Here again, in this issue, the order-to-disorder concepts of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the Second Law) make a powerful statement. In inanimate things order always goes to disorder. To reverse that process there must be in place some sort of plan -- something like a list of necessary parts, a set of assembly drawings, a schedule -- to specify what parts go together, how and when, time after time, to create the new order.
    In living things the formation of offspring at first seems a violation of that Second Law in that extremely complex order is repeatedly created from a disordered bunch of chemicals. There must be a plan in place -- the DNA. But even there that order doesn’t last, the biological organism gets old and dies and that created order, despite the DNA, returns to complete disorder.
    But uniquely in humans there is a mental / spiritual side, our continual growth in understanding that we pass on not only to our offspring but to each other. And this created order does not die with the biological life but goes on -- forever. No other biological organism shows evidence of such growth of understanding -- humans alone exhibit both types of evolution. And the Second Law says that the latter can only happen if there is some sort of controlling plan in place.

BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION
    Once again harkening back to the Second Law, early definitions all contain caveats like “non-living”, and “unaided by external agency”, specifically restricting the scope of the Second Law to the inanimate world. The implication is that certain “animate” things are somehow above or outside of the Second Law. Life seems to represent a contradiction to the Second Law.
    Some scientists claim that living things alone do not represent a fully closed system, that if we properly include the energy “source and sink”, the inanimate sun and lifeless space, the overall energy system containing living things can also be seen to be increasing in disorder with time. However, the real mystery is how any and all life here on Earth seems to routinely violate the Second Law, even if it is just locally. I’m sure you have built a house of cards, how did little old you so warp the thermodynamics of the whole universe that you could create such order?
    But even if biological life does represent a local reversal of the Second Law, lifetimes are finite. Some of the original characteristics are passed on but little more than were already in the parents.
So what does Darwinian evolution look like up close -- when it’s us? Well the process is one which maximizes the probability that the male and female will get together, mate, produce offspring, and raise those offspring until they are not only fully capable of surviving but of going on to mate and produce even more viable, fertile offspring.
    First the process requires that male and female mate. It seems to be the man who is built to seek out the mating, with the sole intent to impregnate the female. Humans are endowed with a chemical called testosterone whose primary function is to increase the desire for mating. On the average, men are endowed with 50 times the testosterone of women.
    For her part, natural selection requires that the woman do her best to attract that man, to increase the probability that he will come to her for that purpose. For the woman to be big, strong and intelligent has much less to do with that “attractiveness” than does the appearance that she is ready and able to produce children, to be a dependable mother. For that purpose, as she approaches childbearing age she swells at the hips, showing evidence of the ready womb, and develops the child-feeding breasts of a potential mother.
    But there is another important aspect of natural selection, that is to raise the resulting children to the point of adulthood, where they can effectively duplicate the reproductive actions of their parents. The child is born totally helpless. To maximize the probability that that child will grow to healthy adulthood, and carry on his part in the evolutionary cycle, the man and the woman must care for, raise and develop that child to a healthy, strong adulthood. Once again, survival of the fittest demands it.
    Most statistical studies indicate that women are first attracted to men who look like good protectors and providers (strong, healthy, and reasonably intelligent). So, in the longer term, both are especially attracted if the other seems ready, willing and able to accept the longer range commitment, the partnership, necessary to adequately raise those children.
    That means that to achieve that highest probability the man must be fully capable of and committed to full protection and care of mother and children, especially while the children are young, while the woman is preoccupied with them. On her part the woman has to take care to get impregnated by a man reasonably capable of providing for her and her children during that critical period. A human society that fails to recognize and honor these protective and supportive teams (marriage and family) will not be the fittest, and will eventually die out -- yielding to those societies that do.
    World demographics graphically demonstrate human biological evolution. In developing countries, where the childhood death rate tends to be high, the average woman may bear half a dozen children in her lifetime. On the other hand, in safer, developed countries the average birth rate tends to approach a bare replacement rate, 2.1 children per woman.
    In countries where the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita (a measure of individual wealth) is near zero the survival birth rate is around eight children per woman. That rate decreases smoothly as the GDP
per capita rises, reaching the bare replacement rate in countries with a GDP of around $7,500, and staying near that level all the way up to the $40,000 per capita of the U.S.
    Could all that be because the men and women in these countries carefully calculate the local replacement rate (“How many children must I have for our family to survive?”) and then arrange to have at least that many? Or might it simply be that heterosexual couples with lesser desire to mate, create, and care for offspring (the “un-fittest”) are not replaced and soon die away, leaving only those who are more positive in that regard.
    One might note that homosexual couples clearly fit into the “un-fittest” category. “Mating is almost non-existent and so biological “survival of the fittest” has no meaning. Their replacement rate would have to be below that required to sustain the family line, even in the richest world. And yet homosexuality has been present in society for all of recorded history. It seems that, unless there is a recessive gene like the one responsible for Downs Syndrome, there should be no such thing as in-born homosexuality. Although the data are not well established, it does seem that the presence of what might seem like in-born homosexuality is at about the same rate as that for Downs Syndrome (about one percent).

INTELLECTUAL EVOLUTION
    Science says that all energy (mass, motion, forces, etc.) in the universe will gradually spread out and eventually everywhere equalize, at infinite entropy. There will still be “energy”, compared to absolute zero, but there will be no energy differences in space. As a result there will be no “available energy” that might be used to power work or produce motion. With absolutely nothing moving anywhere it will be impossible even to tell if time is passing. In fact, science says that time will indeed come to a stop.
