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 ...
I never read The Selfish Gene because I didn't know if it was referring to Simmons, Rodenberry, or Wilder.
Seriously, I thought the gametes were there to reproduce the rest of you, or a fairly close copy thereof.
Speaking of that, has anyone figured out why Lewinskys are so dang popular all of a sudden? What is their survival value supposed to be?
...and on a related note, Happy New Year.
And that was just the tip of the tongue. Imagine if the whole tongue needed to be used.
Start with an hydrogen atom, then sequentially add the next element, in this case helium, to the molecule. Keep adding elements to the molecule. At the end of 80 or so elements, assuming those that require too much EA to bond easily or will not bond at all are discarded, what do you end up with? Is the molecule you end up with the same as the one you started with?
If this as aimed at me, you might check back on my posts. You will see I claimed that appendix D of Sewell's book was full of errors. An appendix by the way, that had nothing to do with the focus of the book, which is Calculus. I also made the comment that if the rest of his text was as bad as the appendix I hoped it was not used as an education textbook. I did not claim that the text was full of errors.
That's a specious argument for order from disorder.
In fact, it may be a better argument against evolution.
Entropy TENDS toward disorder. Wouldn't the mixture temporarily imposed by the shaking motion be more complex than the individual ingredients? Yet because nothing was imposed to keep the mixture in the new state, it reverted to the original ingredients.
Evolution has to OVERCOME entropy to organize increased complexity of higher species. Or, as I believe, the order of this elegant universe is created and imposed by a Creator.
Thank you for the interesting paper(s).
Note: "Thus, under adverse conditions, cells may use this error-prone polymerase to produce variants that allow their descendents to survive. Indeed, Pol IV, Pol II and Pol V were all shown to be important for the long-term evolution and survival of E. coli (Yeiser et al., 2002)."
The bacteria didn't "decide it needed the mutation". They just respond to adverse conditions by increasing their mutation rate as an adaptive mechanism. Natural Selection in action.
There is no "direction" here, and how does a bacterium "decide" anything?
The 2 examples I gave are not "pre-coded" (whatever that is), they are the result of viral infections entering a lysogenic (like) phase. There's nothing Lamarckian about this. So, are Creationists Lamarckists?
Putting a creationist appendix in a book primarily devoted to another subject seems unnervingly familiar. Something like sneaking a "peer reviewed" article pushing creationism into a journal otherwise devoted to cataloging birds and butterflies.
Depends on your frame of reference, I guess. Can also elicit howls of protest.
Happy New Year.
"But... Wouldn't a dehydrated toad find it a bit hard to pee?"
How do you think it got dehydrated?
New Years Eve is second only to Christmas for me folks, so I'm out to celebrate.
"The bacteria didn't "decide it needed the mutation". They just respond to adverse conditions by increasing their mutation rate as an adaptive mechanism."
Are you sure about this? Not all genes were mutated, and among the ones mutated included the one that was needed, and the kind of mutation that was needed was the kind induced by the action of the DNA Polymerase.
This seems to me that it would meet the requirements for being an assisted search, not an unaided mutation.
"There is no "direction" here, and how does a bacterium "decide" anything?"
Ummm.. even if you don't agree with my interpretation above, the stress did in fact trigger a specific response mechanism to alter its genome, whether or not you think that this was a blind or assisted search for the proper change.
Likewise, I gave another example earlier how bacteria can modify its genome in response to stress in very specific ways with insertion sequences.
"The 2 examples I gave are not "pre-coded" (whatever that is), they are the result of viral infections entering a lysogenic (like) phase."
Right, I was responding to your comments about the work of adaptive mutagenesis by Hall and others. As for pre-coded genes, there is evidence that many pseudogenes are actually latent genes that can be triggered by the environment for a transposon to activate them. This is a genetic change to trigger a pre-coded adaptation within the genome.
"So, are Creationists Lamarckists?"
It appears that we may have different ideas on what Lamarckism means. A good book on a creationist view of biology is Understanding the Pattern of Life:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=ASIN/0805427147&link_code=as2&camp=1789&tag=freeeducation-20&creative=9325
A good review of some of the ideas in that are here:
http://www.grisda.org/origins/54005.pdf
and here:
http://www.grisda.org/origins/52007.pdf
I almost forgot, I try to keep track of some of these things on my blog:
http://baraminology.blogspot.com/
If you're coming as a newcomer I would suggest that you start in September and look through the posts sequentially as some of them build on others.
"I used to believe in classial evolution.
It is, however, a theory that one must take on "faith" rather than "factual supposition"."
Amen, it does indeed take a lot of faith to believe in the lie of evolution as well as a general disregarding of so many recognized scientific facts that contradict the theory of evolution. And no science contradicts creationalism except the theory of evolution, a fable concocted by the athiest mind fearful of scientific fact that kicks their evolution religion to the curb. Evolutionsists remind me much of the Hindu India religion which creates an insurmountable caste system and causes starvation of those who worship their ancestors. An ironic fact considering that the elitist left prides itself on the pursuit of scientific fact unless it contradicts their ape to man religious faith. Athiests are all alike.
"There is none so blind as those who will not see."
Happy new year one and all!
Do you want the classical thermodynamic explanation, the CT entropy explanation or the statistical mechanics explanation?
Classical Thermodynamic: Heat tends to spontaneously move from a concentrated state to a dispersed state. Simply put, heat tends to move from a higher temperature system to a lower temperature environment, spreading out if possible.
Classical entropy: The change in entropy is a measurement of the amount of heat dispersed. The amount of heat no longer available to the 'system' to produce work.
Statistical mechanics entropy: The disorder in a system, determined by the number of microstates possible without affecting the description of the macrostate, expressed as the log of a probability.
Written in what?
Have you determined a limit to the number of changes he is allowed to make after you're done?
Not if you add water.
Access. It's basically a photo database used to document construction projects. Kind of a CYA thing for contractors. My son finished architecture school and decided he'd rather be a photographer.
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