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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CF002.1:

Order does not spontaneously form from disorder. A tornado passing through a junkyard would never assemble a 747.

Source:

Hoyle, Fred, 1983. The Intelligent Universe. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 18-19.

Response:

  1. This claim is irrelevant to the theory of evolution itself, since evolution does not occur via assembly from individual parts, but rather via selective gradual modifications to existing structures. Order can and does result from such evolutionary processes.

  2. Hoyle applied his analogy to abiogenesis, where it is more applicable. However, the general principle behind it is wrong. Order arises spontaneously from disorder all the time. The tornado itself is an example of order arising spontaneously. Something as complicated as people would not arise spontaneously from raw chemicals, but there is no reason to believe that something as simple as a self-replicating molecule could not form thus. From there, evolution can produce more and more complexity.

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created 2001-2-18