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Evolution's Thermodynamic Failure
The American Spectator ^ | December 28, 2005 | Granville Sewell

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 ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: creation; crevolist; evolution; intelligentdesign; law; mathematics; physics; scientificidiocy; thermodynamics; twaddle
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To: Right Wing Professor
You think I went back in time and changed the last twenty posts retroactively because of something you just posted? Or the last 20 are just accidentally unrepresentative of the last 2000? You're a nutcase. Go away.

I looked at the last 20 posts on this thread and didn't see anything by you about fossil evidence; just name-calling "jerk", "blowhard".

Calling people names, as here, is all you have. I have always made detailed, precise, respectful arguments. Many other people have attested to this. Want to explain why that makes me a nutcase. You are the one who should go away.

1,421 posted on 01/09/2006 1:33:04 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: Right Wing Professor
You act like a jerk, and then whine when poeple answer in kind.

Want to back up your claims with evidence? I acted like a "jerk" because I didn't ping you when responding to someone else who was responding to you?

I am "whining" because I call you out for having nothing more than name-calling in your rhetorical quiver?

You know, you seem like a very unhappy person. I suggest you find a program or something. There is help for people like you out there.

You'll notice that my posts, as always, are backed up with something us creationists like to call "facts". Your accusations are backed up entirely with more accusations. You ever wonder why that is?

1,422 posted on 01/09/2006 1:36:53 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: jbloedow
I have always made detailed, precise, respectful arguments

You mean, like What is this? The Beavis and Butthead hour?...Do we need a separate, plastic-coated kids' table for you people?

Delusional. You're now on my Virtual Ignore list. I've no doubt you'll precisely and respectfully claim as evidence you 'squished' me.

1,423 posted on 01/09/2006 1:44:54 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
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To: jbloedow

Responding to myself here but ... just for the record, I'm going to do my best to ignore the RWP person from this point on and allow all slanders, insults, ad hominems, absurdly false and unsupported claims to go unanswered regardless how rude, baseless, or vulgar.

It is, after all, the Christian thing to do...

If he decides to make a coherent point without insulting anyone, someone please ping me.


1,424 posted on 01/09/2006 1:46:06 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: jbloedow

Actually, I find RWP to be one of the most coherent posters on these pathetic, tired ID threads...


1,425 posted on 01/09/2006 1:47:35 PM PST by blowfish
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To: blowfish

Thanks. Appreciate it.


1,426 posted on 01/09/2006 1:53:11 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
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To: blowfish
Actually, I find RWP to be one of the most coherent posters on these pathetic, tired ID threads...

Wow. That's fascinating. Okie dokie.

Can you point me to his most coherent argument against Dr. Sewell's article. Coherent means free from slander, insult, presuppositional dismissal of people he disagrees with. (I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I just didn't see it).

Thanks.

P.S. One of his most coherent arguments against me was where he accused me without basis of being "as ignorant of Latin as [I] am of science" despite the fact that not only had I not indicated any ignorance of science -- oh, except for being skeptical of evolution -- but also the fact that I was a Classics Scholar at my private English school, and the son of a Classicist. After pointing this out to RWP, he fell oddly silent and forgot about me. :-)

Doh!

1,427 posted on 01/09/2006 2:00:01 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: jbloedow

It's Christian to wallow in ignorant sanctimony?


1,428 posted on 01/09/2006 2:00:29 PM PST by js1138 (Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.)
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To: js1138
It's Christian to wallow in ignorant sanctimony?

js113, where have you been? You know what, I hate to get all sentimental and stuff, but after dealing with these other folks I've been starting to miss you (and b_sharp and bobdsmith). Good to know you're still there.

By the way, those are some excellent vocab words you used there!

1,429 posted on 01/09/2006 2:06:28 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: js1138

Seriously, though, last time we talked we were actually having a decent conversation. If I recall correctly, we had decided to place the abiogenesis issue off the table for the meantime because you guys admit you have no clue how that happened, and you had asked what processes of evolution might possible violated the SLoT.

I did some looking around, and found that the most developed argument seems to be that:
1) The genome contains information;
2) Evolution involves adding information to the genome via mutation+selection.
3) The SLoT, as extended in Information Theory (Shannon, etc.) says you can't do that spontaneously (ok, it's a bit more formal than that, but you get the idea).

Here's a site on your side that summarizes some of this: http://home.mira.net/~reynella/debate/spetner.htm. (See, I'm not scared to read your stuff!!!)

Anyway, your position is that mutations can add information to the genome in the "Shannon" sense, I take it? And this isn't a problem from a SLoT point of view because... (I'm still reading).

NOTE: this is a bit like arguing with liberals; I find I'm usually better figuring out what their best arguments are myself. (just being a "jerk"!) :)


1,430 posted on 01/09/2006 2:20:58 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: jbloedow
I've actually noticed that the evolutionists on this board appear to be almost completely illiterate when it comes to philosophy, which is sort of surprising. But not really I suppose.

Natural selection explains it perfectly. They can only continue to hold onto the ToE in an information-selected environment. At the racetrack blinders are used to similar effect.

So only the selectively blind survive as ToE-ers.

1,431 posted on 01/09/2006 2:27:28 PM PST by bvw
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To: jbloedow
Closed and open systems.

My twin sons when they were wee lads would have loved it if their room self-organized upon turning on the lights. But, not so. If anything the heat of the lights causes more dust to fly.

1,432 posted on 01/09/2006 2:31:29 PM PST by bvw
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To: bvw

Somehow if I utter the words "hurricane" and "snowflake" I have refuted your point.

Not sure quite how though...


1,433 posted on 01/09/2006 2:34:42 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: DennisR

Yeah, but it will certainly show up if God wants it to.


