
The gist of Daniel Styer's argument from his 2008 article "Entropy and Evolution", wherein he uses Boltzmann entropy to calculate the entropy change of an organism evolving and biosphere as a whole, which he says does not conflict with the second law; which in 2012 worked to initiate the Roemer-Styer fiasco carried about via the efforts of American noma creationism physicist David Roemer, who considers Styer's calculation paramount to pseudoscience. [1] Debate chimers include: Andrew McIntosh (2009), Emory Bunn (2009), and Granville Sewell (2013), among others.

The gist of Daniel Styer's argument from his 2008 article "Entropy and Evolution", wherein he uses Boltzmann entropy to calculate the entropy change of an organism evolving and biosphere as a whole, which he says does not conflict with the second law; which in 2012 worked to initiate the Roemer-Styer fiasco carried about via the efforts of American noma creationism physicist David Roemer, who considers Styer's calculation paramount to pseudoscience. [1] Debate chimers include: Andrew McIntosh (2009), Emory Bunn (2009), and Granville Sewell (2013), among others.

In debates, Roemer-Styer fiasco is the 2012 to present attempt of American physicist David Roemer, a noma creationism Jesuit in belief system, to get the 2008 article “Evolution and Entropy” by American physicist Daniel Styer, a god-believing Quaker, wherein he uses Boltzmann entropy equation to calculate the entropy change of an evolving organism, retracted from the American Journal of Physics, per overt scientific objections (i.e. the equation isn't applicable; you can't measure the entropy of a tree), driven by covert religious beliefs (god gave us free will, a soul, and the promise of afterlife). Roemer, to note, is an unusual case: contacting and harassing hundreds of people on this matter, e.g. Victor Stenger, Georgi Gladyshev, Neil Tyson, forums, university departments, journal editorial boards, state legislatures, congress, etc. [N1]

Styer
In 2008, American physicist Daniel Styer published his American Journal of Physics (AJP) article “Entropy and Evolution”, the main derivation section shown adjacent, wherein he uses the statistical mechanics definition of entropy, i.e. Boltzmann entropy, S = k ln W, admixtured with a microstate of organisms argument, i.e. assertions about the multiplicity W of states of organisms, to calculate the entropy change of an evolving organism per second, which he determines to be: [1]

Entropy change per organism: -3x10E-30 J/K (per second)

Then determines:

Entropy change of biosphere: -302 J/K (per second)

He then concludes:

“Presumably the entropy of the earth’s biosphere is indeed decreasing by a tiny amount [ΔSbiosphere = -302 J/K∙s] due to evolution, and the entropy of the cosmic microwave background is increasing by an even greater amount to compensate for that decrease.”

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Bunn
In 2009, American physicist Emory Bunn, in his “Evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics”, agrees with Styer, albeit with the note that: [3]

“Styer’s factor of 1000 was not really generous, that in fact organisms should be considered to be, on average, about 10E25 times more improbable each century, but went on to show that, still, “the second law of thermodynamics is safe.”

Bunn, who in his blog “Ted Bunn’s Blog” has 7 posts on “god” (Ѻ), 4 posts on “religion” (Ѻ), and one post on “atheism” (Ѻ), would seem to be classified as an “agnostic-atheist” or Dawkins number 5-6 approximately.

McIntosh
In 2009, English creationist thermodynamicist Andrew McIntosh, in his “Information and Entropy: Top-down or Bottom-up Development in Living Systems?”, cites Styer and Bunn, in a general objectionable manner, stating that: [5]

“This is then compared to the total entropy received by the earth from a rate of solar radiation estimated to be absorbed by the earth for a given period of time. However, all these authors are making the same assumption – viz. that all one needs is sufﬁcient energy ﬂow into a closed system (or open system, where mass ﬂow is allowed) and this will be the means of increasing the probability of life developing in complexity and new machinery evolving. But as stated earlier this begs the question of how a local system can possibly reduce the entropy without existing machinery to do this?”

