AOF Activities & Events
Keith Swenson: Snowflakes and Origins
Snowflakes in August, yes -- clearly we have an ice theme going on here. But we can learn a lot from this, besides remembering to let your little brat brother out of the freezer. Because of all areas where science and the Bible have friction, the topic of origins is the war zone, the scorched earth. Exactly why do evolution and abiogenesis kick up such emotion? Maybe it's that by-your-bootstraps thing, auto-creation, the idea of organization "creating itself." Even scientifically minded people struggle with that one.
But we humans are small-minded, localized thinkers. What we understand at one level may baffle us at another. The molecular world and the process of long-range natural selection are nonintuitive. We must burrow through a mental block, a conceptual bias. A way to do this is to observe how snowflakes and ice crystals forms. Crystallization is palpable auto-creation, a spontaneous increase in order without intelligent meddling. It seems to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. But this mistakes the law, a misunderstanding often promulgated and exploited by creationists.
Intuition may say all things must decay into randomness, but in fact organized patterns, like snowflakes, or like the delicate frost-ferns on your windowpanes in winter, often evolves spontaneously on its own. Certain systems display this strange behavior of auto-creation all the time. Shake a shoebox of marbles, see them nest automatically into lovely hexigonal patterns. That's what we mean.
Evolution is one process of auto-creation among others. It's easy to see once we learn to look. And our speaker will help us look.
Keith Swenson comes to AOF to help us gain a better understanding of:
- Why people find it hard to accept evolution
- What the natural cognitive barrier is, and why it exists
- The role that misunderstanding randomness plays
- The role that misunderstanding entropy plays
- How complex systems display the behavior of auto-creation
- Several examples of auto creation
- (with luck) an improved way to explain why evolution is really quite reasonable after all
One more groundbreaking event of the AOF Speaker Series. Open to all open minds, including yours.