[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for this excellent thread and especially for your post at 57!

IMHO, some correspondents may have leaped to the conclusion that this is an Intelligent Design article per se, resulting in a rash of dismissive statements which are not particularly relevant to the point being made by Swenson.

I don't read where Swenson is suggesting a designer and certainly he is not making a pitch for Young Earth Creationism - rather, he is looking at the ecology, the big picture, the evolution of one. He is saying (in my paraphrase) that the materialist approach of Darwin's theory is tunnel visioned.

Truly, you have done a much better job than Swenson himself in laying out the issue at hand, narrowing to the false "Cartesian Split". IMHO, we cannot have a fully informed view of nature (including evolution) without removing this bias.

So Swenson gets a tad exercised, because Darwin’s system not only does not accord with the universality of the second law; but it also denies a central fact of living beings: That they possess a form of consciousness, and thus have the capability – in varying degrees – to assess situations in which they are existentially involved; they possess a form of memory and thus have some capability of “learning” from their experiences; and so can modify their paths accordingly, such that they may persist in the living state – which theoretical biologist Ervin Bauer has defined as the achievement and maintenance over long timescales of the greatest distance possible from the onset of thermodynamic equilibrium.

The contention over entropy is a case in point. If the only entropy one considered was physical, then entropy increases, and "heat death" results. That is a tunnel-visioned view concerning the evolution of one.

For one thing, living systems are information rich which means the Shannon entropy in living systems decreases as information content increases, dissipating energy into the local surroundings to "pay the physical entropy tab".

And there is certainly more at work in living systems than just the gain in information content to defy the physical entropy! As you have mentioned, intelligence is involved as well: memory and problem solving. That intelligence is manifest not only in organisms but also molecular machinery and collectives of organisms - perhaps as the article suggests, an evolution of one.

My two cents...

[Ronzo]

And there is certainly more at work in living systems than just the gain in information content to defy the physical entropy! As you have mentioned, intelligence is involved as well: memory and problem solving. That intelligence is manifest not only in organisms but also molecular machinery and collectives of organisms - perhaps as the article suggests, an evolution of one.

Oh, so that's the big deal with entropy...we living creatures so badly wanting to avoid it! We are living contradictions to the 2nd Law.

The "evolution of one" makes perfect sense from a cosmological perspective. Though it seems "New Age," the crystal & meditation crowd probably understand this idea better than anyone. And yet there is nothing in Christian theology that would oppose something like this, in fact there are some theological hints that would lead one to believe that there is a lot more "life" to our universe than we realize.