McIntosh then goes in the right direction, via several pages of Gibbs energy discussion, but then avers when he gets to his section five “The Vital Role of Information”, wherein he begins ridding on the Shannon bandwagon, using melting pot theory, e.g. self-organization, vitalism, Jeffrey Wicken, Stuart Kauffman on emergence, the Brooks-Wiley theory, Ilya Prigogine, Prigogine entropy, and then goes out with teleology and “energy + information” teleonomy arguments about how local entropy reduction, and in the implicit name of god.

Roemer
In 2006 to 2008, American super-zealous noma creationism physicist David Roemer launched DKRoemer.com (Ѻ), wherein he began to post a number of things, such as book reviews he had done on: Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006), Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (1993), Kenneth Miller’s Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (2008) (Ѻ); a 13 proposition proof of the existence of god (Ѻ); letters he sent to the US District Judge of Pennsylvania (on evolution), etc.

On 19 Jan 2012, Roemer was busy, at the SkepticsForum.com, as usual, with his attack on the atheism and evolution views of Richard Dawkins, during which time he emailed Glenn Branch (Ѻ), head of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) director, on his squabbles, amid which, as he says, Branch “squelched me” by citing Styer’s “Entropy and Evolution” (Ѻ) article, and is equation 4b calculation of the entropy of evolution of an organism.


American physicist Daniel Styer's general assertion, which is behind the Roemer-Styer fiasco, namely that the entropy of an evolving organism can be calculated, via Boltzmann entropy, and this does not violate the second law, but rather concurs with it via the local entropy decrease model.

American physicist Daniel Styer's general assertion, which is behind the Roemer-Styer fiasco, namely that the entropy of an evolving organism can be calculated, via Boltzmann entropy, and this does not violate the second law, but rather concurs with it via the local entropy decrease model.

This article infuriated Roemer, who would go on to spend the next three years plus focused on an effort to get the American Journal of Physics to recant (or retract) the article. The following two quotes seem to capture the gist of Roemer’s main objection:

“Performing calculations to show evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics implies that natural selection explains the complexity of living organisms. The second law of thermodynamics is an absolute truth. It is like saying the chance of getting heads when you flip a coin is 50%. When a tree grows from a seed by absorbing oxygen and carbon dioxide there is no violation of this law. However, the idea of calculating the entropy of the tree and heat flows into the plant to prove this strikes me as being absurd. I may be wrong, but this is how I understood the article.”
— David Roemer (2012), “Letter to David Jackson, Editor of AJP” (Ѻ), Feb 1

“Two American Journal of Physics articles are promoting misinformation. According to the second law of thermodynamics, an isolated system of non-interacting particles will either be in equilibrium or go to a state of greater disorder. In other words, nature goes from the more complex state of speed and location to the less complex state. The two articles report scientific calculations showing that evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. Laymen interpret this to mean that natural selection explains the complexity of life.”
— David Roemer (2012), “Evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” (Ѻ), Article submitted to AJP (but rejected), Feb 24

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Sewell
In 2013, American creationist mathematician Granville Sewell (CIR:33), in his “Entropy and Evolution” article, published in BIO-Complexity, states: [4]

“Much of the confusion in applying the second law to evolution, and to other situations where entropy is difficult to define and quantify, comes from the idea that “entropy” is a single quantity which measures (in units of thermal entropy) disorder of all types. The American Journal of Physics papers by Daniel Styer (2008) and Emory Bunn (2009) illustrate the confusion that results from thinking of entropy as a single quantity when applying the second law to evolution.”

Sewell continues:

“Styer estimated the rate of decrease in entropy associated with biological evolution as less than 302 joules/degree kelvin/second, noted that this rate is very small, and concluded, “Presumably the entropy of the Earth’s biosphere is indeed decreasing by a tiny amount due to evolution and the entropy of the cosmic microwave background is increasing by an even greater amount to compensate for that decrease”. To arrive at this estimate, Styer assumed that “each individual organism is 1000 times more improbable than the corresponding individual was 100 years ago,” which, according to Styer, is a “very generous” assumption. He then used the Boltzmann formula to calculate that a 1000-fold decrease in probability corresponds to an entropy decrease of kB × log(1000), multiplied this by a generous overestimate for the number of organisms on earth, and divided by the number of seconds in a century.”

