[Right Wing Professor]

What is it about the living organism - which does not exist in a dead organism or in non-life - that causes it to translate the will to live to the molecular machinery which then obeys the thermodynamic (and all other) physical laws?

It does not then obey thermodynamic laws. At all times, in all stages of development, it obeys thermodynamic laws.

It's quite obvious in the living albatross flying away while the dead bird drops along with the 12 lb cannonball. But the will to live is also evident in bacteria, amoeba and so on.

The hypothetical 'will to live' sounds quite Nietzschean. So where in the bacterium is the 'will to live' located?

By the way, the 'panspermia' link which you continually post is quite confused. Boltzmann's constant is not mysterious at all, it's just the constant that relates our scale of temperature to our scale of energy.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your reply! Yours is an excellent example of the point I was underscoring in my replies to betty boop and to spunkets.

Here you focus on Shannon information as if it were physical:

It does not then obey thermodynamic laws. At all times, in all stages of development, it obeys thermodynamic laws.

And here you acknowledge that inception is not physical:

The hypothetical 'will to live' sounds quite Nietzschean. So where in the bacterium is the 'will to live' located?

The "will to live" is not tangible. Shannon entropy is measurable (uncertainty in the receiver) - but the process whereby that uncertainty is reduced is the intangible successful communication - an action called "information". It is measurable in bits as the difference between the Shannon entropy of the after state less the before state.

Again, I assert that Shannon information is the successful communication itself, the reduction of uncertainty (entropy) in the receiver.

It does not become "physical" in biological systems until that communication has occurred, the state changing in the receiver. That is why the reduction of uncertainty must (and does) obey the physical laws, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Whereas the sender is the inception of a particular communication it does not factor in the calculation of Shannon information at all!

Before the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver occurs, the communication is unmeasurable (intangible) and thus the thermodynamic entropy does not apply to the will to live which translates to the communication process in biological systems.

When this feature of information theory is added to the usual response that nothing can disobey a physical law, it more fully answers the "creationist appeal to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics to refute evolution" by isolating the origin of "the will to live" and information (communications) in biological systems to the abiogenesis v. biogenesis debate - well outside the "theory of evolution".