[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

My post at 1773 goes into my assertions in more detail, but wrt your point concerning open systems, from the first link:

You may have noticed the words "closed system" a couple of times above. Consider simply a black bucket of water initially at the same temperature as the air around it. If the bucket is placed in bright sunlight, it will absorb heat from the sun, as black things do. Now the water becomes warmer than the air around it, and the available energy has increased. Has entropy decreased? Has energy that was previously unavailable become available, in a closed system? No, this example is only an apparent violation of the second law. Because sunlight was admitted, the local system was not closed; the energy of sunlight was supplied from outside the local system. If we consider the larger system, including the sun, available energy has decreased and entropy has increased as required.

I have a comment concerning your sidebar with Right Wing Professor. What you are seeing in the refrigerator is akin to the point I was trying to make about molecular machines.

If one only looks at thermodynamic entropy there appears to be a clear violation in biological systems characterized by life itself and its emergence (autonomy, semiosis, order or complexification, etc.)

betty boop once used a thought experiment to demonstrate the difference between life, non-life and death. She said to take a live albatross, a 12 lb cannonball and a dead albatross to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and toss them over the side. The difference becomes obvious. Non-life and death are subject to thermodynamic entropy et al in one fashion - and life, in another.

To put it in mathematical terms, Shannon-Weaver to be exact, life is characterized by successful communications. In Shannon parlance that is the reduction of uncertainty in a receiver or molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state. Actually, Shannon used the term “entropy” instead of “uncertainty” – but we avoid that around here because it can be confusing.

The bottom line is that as long as the molecular machinery is successfully communicating, there is life. When the successful communication stops, the organism is dead. There is no life where there is no successful communication.

In the Shannon model, information is not the message – it is the action. The DNA is as good dead as alive. The elements in the Shannon-Weaver model are source, message, encoder, channel, noise, decoder, receiver. All of these exist in molecular machines.

This is not hype. It is an important area of cancer and drug research.

So just like the refrigerator is a machine designed to do something which seems to defy the 2nd Law yet nevertheless pays the tab for doing it – the molecular machine also does something which seems to defy the 2nd Law and yet pays the tab for doing it. For each bit of information gained in a molecular machine in going from a before state to an after state, energy is dissipated into the local surroundings.

Here’s the key, though and the thing which points to Intelligent Design. The refrigerator was designed and built by man. Life occurs in nature.

So the question that we ought to be asking is not about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but where did the information come from? What causes this successful communication?

To borrow a metaphor from Schutzenberger, its like the biologists and chemists are fumbling with their keys convinced that one of them will open the lock while the physicists and mathematicians are trying to tell them it is a combination lock.

The origin of information in biological systems is #2 on my list at post 1713.

[nasamn777]

You may have noticed the words "closed system" a couple of times above. Consider simply a black bucket of water initially at the same temperature as the air around it. If the bucket is placed in bright sunlight, it will absorb heat from the sun, as black things do. Now the water becomes warmer than the air around it, and the available energy has increased. Has entropy decreased? Has energy that was previously unavailable become available, in a closed system? No, this example is only an apparent violation of the second law. Because sunlight was admitted, the local system was not closed; the energy of sunlight was supplied from outside the local system. If we consider the larger system, including the sun, available energy has decreased and entropy has increased as required.

Your example here is somewhat unclear. It confuses some important distinctions. For example, your system is transient but moving toward equilibrium. Energy of the overall system is being dissipated. It does not capture the nonspontaneous processes related to the development of lifeforms. For example, if I had a gas that had energy flowing into the system from outside, I would not expect to see one volume of air at one temperature and the other volume of air at another temperature. The air would tend to mix together and the heat would flow through the colder wall. There would be a distribution of temperature within the fluid based on known laws. A finite element analysis of the fluid could be done to obtain the air temperature distribution if the boundary conditions are known over the given time. There is no apparent violation of the Second Law in your example, because the system is at nonequilibrium and the system is moving toward equilibrium as expected. The natural tendency (spontaneous process) is for the water to heat up due to the sunlight. A nonspontaneous process would be for ice to form on one side of the water due to the heat of the sun. Now if we had a solar collector connected to a Stirling heat engine that drives a Stirling cooler, we might see ice forming in the water. We have the thermodynamic mechanism that allows this nonspontaneous process: without the mechanism this will not happen.

The notion of the thermodynamic mechanism has relation to Dembski's conservation of information and applies to open systems.

Iin + I machine [due to constrained boundary conditions} >= Iout

An example is a computer. The computer utilizes energy to perform nonspontaneous processes. It acts as a thermodynamic mechanism. There is an informational content related to the boundary conditions of the computer. Also, the user may add an input of information by, for example, programming the computer. The sum of information into the computer plus the information associated with the thermodynamic mechanism is less than the information out. Information consequently has a relation to thermodynamic entropy.

Concerning the thermodynamic mechanism: in nature there are some simple thermodynamic mechanisms. One example is a waterfall. The water is heated due to the fact that the kinetic energy (due to the falling water) is converted to thermal energy. The water experiences a slight rise in temperature. Other natural mechanisms are self-organizing systems. These systems are very limited and are constrained due to the physics of the system. We do not expect these systems to produce stone mosaics!