Posted on 02/03/2002 9:07:58 AM PST by Sabertooth
I see. I take it, than, that you agree with me that definitive proof (which deductive proofs are the only example of) is not a question on the table for natural sciences. We have theories, and varying degrees of confidence in those thories. We do not have incontravertable "facts", we do not have proof in any formally exact sense. We only have theories, and various degrees of confidence in those theories.
Calling theories in which we currently have a very high degree of confidence "facts" or "proved" is just a good way to confuse ourselves about why we believe things...you cannot bring to bear the power of actual proof just by using the word like a magical incantation.
...by asking you to learn some rudimentary notions about stochastics? Speciation is probablistic in nature. Some examples of a "species" may be able to procreate successfully with some other examples of another "species", while most such attempts would fail. This is the nature of stochastic behavior. You can describe the relationship of the chances of successful procreation as a bell curve. And no one's drawn an arbitrary line in the sand and said "x much probability of successful procreation means speciation". This is why speciation is inexact. Kindly make at least an attempt to follow along in the text. You are far too easily confused to be making the assumption that I am the source of it so readily.
If it's truly closed--not on your tintype. To run entropy backwards, you need to have energy made available from outside.
I have never been able to understand Shannon's notion of information entropy, and not for lack of trying. If you understand it, more power to you. But I think the old-fashioned notion of entropy is the only one relevant to biological systems. DNA is not bits in an etherial bit plane, and you'd be well advised, in my opinion to stear clear of the notion of informational entropy. DNA creates proteins, and whether having more or less more-or-less complicated proteins is an increase in informational entropy does not tell you much--but the tendency to meld issues in energy entropy and informational entropy can lead you into forbidding things that quite obviously could and have occured for not very sound theoretical reasons.
Unfortunately, the real definition of entropy doesn't come from any of these three areas, but from information theory. Thermodynamics is basically transaction theory mathematics applied to enthalpy, transaction theory being not totally unrelated to information theory.
A living organism is a relatively closed, or isolated, ongoing chemical prosess. Being closed, it would achieve inertness when the fuel ran out---entropy.
"relatively closed" is like "relatively pregnant"; there is no such condition. The system is either closed or it is open. A living organism is an open system; it maintains order by using external energy sources as a bulwark against entropy. When energy is consumed by the organism, entropy is created at the energy source that is far greater than the entropy reduced in the organism. Living organisms, in effect, radiate entropy away from themselves externally after consuming enthalpy from external sources. If you take into account the entropy created at the energy source, it is vastly larger than the entropy reduced in the organism. Incidentally, this is trivially measurable. It turns out that organisms generally have a poorer conversion efficiency than a diesel engine; the conversion loss is just another source of entropy (which gets radiated away as waste heat and other things). And like a diesel engine, you have to keep supplying fuel if you want it to keep running (and consequentally pumping out more entropy). You can create things that have low entropy while consuming enthalpy, but thermodynamics says the enthalpy conversion loss in the construction process must exceed the entropy reduction in the constructed entity. In practice, this is never violated by organisms or engineers.
My contention is that the closed chemically-reactive systems, aka: life forms, forestall entropy ( e.g., inertness) by ingestiing more energy than they expend.
Entropy isn't inertness, but yes, this is generally true. However, they don't ingest more energy than they expend, rather they ingest energy and some of it is turned into useful work and some of it is converted into entropy, where the entropy reduced by "useful work" is less than the entropy created from the enthalpy transfer. By converting external enthalpy into entropy, organisms reduce their own entropy. On Earth, we have a vast entropy generator and enthalpy source otherwise known as the sun. As long as the sun provides the enthalpy to dump the entropy elsewhere, living organisms will be able to build cells.
Are you actually claiming that camels and llamas are the same species? Something like different breeds of dog?
Information theory provides the ability to measure the amount of entropy in any system. In thermodynamics, it is frequently much easier to derive the entropy values indirectly. Incidentally, DNA is very much related to information theory and is a fine example of mathematical coding in biological systems. Information theory is extraordinarily powerful, but for the practice of engineering one rarely needs to go to that level to get the answer one is looking for.
The greatest danger of NOT tying information theory and thermodynamic entropy together is that people take them to mean different things and ascribe characteristics to thermodynamic entropy that would be clearly invalid if you understood information theory. There is a lot of evidence that this is in fact going on when I see words such as "complexity" to define entropy in thermodynamics, when that is a nonsense definition under the formal information theory definition of entropy. They do not use different definitions; it is just easier to fudge correct results with invalid definitions in thermodynamics than it is in information theory (assuming you aren't doing real work with it, that is).
