ENST: Darwinians Losing with Physics Envy

This article shows materialists
desperately trying to look
more scientific than they are

Physics Envy Is Not Helping Evolutionary Biology
by David Coppedge
Evolution News & Science Today, April 30, 2025

One of Murphy’s Laws of Technology facetiously avows, “Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables the organism will do as it darn well pleases.” Can such a law be tested with an ammeter or a differential equation?

“Physics envy,” a term sometimes used to disparage the “soft sciences,” expresses the desire of biologists to share the scientific prestige of physics which has been highly esteemed since Newton for its mathematical precision. Launch a cannonball, calculate the force on a dam, or fly a spacecraft, and if the initial conditions and variables can be measured accurately, physicists can usually predict the outcomes meticulously. The laws of physics, expressible with differential equations and tensor calculus, can even predict new laws. But can evolutionary biologists predict the size and time of emergence of a small predator in an ecosystem overpopulated by mice? Hypothesizing “methinks it is like a weasel” is uncomfortably vague.

Organisms Obey Physics, But…

To be sure, the bodies of organisms will obey the laws of physics. When launching a human cannonball, physicists can predict where to place the net. The power output of an electric eel can be measured with voltmeters. The luminosity of fireflies submits to photometry. Terms such as entropy and enthalpy can also be used to model processes of photosynthesis in plants.

That’s not the kind of physics that evolutionary biologists envy. They want to predict what evolution will do, or post-dict what it has done. Sometimes they try too hard to imitate physicists in their stories by borrowing their terms….

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