(4 of 5)
> Creationists argue that the second law of thermodynamics proves the impossibility of evolution. The law, formulated by European physicists more than a century ago, says that the universe is running down, dispersing its energy, its natural movement is from order to disorder.
Since evolution is a process that led to higher and more complex forms, it could not have occurred. In 1977 Ilya Prigogine, a Russian-born professor at the Free University of Brussels, won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for proving that the second law does not apply to "open systems" such as living creatures, because living things can acquire new energy. Plants grow healthy by soaking up sunlight, even though the sun, the source of the solar sys tem's energy, is slowly burning out.
> We know that stars die. But because we have never seen stars being born, creationists argue that science cannot know how they originate. Says David Schramm, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago: "In fact, we can observe stars forming right now: in the Orion Nebula stars are visible by telescope, forming out of gas clouds. Of course, the process takes 10 million years. Obviously, none of us has watched it for 10 million years. What we do see is a series of different stars in various stages of formation. The creation ists are picking up a grain of truth and totally distorting it."
> Again and again creationist debaters attack the "fossil record" of evolution, claiming that though there are fossils by the millions, none so far has been found showing transitions between distinct lifeforms— no creatures, for example, that are half reptile and half mammal. Scientists correctly point out that though there are real fossil gaps among the higher orders, there are tens of thousands of fossils that record the transition, sometimes over millions of years, among such life forms as hard-shelled clams, rhinoceroses and apes. As reptiles became mammals, the fossil record shows that bones in the jaw joint became smaller and evolved into part of the mammalian ear. Most scientists believe that the fossil gaps between major groups (such as fish, amphibians and reptiles) will gradually be filled in by new finds. But Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge think that in some cases transitions occurred so quickly and in such small populations of creatures that there is virtually no chance of finding fossil evidence to fill these gaps. Evolution may occur in sudden fits and starts, they say, not in the agonizingly slow and regular process Darwin postulated in Origin of Species. Gould, whose remarks about fossil gaps are cited by creationists, says flatly: "They are confusing the methods by which evolution occurs with evolution itself. That evolution occurred is a fact. People evolved from ape ancestors even though we can argue about how it happened. Scientists are debating mechanism, not fact."