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To: tortoise
Clearly there is a point at which a system must have more energy removed, than would be required to comprise a certain high level of order, rendering that chaotic system wholly incapable of creating said level of order naturally. - Southack

"This is a variant of the very tired (and fundamentally ignorant) argument trying to mix axioms of information theory and thermodynamics. First, nothing in information theory requires energy to generate order or the lack thereof."

Nonsense! All forms of order require some amount of energy for their very composition. If you don't have enough energy in your system for a certain composition of order, then you can't have that composition in your system; it would be impossible.

Perhaps you simply didn't comprehend my simple, original point above...

114 posted on 03/03/2002 9:43:30 AM PST by Southack
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To: Southack
Nonsense! All forms of order require some amount of energy for their very composition. If you don't have enough energy in your system for a certain composition of order, then you can't have that composition in your system; it would be impossible.

This is true. And life on this planet has had a virtually unlimited supply of external energy for as long as we have had evidence life existed. Therefore, there is no contradiction in the premise that arbitrarily large amounts of spontaneous entropy reduction are possible in living organisms. This is a core point; entropy (or lack thereof) in organisms is only relevant in the absence of vast external enthalpy gradients. Since such gradients exist, the reduction in entropy in living organisms has never been a hurdle to their existence.

116 posted on 03/03/2002 10:07:46 AM PST by tortoise
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