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Rebuttals
In 2013, Styer encountered Roemer, wherein Roemer accuses him of being an atheist; Styer recounts the incident as follows:

“In December 2013 I had an exchange with a man named David Roemer, who stated that he was the same as the CreationWiki “article”. When I pointed out the facts outlined above, he could ﬁnd no fault with them. Yet he persisted in denigrating my work, not through any scientiﬁc fault, but because he claimed it was “atheistic propaganda”.”

On 21 Jan 2014, in his “Reply to CreationWiki page ‘Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Physics’”, uploaded to his faculty page, he gives eight rebuttals of Roemer’s claims, e.g. “the second law does not apply to the evolution of stars”, the “second law does not apply to living things or evolution”, etc.; after which he states that he is a Quaker, who believes in god, and believes evolution to be consistent with religion; an example statement of which is as follows: [2]

“According to Psalm 19, ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of god’. And indeed they do. The heavens proclaim a magniﬁcent universe, 13.798±0.037 billion years old, full of microwave radiation, galaxies, clusters, stars, nebulae, and planets (1078 known to date); various and arresting and beautiful. At least one planet has life: 1.2 million cataloged species — far too many to have been discovered and named by one individual— varying from zebras to Sequoia to whales to gnats to Hallucigenia to Bdellovibrio to Sulfolobus. But even without life our planet is various and arresting and beautiful: crystals, lodestones, ﬂuid turbulence, waterfalls, geysers, rainbows, clouds; 79 million cataloged chemical compounds, combinations of 92 naturally occurring elements, all made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Every day new scientiﬁc discoveries show that the glory we know at present is but a fraction of the full glory of god.”

Styer goes on to conclude that we should not read the Bible literally, but instead only figuratively.

Discussion
To clear up a few points, in short, firstly the premise that the "entropy of an organism" can be calculated, let alone calculated at various states of existence in evolution, has a long contentious and debatable history: "entropy of a human" (or human entropy) Siegfried Bernfeld and Sergei Feitelberg (1936), Bridgman paradox (1946), entropy of a mouse, Martin Goldstein (1993); entropy of students in a field [Moriarty-Thims debate, 2009], among others.

Secondly, Styer's argument that entropy of an organism can be calculated, at various states of evolution, at say an initial state entropy Si, e.g. a humming bird in 1925, and a final state entropy Sf, an evolved version of the same humming bird lineage in 2025, via Boltzmann entropy formula, a decent throw at the dart board first attempt calculation, but one that is incorrect in that the "system" involved, according to Max Planck, has to meet the Boltzmann chaos assumption, which evolving system (e.g. social systems) do not, i.e. animals do interact and social systems are not "chaotic" (e.g. like gas phase systems are assumed to be). Styer, however, did not get this memo.

In 2014, Styer wrote “Reply to CreationWiki page ‘Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Physics’”, wherein he states: [2]

“My paper uses the microcanonical expression for entropy S = kB ln W , but ‘this is absurd because the Boltzmann constant [kB] comes from observations about atomic systems.’ In fact, living things are made up of atoms, so the microcanonical expression for entropy is perfectly reasonable and applicable. The suggestion that the Boltzmann constant applies only to “atomic systems” is also false. For example, black body radiation is not made up of atoms, yet the entropy of black body radiation of volume V and temperature T involves Boltzmann’s constant through:

where c represents the speed of light and h represents Planck’s constant.”

Here, Styer, asserts that since a black hole has a measurable entropy, i.e. black hole entropy, quantified by a Boltzmann-like expression, then so to is it applicable to calculate the entropy of a human via a Boltzmann-like entropy expression. The general problem here is that Styer is thinking using "human statistical thermodynamics" like logic, whereas the correct method of calculating the entropy, or enthalpy, or free energy of a human (or organism) is "human chemical thermodynamics", but this gets into the measurement problem, which has a rich history of confusion and conceptual and engineering obstacles to overcome (see: human thermodynamic instruments).

