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 ...
The differing densities and the gravitational field provide tabular order; you could apply the 2nd law to a set of encyclopaedias with equal relevance.
Next try the experiment with two beakers; one with miscible liquids, and the other with immiscible liquids. Describe your results. Keep trying to find a connection to the thermodynamics of an infinite system, while turning blue in the face.
Evolution is Religeon. See post 119 for what Darwin said.
Mis-statement of the evolutionary process. There is no stimulus -- no reason to include or exclude specific bit sequences.
This is a standard creo talking point -- I think I have seen it stated as a tornado creating a 747. Disingenuous, mis-states the theory, straw man and probably a dozen other logical fallacies.
It requires faith to believe his theory, therefore it is a Religion.
Darwin was couching his language in strong qualifiers, something which creationists on these threads regularly berate evolutionists for not doing. So what is the problem?
Oh, and by the way; science has progressed for some 150 years since Darwin. Few discoveries, here and there; maybe 98% of the fossil record, DNA, a little geology here and there, maybe a stray find or two in biology, etc.
And you know, old Darwin was right all along. Pretty smart guy, eh?
That mis-states the quote.
Evolution is a speculative theory. It is based on using the scientific method. It may have a religious wrapper, but the fact remains that it is subject to scientific srutiny.
All religion boils down to: "because I think so."
A family friend hit the FL lottery some years ago. Had she been playing every day since she was born, her odds for winning statistically were still remote. But she still hit anyway. The point of all this is that if something is probable, the lucky number eventually gets cashed, be it now or the next 20 billion years.
You wrote: "If you spent a year flipping coins, you might possibly get a run of 100 heads in a row, although it's extremely unlikely. ... Evolution is the equivalent of billions of heads in a row."
Reply:
By your "logic", you do not exist. If I calculate the probability that you, Cicero, would be born, would have 'brown eyes' and type O blood (if true), and would post exactly your words at exactly 5:03:39 PM, the probability would be so small as to be ignorable.
So, how do your "probability calculations" allow for you to exist when the probability is infinitesimally small?
I have already posted -- this is NOT a random process. It is a feedback loop.
That old saw is getting really old from the creos.
An excellent analogy to evolution you've given us above. Thank you for demolishing the church of evolution logically.
The fossil record does not show darwin was right.
It shows millions of years of staying the same, and then jumping to something else that stays the same for millions of years.
Darwin's theory of incremental changes over long periods of time is refuted by the fossil record.
Smart, yes; and he may very well have been "right all along." But I was not aware that Darwin predicted DNA. Did Crick and Watson credit Darwin in their work on DNA?
BTW, I'm sticking to my infinity time quotient until someone can prove to me that time definitely ends - in which case I'll perhaps be willing to shave off a few billion years ;)
Your post doesn't make any sense.
I found this interesting, though:
Finally, that natural selection seems even remotely plausible depends on the fact that while species are awaiting further improvements, their current complex structure is "locked in," and passed on perfectly through many generations. This phenomenon is observed, but inexplicable -- I don't see any reason why all living organisms do not constantly decay into simpler components -- as, in fact, they do as soon as they die.
In this passage Sewell stumbles over (but does not stop to examine) a problem with all antievolution arguments involving thermodynamics, even ones as seemingly vague as his own: Life itself "violates" the Second Law far, far more prodigiously than evolution (operating at the rates biologists propose and earth history requires) ever could. Living organisms are basically entropy exporting, or negative entropy concentrating, machines. Evolution is only one of innumerable processes that this organic "negentropy" environment facilitates.
A question like that could only come from one too lazy to study God's word sufficiently to understand it, and to take recognition of the massive amount of numeric evidence in the word to prove that only God could be it's author.
You have made yourself, intellectually speaking, a pool of frozen 'primordial soup.' (mud)
Yeesh, talk about an appeal to improper authority. My university background is chemistry and chemical engineering, and did some work in computational chemistry back before it was common. Despite that, my real contributions to humanity have been in the domain of theoretical computer science and the mathematics relating thereto. You may have "experience" as a tech weenie of some sort, but I develop the underlying theory.
Again, I challenge YOU - take a 8 bit micro, start feeding in random op codes - when will this machine boot???? You are a IDIOT!
You appear to be channeling Ren -- "Stiiimpy!! You IDIOT!!". But you still did not address my point, and fabricated yet another strawman that illustrates your non-comprehension of my point.
Your "experience", such as it is, apparently did not enlighten you to the mathematics of doing computation with anything but zero-order algorithms. And what you say is true if restricted to zero-order algorithms. Very quaint, that, and much computer science still restricts itself to them. Unfortunately, complex organic molecular systems and biochemistry in particular is very clearly a n-order algorithmic system where "n" is a non-trivial integer. One of the neat things about high-order computational systems is that you can bootstrap extremely complex systems from very simple primitives with only a tiny bit of algorithmic information.
All we need is enough high-order algorithmic information to start the bootstrap, and it turns out that the requirements for this to work are actually quite trivial -- it can be plausibly brute-forced. Continue to rant and slobber about zero-order something or other, but it is not relevant to the problem at hand.
So, let me restate:
And you know, old Darwin's theory was right all along. Pretty smart guy, eh?Better?
You posted: "There is nothing in the 2nd law about densities, is there?"
The differing densities and the gravitational field provide tabular order; you could apply the 2nd law to a set of encyclopaedias with equal relevance.
Next try the experiment with two beakers; one with miscible liquids, and the other with immiscible liquids. Describe your results. Keep trying to find a connection to the thermodynamics of an infinite system, while turning blue in the face."
Reply:
Cute. You know about miscible liquids--puts you a step above most creationists. I don't know why you specified beakers--this was kitchen-observable science. You don't need beakers or a lab to observe order arising spontaneously out of disorder. Any middle school student can do this experiment and see the results.
Now: I did not claim this works with any two different liquids. I said oil and water. It works with mercury and benzene, too, in case you are confused. You go on to talk about "the thermodynamics of an infinite system". I have no idea what this means. I only post what we observe here on planet earth.
And: Please show us where miscible/immiscible liquids are mentioned in the 2nd law.
Amazing how disjointed things become when you're either too lazy, or too ignorant peruse them in depth.
(1) survive (2) reproduce ( eat is a subset of 1 )
You have introduced 2 parameters..
Your "program" is no longer random..
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