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 ...
For your perusal...
You actually posted: "Dude, (LOL) you presented a general tautology as proof of a theory, without any proof that the tautology was related to the issue."
Reply:
Your insightful, cogent analysis is a beacon of light for all of us in darkness. Yep. Indeed, it is a wet bird that flies by night. /s
Sure he is, but he's way out of his field when he attempts to tackle biology and information science, which isn't itself necessarily problem if he knows what he's talking about, except for the fact that he doesn't, since he gets a lot of even the basic stuff wrong.
It always amuses me when you guys totally discount the conclusions of the most experienced biologists, then turn around and worship anything that falls out of the mouth of a creationist Professor of Aerodynamics with regards to a very complex field he's not trained in.
Evolution is a fact in the here and now. You can see it with the bird flu virus.
You are arguing about origin of life. But if you read about lipid bilayers, they are self organizing, often into spheres which are microscopic chemistry experiments. The numbers are astronomical both for spontaneaous life and the number of lipid bilayers available.
Further, there is no incompatibilty with an ID creation billions of years ago and evolution driving us here. There is a real problem with the creationists arguing no evolution ever was at hand and the earth is 10k years old.
The fossil record does show creationism aka a 11,000 year old earth is wrong. And further, the fossil record does show darwin was right at least part of the time.
Ahem, that would be "life as we currently know it". Which is something very different than "impossible". Your assertion is premised on your conclusion.
The vast majority of other parameterizations for the universe will allow mathematically equivalent constructions of life, which is about as close a comparison one can make as mapping some kind of physical equivalence between differently parameterized universes is meaningless on many levels.
You cannot make a martini if you are given beer as your only ingredient, but the beer will give you a buzz just the same.
Not really, you can fit a trillion bacteria in a gallon of water.
One of its pitfalls is explaining how one species changes to another.
There is nothing in the fossil record to show how this happens.
Congratulations, you're just revealing your own ignorance instead of stating actual fact. And you sort of "forgot" to mention that there is far, far more evidence for the mechanisms of speciation than just "the fossil record", including many varieties of DNA analysis, field studies, experiments, observed speciation events, etc. etc. etc.
If you believe it happens with no scientific evidence, your belief is a leap of faith.
It would be if there was actually "no scientific evidence", but contrary to your bizarre and uninformed presumption, there is vast evidence for evolution, along multiple independently cross-confirming lines, so there's no need for "a leap of faith".
Try again.
You haven't been to Amsterdam, Netherlands have you?
At least F.Christian was entertaining, a true master of psychedelic haiku prose.
Feeding /dev/random into Babelfish would produce more insightful content than the mindless blathering we are suffering from this other fella. To mix metaphors, on the Internet nobody knows you are a million monkeys banging on a keyboard.
You wrote: "I donno ... I try so hard to get the creationists to love me ..."
Reply: LOL. Passion is ephemeral, but love of the universe and how we are part of it is enduring. Ours is only a small planet, but be assured that there are those of us who love it. And you.
Some actual quotes from an unlovely point of view: "Members of the secular scientific community take their moral and intellectual purity to attack 'intelligent design'. Vested in white lab coats, they appear as high priests of the god of Reason, they defend their model of intractably theistic [sic] Darwinism… It would be easier to accept the priestly purity of the scientific caste, however, if its members didn't routinely descend from high-mindness [sic]… to promote an atheist world view."
…"The liberal elites are those who hate and fear America. Like termites eating away at the foundations of American Civilization, they feed us on evolution and materialistic philosophy that undermines Christianity."
... "you insist in clinging to the completely disproven religion of evolution (otherwise known as the "I-can-have-any-kind-of-sex-I-want-to" faith.)
You could not make this stuff up!
[...] Smart enough to know that in order for a species of one classification to 'evolve' into a species of another classification, the following must occur:
Both a male and a female of this 'new' species must be born with the same specific mutations at approximately the same time in close proximity to one another, survive to adulthood, find each other, sucessfully mate and then raise at least some of their offspring to adulthood.
ROFL!!! I'm sorry to have to inform you of this, Mr. Very Smart Guy, but your "smart enough" notion of biology is laughably childish, and could have been cured by the simple act of bothering to crack open an introductory Biology book, instead of letting your Big Smart Brain come up with the entirely wrong answer through gross ignorance of the subject and a failure to think things through at all. See below.
There is much more. to further complicate matters, to think that both a male and female of even the same litter would have a mutually compatible impossible mutation at the genetic level it too great to comprehend and so speculative that no rational person would think it to be possible.
That's why no rational person *does* think such a stupid thing -- except for the creationists, who aren't smart enough conceive of any other manner by which populations could evolve...
