answer not knowing both the initial amount of mass/energy present at the time of the Big Bang nor the amount of mass/energy in the universe today. However I’d have to agree with that guy who often had bad hair days that said energy could neither be created nor destroyed. If so, then the total mass/energy of the universe is unchanging over time thus in violation of second law of thermodynamics.
Need coffee…..
Wow, I didn’t realize until now how my phone inserted all those extra words, how embarrassing. I’m not sure weI properly consideringthed the evolutionservers!
The conservation of mass/energy is the first law of thermodynamics.
I don’t think Einstein contradicts the second law of thermodynamics.
http://secondlawoflife.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/what-einstein-thought-about-thermodynamics/