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 ...
No, you have faith that it will occur. You believe it will be so, but you don't have knowledge that it will; unless you are God or God revealed it to you.
Should = speculation
Until it has actually been accomplished, it is nothing more than speculation.
You really need to change your screenname. (How can you "connect the dots" if ANY degree of speculation is immediately dismissed?)
It's not knee-jerk at all. I have merely pointed out the environmentalists usage of the words 'possible' and should'. If those words do not directly imply speculation, in the normal usage of the words, what do they mean?
Would you like experimental evidence of Lamarckian inheritance? See "Transposable elements as activators of cryptic genes in E. coli.":
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10952211&query_hl=1
The genome is become more and more Lamarckian each day. If that is your main objection, your biology is behind the times.
I would say that what those posters are suiggesting is more than just a small degree of speculation.
Even you acknowledge that there is speculation in volved in their comments. the use of the words 'possible' and 'should' are admission that the evidence claimed by evironmentalists simply cannot be established right now and may never be established. That clearly falls within the context of speculation, doesn't it? To say otherwise is being intellectually dishonest.
The same assumption (that similarity in DNA is evidence of common ancestry) is used in every Family Court in America.
The parts are basically the same, yet, we cannot create a human-chimp offspring. (Who has tried a chimp-human one?)
There are occasional claims of such things (Google "humanzee"), but no one has demonstrated this under laboratory conditions. (There are laws against such things.) Whether or not it would be possible, that doesn't mean that we and chimps don't share common ancestry. Tigers can only rarely produce fertile offspring with lions, and can never produce such offspring with leopards or cougars, but I don't know anyone who doesn't accept the fact that all big cats share a common ancestry.
Where is our CLOSEST animal critter?
DNA evidence shows it is the chimp. In fact, chimps are genetically closer to humans than they are to gorillas.
why can we not BREED with them?
See above. It's called "speciation."
Lamarkian mechanisms were assumed by Darwin to exist. They have no bearing on the overall validity of evolution. The one you reference is pretty isolated in scope. Hardly the kind of thing envisioned by Larmark or his followers.
The spread of introduced species seems be creating new geographic mosaics of coevolution as some species become invasive and coevolve with native species in different ways in different regions or drive rapid evolution in native species, sometimes in less than a hundred years or so.Evolutionary adaptations within a few generations based on a specific introduction of a new species. Isn't this what you were laughing about?
What bothers me about this article is the author's misapplication of the Statistical Mechanics definition of entropy to sidestep the biochemical utilization of energy to produce work. His understanding of evolution and biology is quite poor, as evidenced by his use of a slightly modified tornado in a junkyard analogy.
If I may I will use an analogy to explain my problem with Sewell's article. If a human takes a hand full of superballs and tosses that handful into a room, the superballs will eventually arrange themselves into a pattern (random or otherwise) on the floor. The probability of those balls arranging into a recognizable order (pattern) is infinitesimally small because any arrangement of balls represents one possible microstate of the macrostate (a room of a specific number of balls) and there are many more non-ordered microstates than ordered states. This is pretty much as Sewell explained it, but easier to visualize.
However, this is a rather poor analogy because the concept of 'order' we as humans observe in the room is based on our concept of order; does the arrangement create a figure, letter, geometric pattern or something else we recognize. Statistical mechanics is not concerned with this kind of order but the number of microstates possible given a specific macrostate where disorder is a description of our uncertainty of the positions of the molecules (balls). The higher the uncertainty, the higher the disorder. This uncertainty can be quantified, the human concept of order can not. That is the difference between human disorder and SM disorder.
What is missing in all this is the dispersion of energy contained by the classical Thermodynamics definition of entropy. Entropy is a measurement of the amount of energy dispersed from a thermodynamic system to the environment.
This analogy ignores many things. The potential energy imparted to the handful of balls by the contraction of arm muscles of the tosser. The entropy increase as the balls shed heat gained through friction as they moved through air, the kinetic energy imparted to the floor as it meets the balls. The entropy increase as some of that kinetic energy is dissipated into the environment. The increase of entropy as the human muscles create and dissipate energy in the form of heat. The entropy increase in the form of waste material from the cells, the entropy increase when sugars are formed in the body, and so on all the way back to the dissipation of energy (entropy) of the Sun.
Sewell's entire article was an attempt to show that biological organisms cannot on their own develop without violating the 2LoT. What he forgets is that this energy dissipation can be used for work by other systems. Thermodynamic systems can't be considered in isolation, the environment that contains the system can become its own system in turn.
There is no violation of the 2LoT when energy from the Sun (increase in entropy) heats up water and causes evaporization (more entropy). There is no violation of the 2LoT when plants receive energy from the sun which overcomes the activation energy of molecules forming more complex molecules (more entropy) of carbohydrates and stores the majority of that energy in the molecules. The 2LoT is not violated when the human consumes the carbohydrates and forms simpler carbohydrate molecules (more entropy created) which in turn are used to flex muscles, correct damage to cells, create new cells and even enlarge the genome and create new genes all while dissipating some energy at each stage (increasing entropy) and storing the rest. Eventually when biological organisms die, energy intake ceases and the rest of the stored energy dissipates thus increasing entropy.
This is all so true. For both sides. Happy New Year.
No.
Very easy to say...
No.
STILL real easy to SAY!
I notice one side simply blunders on when asked to back up the claim that a peer reviewed article or textbook concludes that thermodynamics precludes evolution.
I notice one side simply blunders on after claiming that evolution requires simultaneous identical mutations in a mating pair.
I notice one side never corrects such boneheaded claims.
You'll continue to wait, I guess.
Doesn't the fact of being 'peer reviewed' greatly reduce the chances of cross discipline(sp?) linkages?
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