Here are some posts I wrote to the last few folks who couldn't imagine anything other than the silly scenario you mistakenly presume "must" be the only way a population could evolve:
And:Oh my, where to start... At the top, I suppose. You start with, "The definition of a species is that it can't reproduce with anything outside the species." No, this is incorrect. While it's true that if two groups *can't* interbreed, they are necessarily separate species, the converse is not true. Groups that can interbreed to some degree can still be separate species. Consider lions and tigers, for example. A better definition is that species are groups that *don't* interbreed to any large degree. A more technical way to put it is that they are independent breeding populations. But there are exceptions and gray areas -- this is because nature itself does not recognize the "species" concept. It's a manmade label applied for convenience and utility to certain groups. If Darwin was right, there should not be clear-cut distinctions between groups as they are in the process of diverging evolutionarily. And indeed, this is exactly what we find, which is why there's no "one definition fits all situations" meaning for "species". Groups like "ring species" throw a monkeywrench into any "nice and neat" definition of "species" that humans might care to try to formulate, for example. Nature is nowhere near that tidy.
But even leaving that aside, your idea about how a population can split into two distinct species (even by your definition) is a wildly incorrect misconception about how it actually works.
You have two major misconceptions and wrapped them around each other.
The first is that species formation involves a sudden "freak" with a massive mutation that occurs in a single individual in one generation. Nope, wrong. This is widely snickered at in the biological community as the "hopeful monster" scenario. But it's not how evolution proceeds.
Your second misconception is that having a different number of chromosomes would prevent successful mating. It doesn't. Or at least it needn't, depending on the nature of the difference, and there are many known cases where it doesn't. For example, the Przewalski horse, which has 33 chromosomes, and the domestic horse, with 32 chromosomes (due to a fusion), are able to mate and produce fertile offspring.
A third misconception, a combination of your first two, is that speciation requires anything like an "extra" chromosome. It doesn't.
What actually happens (or at least in most cases -- as in my earlier discussion of the definition of "species", nature is flexible and abounds with variations, and refuses to follow any one "script" in every single case) is that accumulated small changes in a population diverge if from a parent population.
Note for example that there is no one "big mutation" separating humans from our nearest extant cousins, the chimps. There are *thousands* of genetic differences, as one would expect after five million years of divergent evolution between the two groups. Heck, there are hundreds of genetic differences between *human* groups, and we share common ancestors a lot more recently.
[Sidebar: However, the nature of any one specific difference considered by itself is minor and of the type one would expect to be produced by evolution. There are no portions of the human -- or chimp -- genome which are so different that they seem "completely rewritten", or "written fresh on the drawing table" when compared with the other group. Both the human genome and the chimp genome have been completely sequenced and are available on several online databases. I challenge any creationist to compare any portions of the two and look for any difference between them which are "unique", or are major minor variations from the other to be of the sort -- in both amount and kind -- which one would not statistically expect to result merely from five million years of evolutionary "drift". Good luck! None have been found so far by anyone, but hey, maybe you could be the first.]
One genetic mutation does not a new species make (again, usually). Often *hundreds* are not enough, as proven by the many genetic differences occurring even within human populations.
Instead, it takes *many*, *many* accumulated mutational differences to separate one population from another to a degree large enough to warrant describing the two as different species, and/or to interfere significantly with their ability/willingness to reliably interbreed.
So the answer to your question is simple: Speciation does not occur in a single generation by one mother suddently giving birth, *poof*, to an offspring so mutated that it's a "new species" from its mother, and unable to interbreed with the rest of its (sort of) kind. Instead, subpopulations of a larger population (often separated by distance, geography, or other barriers) each accumulate genetic differences apart from each other as new mutations accumulate separately in each subpopulation, each mutation occurring originally in a single individual then spreading through the subpopulation in succeeding generations (while detrimental mutations get constantly weeded out by natural select, and beneficial mutations get "amplifed" by it), until eventually the two populations are different enough from each other in their overall genetic makeup so that morphologically they are obviously different "subtypes" of creatures even to the unaided eye, and no longer reliably interbreed with each other.
And yes, there are countless field studies and genetic studies and all sorts of other studies which have established the reality of this, it's not just a hypothetical scenario.
I'm no expert (this will become obvious momentarily) so I've always been puzzled about one thing. At a certain point a mother gives birth to a child with a different genetic code, right? Fine, but let's say the child is a female. My question is; where does the male come from with the same genetic code to propagate this new species? Or is it a horse + donkey = mule type of thing where the species are similar enough to carry on. My ignorance on this is great so I would appreciate any answers you could provide?You're asking the wrong person, allow me...
The answer is that it's not a matter of having "same" or "different" genetic code. Every human being has a different, unique genetic code (that's why DNA matching works in criminal cases). But obviously we can still interbreed.
No "exact match" of DNA is required to interbreed, just "close enough".