Thirdly, Styer's assumption that his calculations shows an measurable biomass "entropy decrease", which in scientific common opinion parlance corresponds to an "order increase", which is assumed, via regurgitation argument, namely the time-honored so-called “local entropy decrease” postulate (Alfred Ubbelohde, 1947), to be less than the entropy increase in the surroundings, thereby meeting the requirements of the second law, that the total system [evolving system + surrounding system] tend towards and increase in entropy, is a finger-holding the dike argument, a bubble greatly in need of cultural explication, such as touched on by Percy Bridgman (1946) and Martin Goldstein (1993), namely explication via human free energy of formation discussion, some of which lightly touched on by Mirza Beg (1987) and Libb Thims (2007); but one that confronts religion with extreme atheism in a way much greater than simpler social heat that Roemer is venting; something that goes back to the deeper revolutionary independent views of Johann Goethe (1809) and Percy Shelley (1814) and how "chemical affinity" (or free energy) and physical chemistry replaces god and gives a new one nature morality basis (see: Church of Elective Affinities).

Related
The Roemer-Styer fiasco is similar in content to the: 1946 Harvard “What is Life? debate, wherein the Bridgman paradox, on the impossibility of calculating the entropy of a living organism was stated; the Rossini debate (2007), a general religious-based objection to the use of chemical thermodynamics methodology being used to formulate models of freedom and security in a post 9/11 America; the Moriarty-Thims debate (2009) on whether or not an ordering of students in a field, ordered or dispersed, has a measureable quantifiable real “thermodynamic entropy”; and the Beg-Thims dialogue (2014) on the religious conflict of using Gibbs energy models to descript and explain social reactions and human chemical reaction theory.

See also
● Brooks-Wiley theory
● Juarrero-Deacon affair
● What is entropy debate?

Notes
N1. Of note, normal run-of-the mill religion vs science (or science vs religion) debates tend to be rather mundane, with the creationists being thin-skinned, spinning out laughable arguments, retreating or using humor to parlay there agenda, tending to peter out over time, etc.; typical examples being: Michael Behe (CIR:1), Kent Hovind (CIR:2), Henry Morris (CIR:4), Ken Ham (CIR:8), to cite a few, CIR numbers shown according to ranking on the creationism scientists ranked by idiocy page. Roemer, however, is an unusual case. Firstly, his current CIR ranking is #25 (of 40), meaning that he does not explicitly come out and say directly "idiotic" things. Some points of his argument, e.g., actually have merit and correctness, for scientific reasons. Secondly, his methodology of promotion amounts to a steroid amphetamine driven troll like technique of layered mass mailing and thread posting, all extensively documented and detailed, while remaining rather cordial, for the most part, throughout (aside from his "ethical" derogation thrown at many people). Thirdly, Styer, having been fired from his job as a high school physics teacher, in 1995, over poor teaching methods, then spending a dozen years, up to about 2012, suing the New York department of education, unsuccessfully, has two decades of pent up energy that he uses, presently, to attack in the area of religious and evolution conflict.

References
1. Styer, Daniel. (2008). “Entropy and Evolution” (pdf), American Journal of Physics, 76(11), Nov.
2. Styer, Daniel. (2014). “Reply to CreationWiki page ‘Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Physics’” (pdf), Oberlin.edu, Jan 21.
3. Bunn, Emory F. (2009). “Evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics” (abs) (pdf), American Journal of Physics, 77:922-25.
4. Sewell, Granville. (2013). “Entropy and Evolution” (abs) (pdf), BIO-Complexity, 2:1-5.
5. McIntosh, Andrew. (2009). “Information and Entropy: Top-down or Bottom-up Development in Living Systems?” (abs) (pdf), International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecosystems, 4:351-85.