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To: metmom
Can't answer that one.

I'm feeling lucky tonight. None of the common-descent, variation, and selection processes involved in evolution violate the 2nd LOT used by physicists. Reproduction with variation is thermodynamically OK. Duplication mutations are thermodynamically OK. Copy errors and cosmic ray zaps violate no law of physics. Natural selection, the way in which some things live to reproduce and some things do not, violates no law of physics.

The version of the 2nd LOT quoted by creationists is not that of physics and is not correct. It would not only forbid the evolution of complex organisms but the formation of ice crystals from liquid or gaseous water, the formation of tornadoes from warm air and surface water, and the growth of adult humans from zygotes.

What science says about the formation of complexity came to fullness in the work of one Ilya Prigogine, who got the 1977 Nobel for Chemistry by describing the mathematics of "systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium" and their tendency to "self-organization." The Earth, sitting in the outflow of energy from the Sun to the cold vaccuum of space, is a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Lots of squirrely stuff gets to happen here because it's sun-powered.

490 posted on 09/23/2006 8:28:45 PM PDT by VadeRetro (Liberalism is a cancer on society. Creationism is a cancer on conservatism.)
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To: VadeRetro
What science says about the formation of complexity came to fullness in the work of one Ilya Prigogine, who got the 1977 Nobel for Chemistry by describing the mathematics of "systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium" and their tendency to "self-organization." The Earth, sitting in the outflow of energy from the Sun to the cold vaccuum of space, is a system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Lots of squirrely stuff gets to happen here because it's sun-powered.

Remind me to Google some of Prigogine's stuff. If my hazy memory serves me correctly he worked on (or at least started by working on) systems "shocked" away from equilibrium and watched as they re-attained equilibrium...

Cheers!

505 posted on 09/24/2006 12:38:51 AM PDT by grey_whiskers
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