And the short answer to your question (there are all sorts of fascinating complicating details) is that when a population (usually, an isolated *subpopulation*) of species X is evolving towards becoming species Y, the amount of genetic change per generation is small enough that each member of the population can continue to interbreed with the rest of the population, even if it has a mutation that hasn't yet spread to the rest of the population.
Over several generations its novel mutation does spread through the population and becomes ubiquitous in the population, and thus when the next novel mutation pops up in the population, everyone's already on the same "page" with respect to the last one, and the new mutation is no more hindrance to interbreeding than the last one originally was.
Rinse, repeat, etc.
Eventually the number of novel mutations in the population becomes so large that even though the population itself can still interbreed (because they all "evolved together" into species Y through genetic exchange), the population is "enough different" DNA-wise that it will no longer be able to interbreed with members of the *original* population of species X it split off from (which itself may be relatively unchanged, or evolved off in a different direction itself).
This is how one species splits into two (or more), each "daughter" species unable to mate with its "sister" species, yet always able to breed with itself at every stage along the way.
Look back a few posts for a discussion of "ring species", whereby each subgroup along a "ring" around a mountain or whatever is still able to interbreed with its "neighbor" subgroups on the ring, but when the far "arms" of the ring meet each arm has changed enough genetically that they are unable to mate at the point where they "meet up" on the other side of the geographic obstacle. This works in a way similar to my description above -- each subgroup is "not too different" from its neighbors to interbreed, but over the whole extent of the line/ring, the far "ends" have diverged enough from each other to be unable to mate. Same thing, basically.
Those who claim that these new species of a different class could evolve over long periods of time, ignore the very real fact that there must be at some specific generation a point in time when the nes species of a different classification occurs at conception. No rational person would believe this to be possible.
Hey, moron... It *is* possible, using the *real* model of evolutionary biology (which has actually been observed occurring in nature), and not your incredibly stupid cartoon version of it.
Here again is something I posted previously, on the subject of how this "insurmountable" change in classification easily occurs:
I know evolutionists believe that the changes occurred gradually. My point was at some point man was fully man. Unless every single creature gained that full manness at the same time, he was mating with something that would have been less (even if it only slightly less) human than he was.If you're really as smart as you claim you are, could you please *apply* it for a change and *learn* something about a subject before you try to lecture anyone about it? Your uninformed presumptions have proven consistently unreliable.Okay, let's see if I can explain it this way...
First, part of your confusion (in this, and in a lot of other topics in this thread) comes from your insistence on declaring that things must be 100% A or 100% B. The living world is not so black and white. The range of living things is a continuum more often than it's either/or. And not just across time, either -- several people have asked you to ponder the existence of "ring species", but I haven't seen you tackle it yet.
Furthermore, creationists often fail to appreciate the significance of the "nested hierarchies" of living things. It's as incorrect to say that a specific creature must be *either* a human *or* an ape as it is to say that a creature must be *either* a lion *or* a cat. Ponder that one for a moment, and then you'll be ready to understand the point of the essay You Are an Ape. Please read it.
Finally, even if you cling to the view that there's some "required" combination of genetic differences which, as soon as they're acquired, turn a "mere ape" into a "human", *bang*, that still doesn't make the evolution of one into the other a problem, or create any "breeding impossibilities". Here's how it works...
First, keep in mind that even if the "special" combination of genes which make primate DNA be considered human DNA has to all be present before *you'd* finally agree to label the resulting organism "finally human", a creature with only, say, 99% of those genes would still look pretty darned human and not so "classicly" apelike, since it would consist of 99% of the things that "separate" humans from apes. It'd only be missing one little thing out of the full set, so only one part of it would still be "apish" -- for example maybe it'd have more of a protruding brow than most people but all other human characterstics.
The other thing to keep in mind is that any one (or five, or fifty, or...) genetic differences is usually not enough to prevent interbreeding. The genetic differences just "mix and match" in members of the popuation, in the same way that both the blue-eyed gene and the brown-eyed gene swirl through human populations without any big deal.
So now that you've got some of the background, the way in which an "ape" population would evolve into a "human" population is straightforward. At some time a mutation X1 appears in the birth of a member of the population which offers some small advantage by virtue of being a small improvement (which in this example happens to bring the individual slightly closer to the advantages of being "humanlike"). The change is likely to be barely noticeable to those around him, perhaps he stands just slightly more upright, or has a slightly larger brain, or his hands are just a bit more talented, or he can voice a slightly wider range of sounds -- whatever. It's due to a small DNA change within him which just happens, by luck, to make a biochemical improvement to a particular protein in his body in a way that makes some function in his body perform just a touch better than was possible without the change. So, unlike many other mutations in the population, which made no difference, or the ones which caused damage to the functioning of the affected individual and got weeded out by natural selection, the individual who was lucky enough to receive X1 does a little better than the others in his species, and passes on his new X1 gene when he has children.