    Of course, that is a long extrapolation of the Second Law. Nevertheless, atheistic scientists seize on that Law to show the absolute meaninglessness of life. No matter what we do the whole inanimate universe is eventually going to decay away to total random disorder, to infinite entropy, taking all life with it. Scientifically, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
    But once again harkening back to the Second Law, early definitions all contain caveats like “non-living”, and “unaided by external agency”, specifically restricting the scope of the Second Law to the inanimate world. The implication is that certain “animate” things are somehow above or outside of the Second Law. Science seems to say that there is something very different about the entropy of humans -- mankind does seem to represent a unique contradiction to the Second Law.
    This contradiction seems to come in two forms, one the obvious biological and the other some sort of mental.
    The biological side (that “external agency”) does represent a violation of the Second Law but only for brief periods. Lifetimes are finite, a life is created from an assortment of chemicals and DNA; proceeds to create more order as it develops into a fully grown, functional organism; then returns to increasing disorder, ending in death. The instant the “life force” departs, the inanimate Second Law once again fully takes over, and you’d better get the organism in the ground. So biological life in general can represent little more than brief cyclic reversals of that Law. Some of the original characteristics are passed on but little more than was already in the parents DNA.
    Even more, scientists have determined that almost every single cell / molecule / atom in the biological body dies and is replaced every seven years or so -- the physical person you were ten years ago is not at all the physical person you are today. So in humans, the spiritual life runs constantly through seven and perhaps as much as eighty years of constant building and decaying biological order.
    There even seems to be a strong legal side here as well. If YOU were to be considered just your biological body, YOU could not be held accountable for a murder you might have committed over seven years ago. The YOU of today is not the biological guy that did that back then -- that guy has totally disappeared. So, our legal system is based on the accepted “fact” that YOU are not your physical body, YOU are that mysterious, long-lived spiritual person (where, “inside”?).
    There is a vast history documenting the YOU side of humanity. Mankind started some time in the very distant past and has been constantly growing, constantly creating some kind of non-biological or spiritual order. The inanimate world started in perfect order and smoothly devolved to the totally chaotic heat-death ending. Mankind (and only mankind) started in total disorder, knowing very little about anything, and as time went on learned more and more about everything -- until one day ... what .. mankind will know everything about everything ? No one can deny the mind-boggling evolution in mankind from the early days of struggling to understand and utilize fire and sharp sticks to landing men on the moon. Disorder --order.
    There is a concept in Information Theory called “information entropy” -- the more empty and disorganized the information the higher the informational entropy. Human scientists and theologians are constantly studying the physical and spiritual worlds, learning more, writing papers (such as this one), and passing information on to succeeding generations, continually decreasing the information entropy of the human species, of mankind -- the endless creation of order from disorder. Perhaps the spiritual is best seen as the informational side of mankind.
    The spiritual side seems almost independent of the biological side, except that malfunction or damage to certain parts of the biological side (the brain?) can strongly affect the spiritual side. On the other hand, the spiritual side interacts with the rest of humanity (“out there”) and even when both the biological and spiritual sides of the individual die at least some of the spiritual side can go on forever in the history and spiritual lives and minds of the rest of mankind.
    The scientific problem here, however, is that this YOU is not a physical thing. Science does not / cannot get in there and directly define or measure YOU. We can and do observe and measure YOUR actions but not YOU. We are fully ready to recognize a real, legal entity capable of and responsible for free choice but not to define a real physical “thing” that we can identify as YOU.
    So what is that “thing” -- what are YOU? As an example, in a similar way science clearly recognizes gravity as a fact but admits we really know only the effects of gravity, not at all what it “is”. We say a “gravitational field” or “curved space” but we never identify a physical, touchable “thing” we could say is “gravity”.
    Now if we were to apply the scientific method to the concept of gravity we could:
    (1) recognize the repeated effects (the apples always fall down off the tree);
    (2) hypothesize a mechanism whereby the two masses, apple and earth, are attracted toward each other;
    (3) run multiple experiments (drop a bunch of apples) and reliably predict the effects of each drop; and
    (4) verify that the apples never fall upwards (falsifiable but never found false).
    We still would not know how gravity actually works, what it actually is, but that does sound like valid proof of the scientific “fact” we call gravity.
    Now with regard to mankind we might:
    (1) recognize that although every single cell, every atom in a body is replaced every seven years, virtually all of the functional habits and information that were present in that body at one time are still present throughout the life of the individual;
    (2) hypothesize a mechanism whereby that information is (somehow) contained within but is virtually independent of the physical body;
    (3) run multiple experiments (analyze the biological and spiritual bodies in large numbers of all kinds of people of various ages and verify the virtual independence of the spiritual bodies); and
    (4) verify that regardless of how the individual biological body might be growing or decaying the spiritual body within grows in only one direction, with time, and is at least partly retained in close associates long after the death of the first (falsifiable but never found false).
    We still would not know how that spiritual side actually works, what it actually is, but again that does sound like valid proof of a scientific “fact” -- the fact we call the spiritual side of mankind.
    Only humans have the capability to pass valuable information on to anyone who will listen and observe, including but not limited to their offspring. Thus that accumulated information in humans is not simply another form of random natural selection of a particular family or race, it is more like a special characteristic of the broad, interacting human species. A professor may learn something in his lab and teach that information to hundreds, perhaps thousands of students, among which may not be his own children.
    And as an important fallout of that observation, science has always said (the Second Law) that order can be created from disorder only if there is a pre-existing plan. Somehow there is in man, and only in man, some sort of plan -- a plan that allows order to created from disorder, to continually lower the information entropy of all mankind.