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 ...
I've wasted 3 hours going over 600 replies!
I'm hungry and am leaving you fine folks to get some lunch.
Be nice to each other while I'm out of the office.
I believe that boiled down to a 'yes'.
One follow-up question: What difference would several hundred bytes vs. zero bytes of pre-existing algorithms in the machine make in its ability to bootstrap per the original question?
"Who said it did?"
You, with your "Tell Einstein!!" comment.
Too bad; for you'd be remembered for a LONG time!
They certainly had something to say about it 40 years ago; the whole primordial soup thing. with advances in the sciences, even they can no longer pretend that life could have evolved from non-life.
No...
It's proof that YOU aren't perfect.
I have stated that there is evidence to justify belief in evolution. I believe in evolution. That is not the whole story though.
Evolutionists claim the right to include faith in that which they can't prove, while denying the right to those who believe in a Creator.
That one species can change to another is an article of faith to evolutionists. There is nothing in the fossil record that supports that belief.
There is nothing wrong with using statements of faith to cover the gaps in your knowledge. Just don't call it science or say that is other than your statement of belief.
"...you've experienced prove of medicine..."
Nope. Evolution. Please do some research on that.
"Not in the BushMeat markets in Africa!"
What's Africa blaming on Bush now?!
Never planted seeds, I take it.
"I'm hungry and am leaving you fine folks to get some lunch.
Be nice to each other while I'm out of the office."
Something we both agree with!
That is a marvelous name! I think that Der Prinz should acquiesce to a nice Austrian spelling, however, as befits his Germanic title! How about Franck?
I printed off this article and read it this morning. Not bad, but a little garbled and repetitive. He's no Mark Steyn!
I never read most stuff. I just like to kibbutz those who do one way or another. I was kicked out of a lot of schools as a kid.
Not fair to expect Baby to live with his name always spelled wrong. The last name is bad enough!
I have news for you. Your phrase "magical godly religion" shows a basic misunderstanding of the nature of magic and religion.
Religion involves acknowledgment and love of a higher power. Magic involves the desire to exert power and control over nature. Study of the history of science in the Renaissance reveals close connections between magic and science. Both involve a Baconian desire to control nature and impose one's will upon it.
Control over nature is not necessarily a bad thing, although it certainly is dangerous if wrongly used, but it's quite different from religion.
Magic and superstition tend to be most prevalent when religion is weak or divided, as was the case in the Renaissance, a period when there was a great resurgence of magic and witchcraft, and the present time, when there is an incredible profusion of New Age mysticism and superstition. Taking formal religion out of the schools has not produced a race of cool scientists, it has produced large numbers of credulous and superstitious New Agers. Wicca, crystal gazers, channelers, and celebrity worshippers.
As Chesterton observed, if you take away God, you don't end up with nothing, you end up with almost anything. You end up with Shirley McClain, for instance.
Do you know what "order of magnitude" means?
A trillion bacteria is a relatively small number in terms of the enormous number of coincidences you need to produce a Darwinian sequence of events from the most primitive life form to the present variety of living species.
Feezelgruber is a fine name! Franck Feezelgruber. I can see it on the marquee!
F
As I said earlier, I have no problem with various kinds of intra-species evolution. Bird beaks, viral mutations. It's the General Theory of Evolution as an explanation of everything that is statistically so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
There's not too many PETA types in Africa.
For the same reason they don't throw red paint at bikers wearing leather.
Correct so farWhat assumptions does the second law of thermo take?
Read 343. My discussion of closed system and unanswered questions pertaining to the 2nd law. Evolution is "forging science" by taken the observance of adaptation and make the leap to evolution. No one has ever seen the orbital trajectory of a subatomic particle before yet through assumptions and inference we somehow ended up "forging science" about the nature of matter. I guarantee you no one will ever definitively prove the structure of matter yet most everyone gives the atomic models credence. The study of evolution has fossil evidence and studies of adaptive changes on living organisims. There are a lot of unanswered questions, like any body of study, but that’s why we continue to do research.
People pretty much get to live the kind of lives they wish to live.
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