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To: 2AtHomeMom
Meyer's paper makes clear that the entropy decrease is NOT minuscule, and my posts and those of others make clear that the sun can NOT be a sufficient source of entropy decrease

No offense, Ma'am, but your posts so far haven't even been dimensionally correct. And Meyer, while being a bit more polished, is every bit as clueless. You can't lawyer or philosophize entropy; it's a physical quantity we can measure.

The entropy of an object is a simple thermodynamic state function, which can be measured or estimated. A human being does not have significantly more entropy than the same mass of bacteria. Let me prove it.

Let's say that to put a 200 lb human together, we had to assemble the body from atoms in the gas phase. We'll let the gas atoms initially occupy a volume of 10 m3, and we'll say to get a human built correctly, we have to specify the position of each atom precise to 1 Angstrom. This is a gross overestimate because we're ignoring the indistinguishability of particles (i.e. we can use any hydrogen atom in place of every other one, etc.). We'll just use Boltzmann's formula. We'll therefore get a value of W of 1031 per atom, or (1031)N for N atoms. Let's say we have 1029 atoms in a human. Then the entropy required to assemble the body from gas atoms is S = kBln W = 1029*kB*ln(1031), or about 98 MJ/K.

The entropy to assemble the same mass of bacteria. assuming the bacteria to be indistiguishable, would be smaller by kB times the natural log of the factorial of the number of bacteria. If we say each bacterium weighs about 1018 kg, and the human 100 kg, the mass ratio is 1020, and the difference in entropy is therefore 0.063 J/K; one part in 109 or so of the entropy of the human. This, if you like, is our 'evolutionary entropy' (actually, a big overestimate of it.)

And, of course, since the sun's surface is at 104 K and heat is re-radiated from the earth into interstellar space at 2K, the entropy involved in cycling 1 J of energy through the earth is about 0.5 J/K. Terajoules of energy fall on the earth from the sun per second. So in one second, you have trillions of times more negative entropy provided by the sun than needed to evolve from a bacterium to a human.

877 posted on 01/31/2005 10:35:06 AM PST by Right Wing Professor (Evolve or die!)
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To: Right Wing Professor
Then the entropy required to assemble the body from gas atoms

I mean, of course, the negative entropy required...

881 posted on 01/31/2005 10:59:19 AM PST by Right Wing Professor (Evolve or die!)
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