Posted on 12/28/2005 3:01:53 PM PST by johnnyb_61820
"Simple question. Simple answer.
The table. Or tails. Or he substituted double head coins for the ones you examined. Not so simple.
Using probability to show that the 2LoT is violated by evolution ignores energy used to perform work. The formation of molecules larger than 2 atoms, steam engines, Earth's water cycle, the growth of plants all use a local increase in entropy to perform work. As far as linking entropy exclusively with disorder this is a mistake since it is possible to increase entropy and decrease disorder. The author of this article is conflating the statistical mechanics definition of disorder with the common usage definition.
Do you know what an analogy is?
Thanks for the response. But I meant a mainstream science peer reviewed journal. IOW, why don't most scientists buy the argument?
As an aside, is there money to be made by betting against mainstream science in this case? I'm always looking for money making opportunities,
The only way any externally influenced phenotypic change can be passed on is if the phenotype change is due to a genotypic change in the gametes. I know of no way knowledge of a predator would cause a gene change in a germ cell. If you have any links to this phenomena I would be interested.
As a scientist, you surely know the importance of research. Before you came to your atheistic position, did you thoroughly research the subject of God? Like, read the Bible, study it, follow the instructions therein? Pray?
Here's a dozen or so intermediates between reptiles and mammals.
Notice in particular how the ear bones evolved. This is recapitulated in the embryonic development of every mammal today.
Also notice that the website I linked to is a regional section of Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists; these guys make money from this stuff; think there are many ID/creationists there?
There's also the famous sequence between dinosaurs and birds. It's easy to find on-line.
Would you consider the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal a peer-reviewed publication? What is your criteria?
"Dust" comes before stars in the cosmic scheme of things, and exists without stars, though the dust may be little more than dark matter. Stars are borne from dust.
"Stars are born within cocoons of dust and dense molecular gas, and are mostly hidden from view at visible wavelengths." -- NASA"Interspersed between stars is a tenuous interstellar medium (ISM) comprised of dust grains and atomic and molecular gas. " -- NASA
Your are out of your "element". (pardon the pun)
"Incidentally, all you've asserted here is conditions that alter computation rates and probability distributions, but does not eliminate them. You said "impossible", not "improbable". Try again.""
No. I've explained to you that minor deviations in basic cosmological constants change the probability of elemental life (composed of atoms) to zero. No bell curve here.
We can say with certainty that no life exists within the nuclear furnace of the sun, because no long chain molecules of any sort could exist for more than nanoseconds before beuing burst asunder. Thus no life would exist in the similar environment of the furnace of cosmological plasma that would comprise the entire universe if some of those numbers were varied in the slightest.
No life could exist if the only element that existed was hydrogen! You obviously did not read any of my post.
However, any possibility of extra-dimensional non-elemental "spirit-like life" exists only because God exists in spirit and with Him all things are possible. However, God would not and did not create life without first creating the stable conditions to sustain life. That is why He created the world we now live in.
No scientist takes your position. Scientists are now looking for reasons why these constants exist the way they do because they cannot conceive of random processes in a singular universe coming to rest with these values.
I am informing you of the status of cosmological science. I am not debating you. You have offered no counter-points to uphold your assertions and establish a debate. Gain-saying is not debate.
"The rest went right over your head. My assertion was not idle speculation, it is a cornerstone theorem in mathematics."
Really? Perhaps you'd better explain. To what cornerstone of mathematics are you inferring? If you wish to debate you must make your assertions, not simply say "it cannot be".
For instance, I assert that life cannot exist if the only element in the universe is hydrogen. Your counterpoint must assert that life can exist with hydrogen only and explain why?
Do you wish to make such an assertion?
Do you wish to assert that life can exist in a nuclear furnace in which no atoms exists (not even stable hydrogen)?
bump
You must live up north. Leave someting out in the sun down here and it will grow or grow something on it.
"Just remember - atheism is the religion of materialism."
What do you mean by that?
Why can there not be evolution and ID in the same physical world?
The fossils show **that** it happened. This was known in the early 1800s. There were a number of attempts to explain **how** by Lamarck, Cuvier, and other biologists. Darwin came up with the explanation that best fit the evidence known at the time, and which has made thousands of correct predictions since then.
