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 ...
Well, it doesn't look like 2006 is going to be any different.
Fair enough.
LOL! Never cracked a science journal or attended a conference, I see. I'm strictly an interested amateur, but still I've attended a few sessions (at AAAS conventions and the like) were I thought they would have to spread sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood. For example I attended the anthropology section heavily one year when the "Out of Africa" versus "Regional Evolution" controversy was at a peak and some of the main controversialists were presenters. (This was a dispute about whether anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa and then spread around the globe, or whether modern anatomy developed within local populations of Home erectus or other archaic sapients.)
Your perception of evolutionary science doesn't have the slightest relation to the reality.
Oh, correction. I remember now that I did once attend a scientific conference in which, although I attended the reading of a couple dozen papers, virtually no one raised critical or penetrating questions or pointed to refuting data. (And there was palpable discomfort and disapproval from the audiences on the few occasions that someone did.) Of course that was a creationism convention...
Another interesting difference, now that I think back, since I believe I attended an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference the same year ('92) I attended my only National Creationism Conference: At AAAS they allotted 45 minutes to the authors' presentation, and 45 minutes to Q&A. Often enough the audience would effectively force the presenter to start addressing questions well before the halfway point. A LARGE proportion of the questions were challenging and not uncommonly (intellectually) aggressive.
The Creationism conference, by contrast, only allotted 15 minutes to questions (and sometimes there were none). I and one or two other evolutionists present would occasionally ask a question, but mostly we were just observing, or relegating our disputations to side conversations. There was literally only one creationist present -- ONLY ONE! -- who EVER asked challenging or even penetrating questions, and again I attended every presentation I could over a long weekend.
It was a most remarkable contrast. That one creationist, btw, was Kurt Wise of William Jennings Bryan college, which was hosting the event. Even though Wise was himself a good fundamentalist, the audience was VISIBLY upset when he challenged presenters. (I made a point of scanning the audience.) By contrast a hard-nosed question at the AAAS convention tended to produce greater interest, attention, and often smiles.
Why was Wise so different? Maybe because, instead of attending a religious school, he decided to study at mainstream universities. He even claimed, IIRC, that the famous evolutionist Stephen J. Gould was a graduate adviser at one point. IOW he learned the critical approach FROM EVOLUTIONISTS.
This presupposes that the person asking the question is a "true beleiver" who already understands to not ask questions that require something that hasn't been proven.
Any question that may be aimed at finding out what you really believe is usually answered with a snide remark or a "that has already been answered, dummy."
Whatever
I'll agree with that from the evo side. Although I'm no expert, it seems obvious to me that thermodynamic considerations are a major constraint on theories of chemical evolution/abiogenesis. I don't agree that they make abiogensis presumptively impossible, but clearly you're going to have to appeal to chemical synthesis that, under "normal" circumstances, involves very low probability reactions. So your theory is going to need a mechanism or boundary conditions that explains how they can occur, how the reactants can remain in sufficient concentration, or what have you.
IOW issues of probability and entropy are clearly relevant. But they simply aren't with respect to biological evolution because life as such has already overcome entropy, and is continuously doing so. All life processes, including evolution, occur in a low entropy environment to begin with.
As perfect an example of a dismissive answer as there can be.
If you look back through the thread, it is typical.
O.K. Take it up with Dan(9698) then. My post was directly responsive to a claim he made. (That evolutionists are just "guessing" in their theories.) I just pointed out that, if that were so, colleagues would have to forgo juicy opportunities to show each other up, and that this would violate human nature (let alone what we know about the sociology of science specifically, a field that maintains an unusually high level of intellectual aggression and competition).
Thank God!
They know better than to bring up something that is "out of bounds" because their colleagues will jump on that and excommunicate them.
...a field that maintains an unusually high level of intellectual aggression and competition...
But only to attack those who say something that is not part of the Dogma.
They have mutual admiration societies for those who present only what every already "knows".
Let someone question how they handle their evidence and watch out. You can already see it on this thread.
I asked for specific information on a "peer reviewed" article explaining how a fossil shows up for millions of years, dissappears, and a few thousands of years something "related" shows up fully developed.
I got an answer that the intermediate steps are hidden.
Ok If that is the answer that you believe, state it as a belief and not as science.
A post with defininitions was a partial answer, OK, then lets apply those definitions to the question at hand.
The closest answer is, "Guess: an opinion or estimate based on incomplete evidence, or on little or no information"
That is an honest answer.
Not likely, they have already seen what happens to anyone who strays from the orthidox.
The reason they made such a specticle of the stickers in the science books was to punish those who had such temerity, and to serve notice on anyone who were to try something like that again.
It certainly was not to expand the universe of competing knowledge. They were protecting their recruits from the mean old outside world.
I see biogenesis as a trap door function, like an encryption algorithm. The key could be relative short, and not improbable at all, but impossible to derive from the message, particularly after billions of years of evolutionary change.
My personal anger is not directed toward people who disagree about how it might have happened, but toward those who argue we shouldn't be looking.
It is ok to look, just don't look in anyplace that isn't approved by the Dogma of the evolutionists.
All I can say is that, from my admittedly limited acquantance with the discipline, your view of evolutionary science is delusional. And not just a little delusional, but WAAAAAAAAY out there. It's nothing like you think. Not even remotely. But so be it. Your mileage may vary.
Both Stultis and myself, as well as others in other threads, have repeatedly described the operational reality of science and the interaction of scientists. No scientist, in my small but vocal circle, is in any way timid. This is possibly a biased sample, but I suspect that the same energy and drive that enables an individual to gain their PhD will manifest itself in their life's work.
There are requirements for an idea to be accepted as part of science, one of which is that it actually *be* science. ID fails this. This failure is the total reason it has been rejected, ridiculed, and even at times reviled.
Actually it was. When you single out ONE theory (particularly one that has known and open political/ideological/philosophical/theological opposition) from among THOUSANDS covered in the textbooks for special qualification applied only and exclusively to it... THAT is dogmatic.
There's no getting around it. If the motivations were not dogmatic the qualification would be made to apply to any/all scientific theories in the texts. There's only one reason to single out a single theory, and that's DOGMATIC opposition to it.
Besides, the "universe of competing knowledge" isn't "expanded" by what you put in the textbooks! (In fact that's indicative of the LEFTIST notion that affirmation makes it so.) It's expanded when actually competitive theories are able to make their mark and their contribution in advancing ongoing scientific research.
Unfortunately it usually passes without comment, but this notion -- seemingly universal among antievolutionists -- that it's principally in the secondary school curricula were scientific ideas do or should "compete," is completely bizarre. Well, more than that. In a word it's stupid. The curricula are merely where the results of the competition are reported, it's not were the competition occurs!
You complain that creationism or ID isn't allowed to "compete" because it isn't included in high school textbooks? Lord. That's like complaining that the Red Sox are allowed to compete because the sports pages keep reporting losing scores for their games!
The great minds of the Discovery Institute haven't figured out where to look, nor have Behe, Denton or Dembski. Where is you want to look, and why hasn't anyone in the ID movement started looking there?
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