Without considering how the Earth, itself, evolved, in 1979, David Attenborough presented an enthralling series of programmes on the BBC, titled Life on Earth. In the first episode, Attenborough graphically illustrated the exponential rate of evolutionary growth on Earth. It is now some 3.6 billion years since the first self-reproducing forms of life appeared on this planet. So, if we consider ten million years to be a day, we can map the whole of evolution on Earth to the days of the year.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand exponential growth is to note that exponentiation is repeated multiplication, just as multiplication is repeated addition. As an example of the latter 2 × 3 = 2 + 2 + 2, where 3 is the multiplicand. Similarly, 2³ = 2 × 2 × 2, where superscript 3 is the exponent.

The most important point about understanding the meaning of growth is that materialistic, mechanistic science cannot explain why green grass grows, even though these words coexisted in Old English with the same PIE root.

To define growth, it is necessary to abandon the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of isolated systems left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time, entropy being a measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.