I would love to hear how the 2nd law of thermo does not conflict with evolution . You say basically it doesnt matter. How so? Your explanation is not based on any science; instead you ignore one of the most thoroughly tested laws in all science. The classical interpretation reads them at face value to mean the universe is winding-down irreversibly toward a heat death where all the mass=energy is still present but unavailable to perform work. These laws indicate the universe is not a perpetual motion machine.
Although , as you know, in the origins debate we typically hear of it as the universal tendency toward disorder or entrophy. There is another aspect of this law. The Second Law says that in a closed system, energy always distributes itself so it is no longer available to do useful work, and this will happen irreversibly.
Imagine a closed system of 2 rooms; a cold empty room next to a room full of hot steam. The non-uniform distribution of mass-energy - known as disequilibrium provides energy that is available to do work. This is called the available energy or free energy.
Imagine a steam engine in one of the rooms with pipes connected so that the hot steam powers the engine and the exhaust is then expelled into the cold room. The engine can then drive many devices to accomplish useful tasks. As the steam engine runs, the hot room gets colder and the cold room hotter. When the two rooms reach the same temperature the engine can no longer run, no matter what temperature the rooms or how efficient it may be. The system has reached equilibrium. All the mass-energy is still present. It has merely distributed itself so it can no longer do work. That available energy is now gone from the system forever. Process irreversible.
Look at Hawking's book on cosmology Brief History of Time. He gives us a fine example of evolutionary distortions.
He misinterprets the probablities involved in the Second Law of Therm. He has the reader imagine 2 boxes: one containing oxygen and the other nitrogen. These boxes are joined together and the intervening wall is removed. As predicted by the second law, the gases will mix throughout the box. What is the probablility the oxygen gas will randomly move back to its half the box? Hawking claims it can happen. Do you?
Hasn't this been answered repeatedly on this thread? The earth/sun energy exchange is not a closed system. Someday the entropic piper will have to be paid, since the entire universe is presumably a closed system, but we are not talking about the entire universe, we are talking about a tiny piece of it, for a very small slice of time, so entropy can run uphill within it, just like eddy currents can briefly travel in the opposite direction from the flow of the river that produces them.
Usable energy is being pumped onto the earth by the sun all the time, which produces highly usable energy gradients that do work to produce highly regular, differentiated effects such as hurricane weather cells, ocean currents, whirlpools, bubbles, snowflakes, crystal lattices, and life.
It is a fundamental point of quantum theory that, in fact, it can happen. Just not with a very high probability. On a subnuclear scale, where events are occuring at an extremely high rate compared to rate at which you can perform your test with two rooms full of gas, it happens frequently enough that the transistors that allow you to communicate on this medium make use of the phenomenon.
I already did that.
Your explanation is not based on any science; instead you ignore one of the most thoroughly tested laws in all science.
No, I just explained how the 2nd Law works. You are the one attempting to apply it to an abstract realm with shoddy reasoning. You can't hand-wave thermodynamics in that way. I'm not ignoring it at all - it doesn't look to me like you're paying any attention at all to the definitions of entropy and a closed system are, in the first place.
The Second Law says that in a closed system, energy always distributes itself so it is no longer available to do useful work, and this will happen irreversibly.
Okay. The sun hasn't finished distributing all its energy yet. Hence it can still do useful work on Earth.
All the mass-energy is still present. It has merely distributed itself so it can no longer do work. That available energy is now gone from the system forever. Process irreversible.
And this will eventually happen on Earth (practically) when the sun has exhausted its available energy and the core of the earth has cooled. Till then, thermal exchange still applies, and also the ability of localized systems to decrease in entropy. I agree, without the sun or geothermal heat, evolution couldn't occur. Then again, neither could life.
Look at Hawking's book on cosmology Brief History of Time. He gives us a fine example of evolutionary distortions. He misinterprets the probablities involved in the Second Law of Therm.
You understand thermodynamics better than Hawking? I don't think so.
The laws of thermodynamics always apply (to systems with large numbers of particles anyway), but not in the ways you are thinking. The article from the Institute for Creation Research that you (apparently) cite most of your 'information' from makes several key mistakes in the application of this concept. It makes the point that direct application of energy to system tends not to order a system (i.e. the old tornado in the junkyard argument. It ignores the fact that complex organic molecules, living organisms etc. act as an intermediate system for the absorption, processing and releasing of energy - the concept of the increasing order (decreasing entropy) of intermediaries of heat/energy flow is a commonly observed process in thermodynamic systems. As I said, a global increase in entropy is necessary for a localized decrease. The laws of thermodynamics are indeed present in evolution, and in fact, evolution occurs in concordance with these laws, not in spite of them.
He has the reader imagine 2 boxes: one containing oxygen and the other nitrogen. These boxes are joined together and the intervening wall is removed. As predicted by the second law, the gases will mix throughout the box. What is the probablility the oxygen gas will randomly move back to its half the box? Hawking claims it can happen. Do you?
You distort Hawking's statement. Given a probabiblity of an infinite number of years, it could happen, but not under any practical circumstances (not in the multibillion year age of the universe would this occurrence be even remotely likely to occur). His point was that thermodynamic laws are statistical in nature, not that this is something one would observe in reality.
I'm not sure what it is you're trying to say that the 2nd Law really tells us - is it that no system can ever have a local decrease in entropy? You're wrong. The creationist 'definition' of the 2nd law would hold that plants can't grow, embryos can't form, a hurricane can't form due to natural weather, and an endothermic chemical reaction can't even occur. The only thermodynamic conditions that are necessary for evolution to occur are the same as those required for life to exist and reproduce.
There's a good and simple reason why scientists don't take groups like the Institute for Creation Research seriously: their science is wrong on a multiple number of levels. Their blatant distortion of the meaning of basic physics principles is not a point that scores well for this organization's favor.
I would love to hear how the 2nd law of thermo does not conflict with evolution .
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Well, it is pretty simple really. In simplified, non mathematical terms, the 2nd Law states that in a closed system, entropy (disorder) tends to increase.
Now, you will say "Ahhhh! But evolution makes things more complex" and think that shows a violation of the 2nd Law. But you missed two VERY important words. Those words are CLOSED system. An organism, a species or indeed life as a whole is not a closed system. There is a huge supply of "negative entropy" in the sky. We call it the sun. And as long as the sun keeps shining its short wavelength light on the earth, and the earth keeps reflecting longer wavelength light back out to space, then entropy of the earth/sun system will keep increasing. So no violation of the 2nd, or indeed ANY law of thermodynamics.