You are correct about one thing though: "entropy" as it is actually defined is not an easy to grasp or intuitive concept. In this case though, the "made-for-TV" definitions are proving to actually be detrimental to people's understanding of it when they try to apply it.
It is fact, actually. We often observe bacteria and viruses mutating into something that didn't exist before. Insects evolve to be DDT resistant, etc. The theory of evolution is Darwin's explanation for the observed fact that evolution happens.
Discusses primate/mammal vitamin C, cetacean/artyodactyl and other recent discoveries from biochemistry confirming predictions made by evolution theory. IMO, Occam's Razor applies here: evolution assumes the observed fact that DNA is copied from one generation to another, all the other theories speculate that more hypotheses are needed, eg. that a creator/designer copies genetic material as part of the otherwise-undescribed process used to make new species.
372 posted on 2/5/02 3:57 PM Pacific by JMJ333
Filling in the gaps-blanks...wishful-vain desire(blotting out the TRUTH-God)---Evolution!
I am doubtful about this, and perhaps I should explain why. I think the common assumption about DNA, that is somehow runs the show like a computer CPU is terribly distracting. From one point of view, a body is just a conglomeration of carnot cycles that are working desperately to restore themselves to equilibrium, and they do this through a negative feedback op amp with the DNA's ability to produce RNA as the gate of the feedback loop. DNA has inhibitors attached to it that prevent expression by clamping down on the DNA in one end, but can premit expression when the inhibitors catch, or--fail to catch, depending on their particular design--the molecules they were designed for on the other end.
All these cycles operate more or less independently, without a central master control. We are basically a citric acid cycle with some miscellaneous additional cycles as temporary doo-dads attached, most of which are to make up for the inefficiencies of the other doo-dads. What's why this is, was, and always will be a worm planet, with a light sprinkling of evanescent sports on the top.
It would be more accurate, in my opinion, to view DNA as off-line bulk storage. Not as critical, information-rich, structurally controlling content. DNA is inert crystals if you ask it to run the show. It does not run the show by communicating information as Shannon understood information, so it is, in my opinion, irrelevant in discussions of evolutionary fitness, to ask after the metrics of the information entropy it exhibits.
We just finished beating this question to death on another ev thread last week. "Fact" is a civilian word, and so is "proof" as gore3000 wants to use it. Let's just concentrate on "facts" for the moment. So the word takes on any number of meanings in civilian context. Most impartantly, fact(1) means theories that are so reliable they have passed into incontravertablity; fact(2) means specific tangible information we have gathered in support of our theories.
Confusing these two definitions of fact is, by my subjective estimate, about 1/2 of the entire creationist argument on the subject of historical evolutionary evidence.
Ah, but on the other hand, the law of gravity has failed many critical tests. It failed the perihelion of Mercury test, so the new theory of punctuated equi...er, Einsteinian gravity had to be invented to cover the embarassment of physicists everywhere, with their naked plot to dis-enthrone God so plainly revealed.
And, presently, the law of gravity fails to account for the outer orbits of stars around their galaxies. Clearly, this threadbare theory only persists due to the sinister machinations of the liberal establishment.
BullsEye! Nothing could more clearly illustrate the machinery of science, and how even the most heavily experimental branches of science are forced to invent new models to account for new and conflicting data.
I see. So every failure to put a man up is a failure of the law of gravity, I guess. How is the failure of Apollo 13 to make it to the moon not a disproof of the law of gravity? Or does this reasoning about the nature of proof only apply when we are talking about fossil gaps?
As mere people, we have no control over the precise selection, but God's unbreakable rules of physics control everything inside that space, to provide a perfectly predictable outcome, at His level of measurement and perception.
The term "absolute randomness" seems to imply a selection with absolutely no controlling rules, but that would appear to be impossible, as long as we're in His Universe.
Darwin hoped he had dicovered an independent process to explain the origin of species that would stand on it's own, but perhaps this process cannot actually be separated from Creation.
In time we might "discover" that they are inextricably linked, with evolution turning out to be the basic engine OF God's Creation, continuing up to this very moment and beyond.
Respectfully, you might wish to rephrase this statement.
A flotilla of giant jellyfish marooned on a beach 500 million years ago has been unearthed in what is now central Wisconsin. This largest-ever find of the biggest-ever fossil jellyfish provides insights into life on Earth before animals came to land.
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