Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler, for example, in "Order and Chaos", write, "In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law.... Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy."
According to this reasoning, then, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal -- and the door is open. In Appendix D of my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, I take a closer look at the equation for entropy change, which applies not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that it does not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system. It also says that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
thanks
Well put! <-- CRID equivalent of the Evo - [Thunderous Applause!]
In China it does...
I imagine that you are right.
What are you?? The inverted Anti-Christ??
Yep.... I just spent 300 bucks for a new boat cover because it would not regenerate itself.
Elsie, see my previous post on why. An academic or scientific bookseller's reputation is their life.
When someone, like js1138, says show me something that has been peer-reviewed or in a textbook on this topic, the whole implicit argument is that there is a much higher level of scientific credibility presumed in those regards vs. something posted, say, on a website or in a popular magazine. Why is that?
Journal and book publishers work very hard at building the highest reputation possible by being as selective as possible so they can be as prestigious as possible, such that when something is published with their name on it, that carries weight. Gravitas, if you will.
When I buy a Wiley book, or an O'Reilly software book, it's because I don't want to have to start from square one independently verifying the author's credibility on the subject in question; I am paying for someone else to have done that. If Wiley is no different from HarperCollins, if I'm getting Harry Potter and the History of Evolutionary Dogmatism, instead of a serious scientific text, it's no use to me. Unless I'm looking for entertainment.
Hope that makes sense.
So what? Literally, so what? Unless you know in detail what the designer had in mind, you cannot say.
My point was the logical inconsistency of allowing for the nonce, for the sake of argument, the existence of a designer, and then jumping to conclusions about what a designer's purposes MUST be.
I agree that from an engineering perspective, ERV's serve no apparent purpose. But for all we can verify of designers (nothing), one of the designer's teenage kids and their friends might have sneaked into the development lab one night and put in ERV's as a prank.
Cheers!
That's odd. I went to a Catholic high school, and creationism wasn't even on the menu. Who "penalized you for your position" and what kind of penalties were imposed?
but after much reading and a better appreciation of mankind's real limitations I'm sure the Darwinism is plainly wrong and needs to be exposed for its flaws.
What did you read that convinced you that "Darwinism" (by which I suppose you mean the theory of evolution) is plainly wrong? And maybe you could provide a list of what is "plainly wrong" to help out the misguided.
That's just not RIGHT!
Anyway, from what I can tell, Saudi Arabia and the United States have this in common: it is against the law to teach alternative theories of origins. What was the original point? Who was being compared to the Taliban (who were from Afghanistan as far as I recall, but I may have gotten that from a source who believed in God, so disregard).
It doesn't. On the one hand you say that "book publishers work very hard at building the highest reputation possible by being as selective as possible so they can be as prestigious as possible, such that when something is published with their name on it, that carries weight. Gravitas, if you will."
On the other hand, you say that HarperCollins exercises no selectivity at all and publishes what you believe to be junk like the "History of Evolutionary Dogmatism" (couldn't you name a real book to make your point?).
Seems to me that book publishers (and authors) are principally in business to sell books, which explains rather well the existence of books like "Of Pandas and People" and "Darwin's Black Box", not to mention Jack Chick.
We don't know this, but based on the history of science, a naturalistic explanation will be found.
What does elude me is the motive for giving up without an explanation, particularly since ID proponents keep assuring us that ID has nothing to do with religion. Some. like Michael Denton, assure us that biogenesis is inevitable, given the starting conditions of the universe.
Goddidit is not an explanation. Never has been, although it has been attempted for every phenomenon from disease to earthquakes.
Not as raw as his wife and children.
First, the book title was supposed to be a little funny, for Pete's sake. Breathe, everyone, it's the weekend.
Second, I said no such thing, re: HarperCollins. It's not that they don't exercise selectivity, but rather they are selecting for a different literary phenotype, if you will. They -- or let's say fiction booksellers in general -- are trying to publish entertaining books that make a really good read.
Yes, everyone wants to promote their own survival, but that doesn't mean they're all trying to occupy they same literary environmental niche. Each bookseller has selected a certain niche and tries to adapt itself as perfectly as possible for that niche.
In the case of academic and scientific booksellers, their fitness function is highly correlated to the intellectual integrity of their authors. For fictional booksellers, there's a different definition of fitness. This making any sense yet? It's not that complicated really, and everyone here knows it's true.
Are you really trying to argue that McGraw-Hill or Wiley or MIT Press are going to start publishing Howard Stern's autobiography just because it would make them lots of money? If that's the position you want to stake out for yourself, go ahead, and we'll all have a good long laugh at your expense.
Speaking of books, does anyone know anything about the late Barbara Stahl's text, "Vertebrate History: problems in evolution"? I was thinking of giving it a read, but if one of you evos who moonlight as specialists in claiming published books are full of errors could provide some insight, that would be great.
Explain how evolution is thermodynamically different from metabolism, growth, development, learning, photosynthesis. What specific chemical process involved in evolution violates thermodynamics?
I originally responded to a claim that the pattern of ERVs indicates common design as much as it does common descent.
I disagreed because ERVs are not a "design feature". That is what sets them apart from say shared functional genes between species which can be said to be a design feature.
You question how I know ERVs are not a "design feature". I guess I don't absolutely know they are not, but there is no more reason to think they are than to think the pattern of craters on the moon is a design feature, or the shape of the himalayas is a design feature.
The pattern of ERVs fit a nested heirarchy. Common descent expects this, common design does not.
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