
An order from disorder rebuttal, CF001.2 (Ѻ), from TalkOrigins.org index editor (Ѻ) Mark Isaak’s 2005 book on the top 400 counter-creationism objections, that order from disorder is impossible, according to the second law. [3]

An order from disorder rebuttal, CF001.2 (Ѻ), from TalkOrigins.org index editor (Ѻ) Mark Isaak’s 2005 book on the top 400 counter-creationism objections, that order from disorder is impossible, according to the second law. [3]

In hmolscience, order-from-disorder, or "order out of chaos", refers to the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of the spontaneous formation of ordered structures in the universe, as typified by humans and society, in a universe governed by the second law of thermodynamics, often typified as the tendency in isolated systems to tend towards maximum entropy.

History
The phrase “order from disorder sprung” is from John Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost. (Ѻ)

In 1944, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger penned his “Order, Disorder and Entropy”, wherein he pits the science of genetics as a counter to statistical thermodynamics and second law, entropy tendency, towards disorder. [1]

In 1984, Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine published Order Out of Chaos, in which a nonequilibrium thermodynamics variation of a far-from-equilibrium state of ordered life emergence was hypothesized. This soon led to a mixture of the two interpretations.

In 1992, American sociologist Thomas Fararo, in his The Meaning of General Theoretical Sociology, warns his readers not to mix up the far-from-equilibrium Prigoginean thermodynamics interpretation of equilibrium and structure formation with the standard sociological one (an abstract analytical conception): [2]

“The main point is that theoretical sociology should employ an abstract analytical conception of equilibrium in which this concept is in reference to certain states of the social system, not of the biophysical environment … any special emergence of order-from-disorder phenomenon in our field must be accounted for by the mechanism of social interaction, not by a vague appeal to some thermodynamic situation.”

(add discussion)


A chaos vs order image (Ѻ), indicative of the idiom that the mind brings order; following the heart, often times, brings about chaos.

A chaos vs order image (Ѻ), indicative of the idiom that the mind brings order; following the heart, often times, brings about chaos.

References
1. (a) Schneider, Eric D. and Sagan, Dorion. (2005). Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (section: Order from Disorder, pg. 15-19). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
(b) Schneider, Eric D. and Kay, James J. (1997). “Order from Disorder: the Thermodynamics of Complexity in Biology”, chapter 12 (pgs. 161-74) in Michael P. Murphy and Luke A. J. O’Neill’s What is Life? the Next Fifty Years, Cambridge University Press.
(c) Hunter, Graeme K. (2000). Vital Forces: the Discovery of the Molecular Basis of Life (pg. 249). Academic Press.
2. Fararo, Thomas J. (1992). The Meaning of General Theoretical Sociology: Tradition and Formalization (pg. 86-87). Cambridge University Press.
Mark Isaak’s 2007 counter-creationism snippet on the assertion, commonly employed by creationists, that order from disorder is impossible according to the second law. [3]
3. Isaak, Mark. (2007). The Counter-Creationism Handbook (order from disorder, pgs. 191, 193). University of California Press.