1,434 posted on 01/09/2006 2:36:16 PM PST by GreenOgre (mohammed is the false prophet of a false god.)
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To: jbloedow

Shannon didn't study information. He studied information transfer. Information, that is what information is, is nothing but "philosophy". Yet without a common understanding of what the "information" is that we are talking about discussions run in circles.


1,435 posted on 01/09/2006 2:40:14 PM PST by bvw
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To: jbloedow

All structure is in the mind's-eye of the observer. What fosiil record is there of the mind's eye?


1,436 posted on 01/09/2006 2:45:14 PM PST by bvw
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To: jbloedow
"Your argument is that you can analyze the sequence of events that make up abiogenesis and show that there is no SLoT."

Not only here, but in any real system. What needs to be understood is that if the system exists, then it doesn't violate the 2nd law. There are no biological systems that violate the second law. They all run off the Sun's output, or the Earth's heat and chemical energy.

"Second, your other analysis seems to ignore completely the development of Information Theory, and to mistakenly assume that the primary SLoT objection to information-adding mutations is thermal."

The entropy of information theory and thermodynamic entropy are not the same. In general they can be equated, but in that case the thermodynamic meaning renders the information theory obtuse and overly complex. I've seen many attempts to equate them and most are wrong. Schneider's informaiton theory is the best I've seen, but his grasp of thermodynamic entropy isn't that good. Here's a page from one of his papers where he calculates the minimum energy to communicate one bit of info.

Here he considers a coin flip and mixes thermodynamic entropy with info theory info-Hbefore-Hafter. He gets ln(omega) right (1.14*1023) for a 3g Cu penny at 300K, but then says the number of microstates decreases by 1/2 after a coin flip. That is wrong. The number of microstates can change at 300K by 1/2, if the penny's weight decreases by 1/2. The penny's microstates aren't a function of marks placed anywhere on it. As far as counting microstates goes, all that matters is 3gs of CU at 300K.

His information theory concerns are satisfied, as he does elsewhere, by simply ignoring the microstates. That's appropriate, because they don't change here. They don't change significantly in his other bio examples I saw, or the energy for the interaction is clearly provided allowing the discount. All that matters is noting the features that have meaning as far as info is concerned. In this penny case calculating a real entropy change would require giving a time to flip and calculating according the heat required to accelerate and the disipation required to gain a result. I haven't verified his calculation of the Emin for any bit change in general yet.

The second law is thermodynamics and refers to energy. Information theory is not thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is all that's important for the physics. Applied information theory, as I just noted for Schneider's penny example, is not thermodynamics. He touches on this elsewhere by providing an ACS educaitonal article about papers tossed around the room, or neatly organized as having the same entropy, but forgot it in this case. Note that paper arrangement can transmit a message, but any entropy change is contained in calculating the heat disapation during the acceleration and drag of rearrangement. The microstates of the papers don't care hwere they are, or what's written on them.

"By the way, you previously stated, if I'm not mistaken, that the genome contains no information? Surely this is a rather "innovative" suggestion?"

My comments above should clarify that. The thermodynamics are independent of what is represented in the DNA. Schneider's reciver of information theory is the reader of the DNA. Themodynamics has no senders and receivers and as above doesn't recognize "signals", "order/disorder", or other qualificaitons.

" if you use the Shannon-Weaver index to measure "complexity", then your "complexity" increases when you add random noise "

Yes. So? If the noise reduced the channel capacty the signal won't be recognized. That's a nonviable situation. Biologists study existing, viable organisms.

"to talk about information solely in terms of the bits in the message outside of the receivers interpretive "filter" may not be a complete understanding of the issue."

What matters is Esignal/Enoise. That can be observed and measured. It can be observed if that ratio is greater than (2r-1)/r. Where r=bit rate / bandwidth. If noise, or bit rate is a problem, the system is not viable and will not be observed. The 2nd law is never violated in any real process.

1,437 posted on 01/09/2006 2:51:59 PM PST by spunkets
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To: bvw
Shannon didn't study information. He studied information transfer. Information, that is what information is, is nothing but "philosophy". Yet without a common understanding of what the "information" is that we are talking about discussions run in circles.

That's a darn good point. Perhaps the creationist side is guilty of this too -- don't know, I spend more time reading evolutionist arguments -- but the evo side of this seems to obscure this fact in everything I'v read on this topic. Bits don't "mean" squat in and of themselves. It's dependent completely on the decoder, right? Because information has only been transferred once it's been decoded? Do you know of any study of the application of information theory to genome evolution that does not obscure this at all?

1,438 posted on 01/09/2006 2:57:48 PM PST by jbloedow
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To: jbloedow
The hurricane organizes due to a an amazing coincidence of orbit and plantery rotation. The snowflake organizes due to an amazing coincidence of atomic layout. One by adding heat, the other by taking it away.

Yet what information is created? Organization is not information of itself. It is only some intelligent observer that can apply any pattern of information onto it.

When an obsever takes on a bent towards ToE, he drops the "amazing" first, and as time goes by becomes less and less able or motivated to apply any informative patterns. For all become equivalent for defiency of a philosophy.

And once equivalency takes hold, it affects all cognition and interaction -- they become more and more base, animalistic, crude.

Simple socio-physics.

QED. ToE, Dawkins-extreme, is very anti-science.

1,439 posted on 01/09/2006 2:58:36 PM PST by bvw
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To: bvw

I think the evolutionist would argue that anyone can observe "patterns", but are you saying that without the philosophical basis upon which to ascribe meaning to some patterns over others, science becomes impossible?

(Or do I misunderstand?)


1,440 posted on 01/09/2006 3:23:26 PM PST by jbloedow
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