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 ...
Book publishing decisions are based entirely on the prospects of making money (or of being paid by the author).
Lunatic science books frequently sell well.
If it is used as a textbook, is the school by any chance Bob Jones University.
Directly, or at X number of removes?
According to Red Storm Rising (Tom Clancy), there is such a thing as "man-made thunder" ;-)
Faith is not the correct word. Science does inference and interpolation. Even Newton did this in devising his laws.
Not only did he make assumptions about missing data, he also fudged his raw data to make the theory look better to skeptics.
This is why science continually looks for confirming evidence, and why theories get modified by new evidence. Even Newton required revision.
What I found was an article that is included as an appendix in Sewell's math text "The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, Second Edition,"
Whether this book is actually used as a text book in schools or not I have no idea. I do suspect the body of the text says very little about the 2LoT and evolution considering how much effort he puts into the appendix.
In any case his conclusion about the 2LoT and evolution is wrong.
If you ever heard a Nike Hercules anti-aircraft missile being launched, you heard it.
It echoes and sounds just like a clap of thunder.
I was in the Army in a Nike Hercules unit, so I participated in launching several.
Perhaps it was the time, manner and place you asked? You gave very little information so assumptions had to be made.
What a brilliant refutation of the professor's thesis.
Stultis, you want to take this, or do you want me to?
Darwinists also do extrapolation. That is where the statemets of faith are. When they predict what will be shown in the future.
The Apostle Paul defined faith as the hope of things not seen. That is exactly what their statements of what will be shown at some time in the future are.
They are their prophecys. There is nothing wrong in believing prophecys. I do that.
That they choose to call them by another name is similar to the "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".
They believed Darwins predictions or prophceys when he had no scientific evidence to support them. They see that some of his prophecies turned out to be correct, so they extrapolate that all will be proven in time.
Some more may be proven, but in the meantime they are using their political muscle to enforce their doctrine.
My request is just that they call a spade a spade and admit that they have faith in their Prophet. --- faith that he will be proven right in the end.
That is the way it is supposed to be, but Darwinists do not permit any unorthidoxy. They fight and use political muscle to enforce their views.
That is why they dismiss the idea of intellegent design out of hand and call anyone who even reads about it a heretic.
When was the last revision to Darwin's theory of evolution as interpreted by the "priesthood" of professors accepted by them?
Neuton's theory also has only been revised since he is dead and can't defend himself.
Darwinists fight feircely to defend their ideas. They do not discard anything.
I'll give your questions a shot sometime tomorrow. As long as my brain works.
Umm, that's the whole point. When one doesn't have enough evidence, rather than jumping to conclusions, isn't it better to go looking for more facts? Why do assumptions have to be made?
This isn't rocket science. My point is that ToE is obviously not independent of the origin of life because without the origin of life there is no ToE. As I stated quite clearly in an earlier post, I understand perfectly well that ToE, strictly defined, operates on living organisms, therefore Natural Selection only comes into effect once there is the first living organism, whatever that is.
No, all ToE assumes is that there is life, and that it has the properties listed. The origin is irrelevant
That's what I said (first part), but I'm challenging you on your claim that the method of origin is completley irrelevant. ToE is based upon assumptions of Naturalism and Gradualism (you can use lower case if you must, but it would be wrong). Are you saying that if there was no Naturalistic or Gradualistic explanation for the origin of life itself, that would have no impact on ToE? Are you saying that if science classes taught that the first life was created by God, or was intelligently designed, you wouldn't be calling down judicial tyrants to zap these school boards? Are you saying that if some dupe demonstrated that a gradualistic/naturalistic origin of life was impossible thermodynamically, just for the sake of argument, evolutionists wouldn't start slandering the heck out of him?
Sure.
There's an old saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Since ToE assumes the origin of life -- the fact of it, not the mechanism -- if you can't come up with a viable naturalistic explanation of how life began, you can come up with all the prettiest naturalistic explanations of what happened to this imaginary first living organism, but it's just fairy tales.
Yeah, I'd say that it is obvious.
And all this time I thought we were arguing about whether or not there was evidence for evolution, but now I find out that we don't need to worry about that because it's obvious. I'm getting very confused about how "Science" is supposed to operate.
Differential survival means that the frequencies...
For the life of me I can't figure out why you keep thinking you need to explain stuff to me which I've already demonstrated I firmly understand. Whatever.
If you assume there are some sorts of limits, then the succeeding generations, obviously, will stay within those limits.
So what exactly is obvious again? Microevolution? (Ya, we know, it's a "creationist" term...)
Anyway, call me old fashinoed, but rather than go about assuming things, I like to see what the evidence shows me.
Thank you for the update sir.
The cold sore example, of course, is not in the germ line, so your kids have to acquire the viruses for themselves.
If Lamarck was alive and well, we wouldn't have to protect our kids from sharp objects, electrical outlets and toxic cleaning materials.
GMAB
At least enough to justify what you've claimed so far. I'm very interested to find out how such a flawed piece made it past the Wiley editors. If you're right, I'm going to have to throw out all my Wiley texts and recommend the same to others.
If you like, you can just focus on the biggies.
BTW, your point about the "complexity" issue is interesting, though I take issue with your imputation of corrupt motives regarding his overly casual use of the notion; the term has an intuitive meaning and one could argue that he saw fit to stick with this intuitive meaning.
If I take my wristwatch and smash it with a hammer, the arrangement of cogs, etc., will be just as unlikely as the arrangement they have right now, as you said in the other context, except out of the complete set of all possible arrangements, the number of arrangements that make up a working watch is miniscule. Is the "working" arrangement of higher complexity (and lower entropy) than the more distributed, post-hammer arrangement? You can argue that it is arbitrary to impose our utilitarian notion of "working" on the system in order to declare it more complex, but I don't think you're going to get anyone's tenure revoked by pursuing that angle.
Your whole cheetah thing is a good example of why evolution is a "guess/hypothesis" type of theory, and not a "fact" type of theory.
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