EVOLUTION AND ENTROPY 



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MOST biologists today would agree with George Gaylord 

 Simpson that, " the factual truth of evolution is taken 

 as established and the enquiry goes on from there." ^ 

 Yet as Andre Lalande has shown, there are paradoxes in our 

 commitment to the theory of evolution,^ and one may face 

 them without necessarily opposing the theory itself. One of 

 these apparent antinomies is raised by the law of entropy, the 

 second law of thermodynamics. Since evolution, at least in 

 the living world, is regarded by probably all its advocates as 

 an uphill thrust, how can it co-exist with entropy, the so-called 

 downhill tendency of the cosmos.? Many observers take the 

 view expressed by Norbert Wiener that evolution or entropy 

 is only a temporary phenomenon and that in the end entropy 

 will exert its universal dominion to end all life processes ^ in 

 our universe. But even within scientific cosmology, the solution 

 can hardly be so simple. For it has been customary to speak 

 of the past and continuing evolution even of the inorganic 

 world. Thus in a paper delivered at the University of Chicago's 

 Darwin Celebration and significantly entitled, " On the Evi- 

 dences of Inorganic Evolution," Harlow Shapley intended " to 

 suggest that terrestrial biological evolution is but a rather small 

 affair, a complicated sideshow, in the large evolutionary opera- 

 tion that the astronomer glimpses." * Has the term " evolu- 

 tion," as though it were not already ambiguous enough, been 

 extended to cover all the events believed governed by the 

 second law of thermodynamics? If this is so and if evolution 



* The Meaning of Evolution (New York, 1951) p. 11. 

 ^ Les illusions evolutionnistes (Paris, 1931) . 



* The Human Use of Human Beings (New York, 1954) pp. 40-47. L. Whyte 

 regards entropy in the title of his book as The Unitary Principle in Biology and 

 Physics (New York, 1949) . 



* The Evolution of Life, Vol. 1 of Evolution after Darwin, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 

 1960) p. 23. 



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