For example, finding fossils intermediate between apes and people in Africa. Finding fossils intermediate between reptiles and mammals, or between dinosaurs and birds.
But never finding fossils intermediate between mammals and birds.
Please explain why people, chimps, gorillas, et al all have the **exact same** mutation, not found anywhere else, that prevents the synthesis of ascorbic acid.
What's the point of some designer putting "broken code" in exactly those species that were already classified together, and nowhere else? If the designer wanted us to depend on vitamin C, why include everything needed to make our own, except for one silly mutation?
Please explain the observations summarized here, esp. fig 5 without using common descent.
At least F.Christian was entertaining
Usually, but his nasty side got him banned.
Not true. Entropy in physics is nothing more than a special case of entropy in mathematics.
In fact, the last chapter of Li and Vitanyi (the de facto reference text for information theory) is dedicated to showing how entropy and complexity in the physical sciences is derivable from the general mathematics version.
The relationship is not obvious in older Shannon information theory, which dealt primarily with zero-order information, but the broader field of modern algorithmic information theory (Solomonoff and later) very neatly maps complex physical systems into the mathematics.
The problem with this assertion is immediately obvious to me, though maybe not to you.
You assert that it is a circular dependency, but a DAG relationship (arguably the most common graph in nature, due in no small part to the laws of physics) will generate the exact same result.
And that is the issue. You see this apparent discrepancy and immediately assume circular dependency -- which would be hard to explain away theoretically. I see that and immediately see the consequence of a DAG, which also happens to be the thermodynamically favored pathway for molecular systems. Sometimes, things really are as complicated as they look.
Life as we know it...
And if the creator really is God, I'd be hard pressed to say what is and isn't possible
Some imaginative depictions of (non-planet-based) life as we don't know it:
Dragon's Egg by R. L. Forward depicts living "compounds" or "molecules" of atomic nuclei on the surface of a neutron star.
The black cloud by Fred Hoyle depicts an intelligent interstellar "dust" cloud who nearly causes an ice age when it visits the Sun to "feed" (and who, naturally enough, believes in "Steady State" cosmology)
See Post 390 and the surrounding discussion. There are indeed bacteria called "Obligate Chemolithoautotrophs" that get all of their energy and body mass from inorganic sources.
Lichens are similar. They can live on a vertical rock face, ingesting water, carbon dioxide, and some minerals.
One of the bacteria in the linked-to post lives on sulfur and requires ferric iron in its environment. Another one can live on car exhaust.
Think of the ecosystem around vents in the ocean floor.
What is so special about atoms? Living critters are perfectly reducible to complex algorithmic systems that can be perfectly reproduced in any Turing Complete system. Which would include the majority of very bizarre universes, including many that have no atoms. In fact, existence in the alternative universe would be appear to be identical as long as the algorithms were perfectly reproduced. (Shades of the Simulation Argument, etc)
You are trying to build an airplane by making an exact copy of birds -- because you have seen them fly -- and are ignoring that they are but a tiny subset of the plausible phase space for a vehicle that flies. Humans are not atoms, though that is the substrate we occupy, we are very complex algorithmic patterns at the highest level of detail.
The Invariance Theorem proves that all systems that contain the same algorithmic information are equivalent, and it is well-established that it is a lot harder to make a universe that is not Turing complete, no matter how bizarre, than one that is. The equivalence of such universes from an algorithmic information theory perspective is old school. In short, all your bizarre parameterizations must allow the expression of life as we know it, complements of the Invariance Theorem. Whether or not there are "atoms" is completely irrelevant -- any decent replacement substrate will work just as well and we would never know the difference if we were transplanted into it.
What happens when the genomes are analyzed and there are common errors in the DNA (pseudogenes, ERVs, etc - things that don't code for proteins)?
What happens when a few thousand of these genomic errors are analyzed, and the two organisms are seen to fit into a tree structure with other organisms on this basis, which just happens to match the tree structure based on the other similarities?
At some point, it seems silly to deny the common descent. Especially after it has been used to make true predictions.
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