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 ...
A lot of silly creo talk! LOL!
A lot of silly creo talk! LOL!
This is series!
Personally, I get sunburned.
He's a mathematician. You know what's coming with creationist mathematicians. Don't look at the math. Look at everything else. In this case, physics and biology.
A magnificent, omnipotent orderizer, of course!
I think a computational chem book will cost more than a nickel. I can lend you a credit card if you're strapped for funds. It is that series!!!!
I believe that most people have a hard time understanding the time line. They get hung up on 7 days or 7 billion years. The sun has been around long enough to deposit an unbelievable amount of energy on Earth (1 Kw/square meter average. Think about that in terms of 1000's of years.
By this guys logic should we be running out of stuff to make new people with? But the population on earth continues to grow?
/me blinks.
The outcome of the interaction is so strongly biased toward one particular result that for casual purposes we do not treat it as probabilistic, though it is. For most chemical systems which are not so biased, you end up with a more obviously probabilistic mix.
Minor correction, but I believe you've grokked the essence of the church of evolutionism.
bfl
bfl
Stunning logic!
Order can arise spontaneously out of disorder: an example.
You can do this in your kitchen. Take 1 cup of water, 1 cup of oil (olive or mazola or motor will do), pour into cocktail shaker and shake vigorously for 1 minute. Pour into a clear glass container.
You will see a very great deal of disorder in the liquid. Leave undisturbed for 1-2 hours (doesn't matter if there is light or darkness).
Observe again: You will see that the oil has spontaneously ("miraculously"?) risen to the top, and the water is nicely separated below. ORDER has appeared.
Please explain this via your interpretation of the 2nd Law and entropy.
Thanks. But I'm not going to bother the evolution ping list for this thread.
I continue to be amazed at the certainty with which evolution supporters make their claims. In fact, you would think with all of this certitude they wouldn't need to use insults such as "pig ignorant."
Huh?
Of course not.
You have become incoherent.
good way of putting it. The article was not an confirmation of intelligent design but a reasoned arguement that evolution taken on it's scientific merits is suspect. That's what scientists are supposed to do.
One problem is that creationists are lumped into a single class. I'm horrified by the idea of a 6,000-year old universe and believe that people who push the idea are misinterpreting both science and the Bible. All truth is God's truth. I personally accept the idea that the universe is around 15 billion years old and that evolution of some sort takes place, yet I'm lumped in with those who believe in a 6,000-year old universe.whale.
Michael Behe's theory of Irreducible Complexity is profound. The bladderwort example he used here is compelling but, as a chemist by training, the most astonishing examples are things that take many different chemicals being in exactly the right place at the time for something to happen. With eyesight, for example, a large number of complex chemicals are involved. If any one of these chemicals are missing, the result is not just the animal seeing slightly less well (and thus slightly more likely to get eaten) but in being totally blind. How did all of these chemicals needed for vision end up in the right place?
If the body creates complex chemicals "by chance" in the hope that they might someday turn out to be useful, then we ought to expect to see hundreds of thousands of chemicals just hanging around in the body, waiting to be used when a species evolves an X-Ray eye or laser tail stinger. However, we don't see this at all. There are chemicals in the human body for which we don't yet know their function, but they're rare. The body is very efficient and doesn't make things that it doesn't use.
Must it be distilled water? This is science after all and we want to be precise to 24 decimal places.
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