"I know what I am, but what are you?"
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 ...
How DAST thou speak evil of a beloved (see Pat!) fellow congregant!
PH has stood the test of time, he indeed is an E of the highest magnitude and ONLY an E!
There is no need to parade as a misinformed (but lovable) C type!
--EvoDude
Huh? Have you no knowledge of the lights that have EVOVLED on the deepsea creatures??? Their eyes work just FINE!!
(But them stupid cave fish DEVOVLED their eyeballs. Go figger!)
Come on: take a stand!
Was that one of those mid-mounted engines? What did they call that? I had a 1974 Fiat 124 Sport. Terrible. They entropy in use after the first 10,000 miles.
THAT oughtta hold 'em a while!
You're dumb; we're not: end of story.
Then you have 'evidence' of poor evidence?
Elsie, I like your tagline, but are you a TROLL?
"I know what I am, but what are you?"
Oh, they understood all right. That's why they wanted to kill Him!!!
Well, permit me to try again. You referred to "the absolute truth of conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and evolution". So if the laws of thermodynamics conflict with evolution, even presumptively, let alone absolutely, then why doesn't life itself?
Surely the thermodynamic cost of, say, changing a DNA base pair cannot be greater than the thermodynamic cost of, say, creating a molecule of ATP (the cell's energy source). Yet a typical animal must create, what, millions?, billions?, trillions?, of ATP molecules every single hour. I don't know what the numbers are exactly, but surely in the space of hours a human has created more molecules of ATP than the number of DNA base pair differences that separate humans and chimpanzees.
Life overcomes entropy -- concentrates negative entropy -- in the first instance, prior to and apart from evolution. So how does evolution contradict thermodynamics without life itself doing so first?
Justh cause we lisppst a bit is no reaston to rag on usth!
I once knew a snake so poor that he didn't have a pit to hiss in.
It will eventually be possible to directly verify it when the technology is available. A number of hurdles are still in the way, but they could be jumped at any time. One main hurdle currently is the problem of deriving the protein shape produced by any given sequence of DNA.
Once such hurdles are overcome it will be possible to simulate the expression of genes on a computer. It will be possible for example to take a known gene and randomly alter it and see if that alteration is a valid gene. Imagine doing one million different alterations and counting how many of them produce valid genes, and then being able to determine how they differ. This will allow evolutionary pathways between different genes to be found, something that is currently outside the ability of technology and knowledge.
The long term goal would be to simulate the growth of entire organisms on a computer based on their DNA. The benefit of doing this on a computer rather than real life is that time is no longer a contraint. A fast enough computer could simulate one million generations of a population of bacteria in a matter of seconds for example.
"my new book, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations"
No doubt a Best Seller. Looking forward to a Hannity interview.
ROFLMAO
As legal representative of the author of DILBERT, we have noticed that your post has a certain, shall we say, appearence of QUOTEMINING of a recently published creative work.
While quite possible that ideas can spontaneously form in separate minds, the timing in THIS instance is highly suspect.
In the future, you MUST give the REQUIRED credit where it is due.
Since 1893
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