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 ...
You don't usually need to wait on random mutation. Most populations maintain a significant amount of variation at any one time, and thus can respond, often on time scales of a few years or less, to sufficiently extreme selective pressures. See, for instance, the book The Beak of the Finch which discusses documented, and nearly instantaneous, selective responses to droughts in the Galapagos Islands. (I.e. the results of the droughts were such that the sizes and natures of seeds available to the birds shifted significantly, and so did the average beak sizes. There was already a range of available beak sizes in the population, so differential survival rapidly shifted the average or typical beak size.)
I have a book, "Probability 1", by Amir D. Aczel, a statistician. I think his statistics are OK, but his Biochemistry really sucks.
It's published by Harcourt Brace. Should I throw out all my HB books? Crap! These problems arise when someone writes about stuff they really don't know much about.
This screed of this thread can be safely flushed.
Hardly. Even if you were to take apart one mechanism such as co-evolution you would still need to address the piles of other evidence. In science, 'facts' are data points to be statistically analyzed, evolution has more than you can shake a stick at.
Some populations more than others. DNA studies indicate that dog breeds are less than 300-400 years old. If all you had of dogs were multi-million year old fossils, you would be amazed at the rapid "evolution" of dogs. Quite enough to be labeled separate species.
Suppose all you had were fossils of wolf and Chihuahua. There would be a huge gap in a geologic eyeblink.
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Wolf mating a Chihuahua! Now that's a stretch!
I think a male chihuahua and female wolf could be successfully hybridized, if only by artificial insemination.
Dog/wolf hybrids are rather common.
Dog/wolf hybrids are rather common.
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Sorry, feeble attempt at humor.
See my response to VA. In short, I've indicated I understand full well your position. If it makes you feel good, you can keep repeating it. But don't pretend to me that evolutionists are completely agnostic with respect to the science of the origin of life. If someone claimed to have shown that naturalistic/gradualistic abiogenesis violates the SLoT, just as a random hypothetical, you guys will just shrug your shoulders and carry on??? Right.
But of course, we know life exists, we know it emerged via some sort of natuaralistic/gradualistic process, and we know SLoT always holds, so we KNOW this can't be possible, right?
No problem. The creator created life. Evolution explains what happened after that.
Satisfied?
People rely on the judgment of publishers to filter through the enormous volume of would be authors and select those whose writing is credible. An academic publishers' reputation is their entire life. If they're publishing stuff that "sucks", then yes, you should seriously question how much faith you put in the authority of the other stuff they publish if it's in an area you're not as much of a towering luminary, like the application of the laws of thermodynamics to biochemistry.
These problems arise when someone writes about stuff they really don't know much about.
Anyone can take something they disagree with and claim the author doesn't know much about it. Darwin wrote about entire fields of science he didn't know much about, by your criteria. The Dover judge wrote 130 pages about stuff he didn't know much about. I gather you don't have problems with those?
For all I know, you're writing here about stuff you don't know much about. One of the entire purposes of academic publishing houses is to gain the credibility of their peers so that when someone writes something with their name on it, it counts more than some post on FR.
OK, so now that we're no longer presuppositionally committed to naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, why do we need to pursue such explanations so dogmatically post-biogenesis?
Ramen.
[Replying to myself like a crazy person...]
In other words, when we see natural phenomena best explained through a naturalistic process, namely evolution, we accept that as the best model, but when we see natural phenomena best explained through divine creation, we accept that as the best model.
Any objection?
Neither did they give proper credit to Rosalind Franklin after stealing her early work on DNA . . .
Twas covered extensively in an earlier crevo thread...
Anyone else remember it?
Cheers!
Evidence, data, observations, and facts (leading to theories) which support natural phenomena, and the lack thereof for non-natural explanations.
See, it does not matter for the theory of evolution what happened prior to the start (creation, abogenesis), as evolution does not deal with that. I know religious folks have a problem with this explanation, but that's the way the theory is stated, and all your protestations cannot change that.
Drawing a bow at a venture, was that "Remo Williams" as the main character?
OTOH, C.S. Lewis reported the same thing when trying to introduce theology to lay people, about the time of his Broadcast Talks.
Cheers!
Not exactly, since people designed and built planes, and improved them using empirical testing coupled with theory.
GMO's aside, people have not created life ab initio and so don't have the same level of understanding.
Cheers!
I'm an archaeologist, so I have a lot of patience. And I have been a teacher.
But I need the patience of Job on these threads!
[Job got a raw deal, by the way.]
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