A few weeks ago, I picked up The Sun to see yet another attack on Darwinian evolution. Fellow staff columnist Judah Bellin ’12 poo-pooed those of us who detract from evolution’s detractors. He pointed to massive atrocities committed by ruthless dictators in Darwin’s name. He claimed that biologists’ dogmatic support of a single theory is hypocritical. I rushed to a computer to e-mail Bellin my response.

My e-mail to Bellin focused on three main contentions: First, evolution as a theory exists beyond biology, but only within rationalism (where it would never be in direct competition with a religious theory). Second, a theory can be accepted without being morally correct. This second point directly challenged the folks quoted in his first story who attacked evolution on the grounds that the dangerous theory led to eugenics. And third, I said the eugenics argument was flawed from the start, since evolution advocates for genetic diversity — the best way a species can bolster its chances for survival in an ever changing world.

Finally, I referred Bellin to another grand idea of science with wide reaching applications: entropy. I should have known he’d stumble upon Ludwig Boltzmann.

Boltzmann is a rock star in the physics world (What? You’ve never heard of him?). He provided a link between the wildly unpredictable world of quantum fluctuations and the world of order and certainty that you and I live in. He was also bat-shit crazy, as the saying goes.

Bellin claims that Boltzmann was a man of many beliefs: a man who took physics, and perhaps all rational endeavors, as merely one aspect of his well rounded life. Boltzmann himself claimed he was many things: an apologetic materialist and a religious man. One thing we know for certain: he was a depressed man.

The mid-1800s were the golden age of classical physics. Henri Poincare was still a few decades away from stumbling upon chaos while studying the problem of three objects orbiting each other in space. Dirac, Schrodinger, Pauli and Heisenberg hadn’t come along yet to wreak quantum mechanical havoc. There were Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations, and everything pointed toward a perfectly ordered world of certainty and precision. With enough chalk, you could derive the evolution of the entire universe, as God himself planned it to evolve thousands of years ago.

But Boltzmann didn’t buy that. He had a new theory in the works, and it could explain fundamental ideas most of us take for granted: why heat flows from hot to cold, why gas expands to fill a chamber and perhaps even why time flows forwards, not backwards. Sounds cool, right?

Classical physicists didn’t think so. Boltzmann’s theory was simple and elegant, but it relied on an idea many found repulsive: uncertainty. Boltzmann imagined an inconceivable number of tiny particles whizzing about haphazardly. Like consumers in an economy or dice in a casino, any individual event is impossible to predict. But in aggregate, these events sum together to produce enormous, macroscopic phenomena that would probably evolve in a very predictable fashion. With two dice on a craps table, the most probable outcome is seven, but the chances of rolling a different sum is pretty high. But for consumers in a world economy of 6 billion, the results become pretty predictable. For a gas with one billion-billion-million molecules, the chances of seeing all the air in the room bunch up in one corner, suffocating your classmates, is so unlikely that you could wait many times the age of the universe, and never see it occur.

At the turn of the century, no one could see these supposed “atoms” and “molecules” in action. Boltzmann’s theory contradicted the beautiful order and continuity every other experience in physics and chemistry seemed to suggest. Nonetheless, Boltzmann was vindicated years later; and today, the vast majority of scientists accept his statistical interpretation.

OK, so at this point what have we learned? Popular theories fail! Newtonian mechanics has been relegated to a “good approximation” in a certain small regime of phenomena. So does this mean Bellin wins? Are the evolutionary biologists wrong? The religious freaks right?

No. Absolutely, unabashedly, no. And here’s why ...

Boltzmann didn’t just come up with a trippy idea, get on Rush Limbaugh, scream it over the airwaves and then run out of the room crying. He employed rationalism. He and other scientists built a theory with testable predictions. Their theory could explain observable phenomena that previous theories couldn’t. They were ruthlessly objective, throwing away any idea, no matter how warm and fuzzy it may have seemed, if it did not hold up to the scrutiny of logic and experiment.

Proponents of intelligent design do not attempt anything of this nature. They dwell on the irrational: emotions, sentiments and morality. They conflate the idea of a theory being “correct” with a theory being “moral.”

So you want to overthrow evolution as it applies to biology? Do it with a theory that explains things evolution doesn’t. Devise an experiment where you can prove that theory “A” works, and evolution fails. Then we’ll talk.

I’m not trying to claim evolution is “right” and religion is “wrong.” You can’t claim anything is right or wrong just based off your perceptions (even hundreds of years of perceptions by the world’s greatest experimentalists). But you can definitely reject a theory from the realm of rationalism if its arguments are irrational. After that, I could care less what you tell yourself sitting in your pew on Sunday morning in a massive, impersonal cathedral.

OK, obviously I care, but a rational person doesn’t.

And, finally, back to our friend Boltzmann. He had a crazy theory about our universe: Using his probabilistic interpretation of the world, Boltzmann claimed that a universe that contained simply a floating brain capable of self awareness was far more likely than this world we live in with arms, legs, Cornell University and Rush Limbaugh. He therefore speculated that for every complicated universe you and I live in, there are trillions and trillions of much simpler universes with the far more likely floating brains.

But with the help of Darwin, Boltzmann’s theory proves implausible: our universe is the far more probable one. Molecules randomly collecting into a full brain is a LOT more improbable than those molecules coming together into a single small strand of RNA capable of replicating itself. To prove our universe more probable then, all we have to do is provide an inevitable road map from single strand of reproducing RNA to Rush Limbaugh. At this point in time, the most likely answer is evolution.

In the end, Boltzmann seems more like the dogmatic supporters of a single theory Bellin condescends to, rather than some sort of well-rounded beacon of spirituality. Suffering from severe depression, with many detractors refusing to believe in his theories, Boltzmann hanged himself. He took his argument to his grave, where you can find his most famous equation etched into the head stone: S = k log W.

Munier Salem is a former Sun assistant design editor and founded the Science section. He is a senior in the College of Engineering. He may be reached at msalem@cornellsun.com. Critical Mass appears alternate Mondays this semester.