Otto
The entropy objection to evolution is based on a fundamental misunderstanding. Entropy always increases in a closed system. Neither a genome, nor a life-form, nor the earth are closed systems. Entropy can certainly decrease in an open system, as long as it is offset by increases outside that system.
As evolution increases order in a genome and a lifeform, it increases disorder outside the lifeform - in the rest of the earth. For example, we eat things, build and repair our bodies (decrease entropy inside us) and then excrete waste products (increase entropy outside us). The net effect is an increase in disorder, as required by thermodynamics.
As for the earth, it is constantly delivered free energy in the form of sunlight, allowing order to be increased. (This is not really the place for a detailed discussion of the relationship between free energy and entropy, but that is the guts of it).
The Nobel-Prize winning molecular biologist Jacques Monod said that the function of the
molecular machinery in living organisms is to act as Maxwell's demons, countering the second law of
thermodynamics by decreasing local entropy, at the expense of increasing it in the surroundings.
Edited by EJN, 27 December 2018 - 01:13 AM.