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It would be incorrect to assert that the LDS doctrine is somehow anti-evolution. Many LDS people in fact do believe/have believed in evolution to one degree or another, including at least several well-known General Authorities. (I'm thinking in particular of Elders Talmage and Widtsoe here.)
The only "official" statement on the subject that I can remember reading was a Declaration from the First Presidency in 1909, which was reprinted recently in the Feb. 2002 Ensign magazine. That Declaration, entitled The Origin of Man, merely restates the LDS position that Adam and Eve, the parents of all mankind, did not evolve from earlier mortal beings, but were specifically created by God in His image.
So, while it is probably accurate to say that LDS doctrine precludes the evolution of human beings, I believe there is nothing that rules out evolution in general.
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For those interested, entropy is a property of the state of a system, and the change in entropy is the heat flow into the system divided by the temperature of that system. The second law can be stated Entropy remains constant or increases for all processes taking place in an isolated systems.
[ May 11, 2004, 10:45 PM: Message edited by: Paul Goldner ]
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I'm LDS and I believe in evolution, as well as the evolution of human beings. I also believe that we are God's spirit children, and that the true story of our spiritual origins is told in the Eden story.
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I think the existence of the space foam is also used to account for the release of photons in certain subatomic collisions (photons from the virtual cloud that are made real by the energy of the collision).
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"But in your example, how exactly would the air become more chaotic?"
Cuz in order to hang up clothes, ya hafta breathe to provide oxygen to power chemical reactions which provide the energy to (among many many many other things) breathe and hang up clothes. In order for a chemical reaction to occur the sum of the endproducts must have a higher entropy than the sum of the original reactants.
Overall, metabolic processes must also be exothermic, ie release energy and heat. In this case -- after many intermediate chemical reactions breaking carbon and hydrogen from sugars et al -- respiration is mostly in the form: oxygen + carbon -> carbon dioxide + energy _and_ oxygen + hydrogen -> water + energy. Metabolic processes are less than a third efficient at converting potential energy into work. So more than 2/3rds of the potential energy is converted into heat: ie randomized energy in the form of photons and/or speeding particles/molecules.
The heat also warms the body, which in turn cools off by exchanging heat with the air. So the now warmer air molecules have a higher energy, which is directly related to higher speeds. That means that the air molecules are bouncing off each other at higher speeds, which in turn means that the air molecules are more disorganized: ie have a higher entropy.
In other words, making the room appear neater by hanging up clothes means that the air (and other objects which also increase in temperature) is more than twice as messy. You just don't see the air, so ya don't see the messiness. However, since Hobbes started off with the premise that the room is a closed system -- ie it doesn't interact at all with an outside -- you will feel the room getting messier. The more you organize the visible objects in the room, the hotter the room becomes.
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