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 ...
National Geographic has never been a scientific journal. It is a magazine. It publishes news articles about science.
Looking at the same data, we C's say that indicates a common Creator.
Would it therefore also be true that the idea of all races of humans sharing a common ancestor is also based on assumption? Afterall an asian has never been born to two africans.
Where is our CLOSEST animal critter? why can we not BREED with them?
I don't see why we should be able to breed with them if they are indeed our evolutionary cousin.
ERVs are not a design feature though. They are caused by viral insertions. Viruses are not creators. There is no reason why their distribution should fit the nested heirarchy it does if common descent was not actually true.
But what CAUSED these things to occur?
Using the Schroedinger's cat illustration, these critters either lived in the water or they didn't, as being equally efficient on both is illogical.
Anyone who came across these, who had no preconceived ideas about them would say they were all different creatures an none gave rise to the other.
Examples of what we got NOW.
From where did they come?
;^)
I'm sure they'd be offended or at least miffed.
Why... just LOOK at all the scientific endevours they've sponsored.
Then, according to the predictive quality of the ToE, what is the mechanism that shuts off the breeding abilities between cousins?
Genetic divergance. The fact that two cousin species have diverged from a common ancestor species. Certain genetic differences will mean interbreeding impossible. This is seen in nature where very similar species cannot interbreed, or have some difficulty in interbreeding (lions and tigers for example).
I always thought that Ichneumon's post 217 on how speciation occurs was a good read when it came to understanding all of this.
The three laws of thermodynamics were taught in both the engineering and physics classes. If you first approach thermodynamics from the classical engineeing path of rediscovering how to bore out cannons effeciently, I can see why you'd have the (false) complaint of conflation that you do. There's no sense in learning of heats enthalpic, latent, and transfered of the more general fundaments of the mathematics and physical models involved.
Just to note, that like you, I was always bothered by the non-respect for local phenonmenom that the laws of thermo have -- how they impose perfect gases, perfect diffusions, perfect mixing so as to make use of the classical thermodynamic distributions -- Maxwell-Botlzmann, etc..
So I try to work from the old simple physics mindset. Make simple analogies -- such as the fifty pennies. Use those analogies to provide a mental model to consider aspects of the problem.
Here the fifty unsequenced pennies are being used to to show how the laws of *information* thermodynamics develop and what entropy means, what order means. I could *presto* change it into a heat problem by saying that if heads the pennie is in energy state E1, and if tails, E2. There is a complete parallelism to classical thermo in that regard.
For the most part atheists believe and preach the dogma of materialism.
Why can there not be evolution and ID in the same physical world?
I see no reason why there can't be both evolution and ID because some aspects of evolution have been scientifically supported so if there is anything to ID there must be both - not sure what your point is or how that comment is related to atheism. Atheism is a belief system. There can also be ID without a god (such as seeding from another planet that is the result of pure materialistic means)
Speaking of simple, gosh, and heck - Gosh, what the heck are you talking about?
Oops, forgot to add the mandatory smiley face
:-)
BTW - after reading your other comments I think I understand what you mean - I thought at first you were dising me...
:-)
I don't have to feign humility in the presence of people who say the earth is flat. The argument from thermodynamics is decided. You don't need to be an expert.
Done what?
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