But wait, you ask, he's a "mutant", wouldn't that prevent him from mating with all the rest of the population since they don't have X1? No, it wouldn't, any more than your brown-eyed gene would prevent you from having children with a blue-eyed man. The "owner" of X1 mates with a woman who has the original form of the gene, call it Q1. Due to ordinary genetics, each of their children will have 2 X1's, or 2 Q1's, or 1 X1 and 1 Q1, by random chance. But because X1 gives a survival boost, more of the children who drew X1's from the genetic deck will have their own children than those who missed out. And so on and so on across generations, causing X1 to become more and more prevalent in the population than the competing "obsolete" Q1. Statistically, eventually X1 will "fix" in the population by virtue of being the only variety of that gene existing in the population, the Q1's having gone extinct when the last few individuals who still had a Q1 either didn't manage to have children, or had children but their children drew X1's from their parents genetic "deck".
So now the whole population is made of individuals with X1 genes and no Q1 genes.
Repeat this process for X2, another gene change which is a step along the road from "apeness" to "humanness". Then for X3, and X4, and... Finally, at some point the population will have genes X1 through X(N-1) out of the N genes which you believe are required to make them "fully human". They already look and behave pretty much entirely human, since they have almost every genetic feature which makes a species human, but you're still unwilling to declare them human because they're missing X(N), the last gene of the set. Okay, fine -- repeat the process I described above about X1 to gene mutation X(N). The first individual which gets that mutation is now "fully human" in your book. Hooray for him. However, he really isn't noticeably different from the other members of his species, since he only varies from them by a single genetic difference. So other than being the guy (or girl) who loses that last tiny remnant of "apeness" which is barely even noticeable in the population (maybe jaws on average protrude just 3% more than his or his offspring will), he has no problem having children with the mate of his choice, because they only differ by a single mutation. And eventually his X(N) gene spreads through the population over the next fifty generations until the old-style Q(N) gene gets replaced by it, and all of his kind are now 100% human instead of 99.9% human as they had been before the X(N) mutation.
And note that all the above is *standard* population genetics, *extremely* well established as ordinary processes which occur all the time in nature. It's not just an "imagine if" story.
Also note that I've simplified it somewhat by implying that, for example, mutation X46 wouldn't happen until mutation X45 had finished "fixing" in the population. Instead, it's just as easy for it to occur and be spreading into the population *while* X45 is in the process of doing so as well, for example. But this just makes the process even *more* likely, not less. There are always multiple sets of alleles floating around in populations without ill effect -- if there weren't we'd all be identical and homozygous clones.
Frankly, though, I don't think we're fully human *yet* -- if nothing else, we really need to get rid of the ape genes we still carry that cause these damned wisdom teeth which fit nicely and were useful in the longer ape jaw but just get jammed up and cause health problems in the rear of our smaller more human jaw. It looks as if we're still waiting for X(N) and haven't quite gotten the "full human" transformation finished just yet...
Your deep paranaoia and your false presumptions about me, and about evolutionary biology, are duly noted.
Any day now, I expect to hear you tell me that I'm involved in the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of your precious bodily fluids.
General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden)
You posted: "Eternity is too long to be wrong."
Reply:
Inasmuch as there is no evidence of the 'eternal life' of which you allude, I have no interest. Countless 'mediums', 'psychics', witch doctors, and priests have claimed the ability to communicate with the departed, and all, to date, have been shown to be frauds preying on the gullible.
There is a much better faith, from the Quakers (not an exact quote, from my imperfect memory): 'I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.'
For me, this reminds me of what we do in this life, the only one we know.
What in the heck is an "evo-activist"?
They claim in one breath that we are all just another animal,
No they don't. We are animals, obviously, but we're very special animals.
yet deny us the same rights they so freely give to lesser species.
Nonsense.
But the "rights" pie must be of a fixed size, because when they give rights to a lesser species they take other rights away from us (but exempt themselves from that restriction).
What are you babbling about here? It might help if you were able to make some actual points, and tie them to something in the real world, instead of leaving people guessing about what you might have gotten your panties into a knot about.
All your prior postings and convoluted "science" won't sway me from my opinion.
A closed mind gathers no thought.
Evo-activists are nothing more than fascists trying to supress criticism of their views.
Uh huh. Sure.
Now, is there any particular reason you didn't bother to address anything I actually wrote? If you're going to go off on a generalized spittle-flinging rant that doesn't deal with what I've actually written, don't waste my time pinging me to it.
The rhetorical similarity is uncanny, isn't it?
Well, I, first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love... Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.... can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.... But I... I do deny them my essence."
--General Ripper
I just like Sterling Hayden. The guy led an incredible life and is now fading into history.
Ichneumon, I feel sorry for you. People are not persuaded by insults, sarcasm or bitterness. It turns everybody off, even those disposed to be on your side. And ironically, it tends to discredit your factual arguments.
Lighten up.
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