SEE HERE :
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1704943/posts
Can't say about Darwinism, but evolution is a principle not a law.
Uh, yeah, sure I'm going to read all that.
For a mathematician, there's a lot of very weak logic here.
He's right about that. Why should we think that random mutation accounted for all of the developments in life?
Seen this before. Such twisting and turning.
Sorry to say, the guy gets an F.
If anyone here cannot be bothered to read all that then I will sum up the spirit of the article for you in an analogy.
It is like someone trying to argue that the Law of Gravity proves aircraft cannot fly because gravity says objects fall towards the ground.
The person making the argument is well aware that science's response to this is that aircraft can fly because there are other forces that outweigh gravity, not that gravity contradicts flight.
But rather than accepting this sensible reasoning, the person instead writes a long article trying to obfuscate the issue and turn the above response into some strawman they can attack. The result is an article titled:
"CAN ANYTHING FALL UPWARDS THEN?"
With the jaw dropping argument of:
"So that means a computer can fly can it?"
and interspersed with off topic arguments such as the improbability of jet propulsion, and why planes wouldn't be strong enough to fly, etc - off topic arguments that have absolutely no bearing on the subject of whether the law of gravity disproves flight. And that is supposed to be the point of the article.
Nice piece. Thanks for posting it.
Order increases all the time in nature:
When a lake of impure water evaporates and then condenses as pure rainwater.
When that lake evaporates and leaves layers of pure compounds.
When a randomly distributed cloud of hydrogen becomes very orderly solar system and eventually collapses to a black hole.
INTREP [TLAC]
The phrase "the appearance of human brains" is ambiguous, as it stands. For example, we may ask, "How many human brains appeared last year?" Of course, we usually use the term "developed" or "grew" in this context.
But they do in fact "appear", if not from nothing, from very little - an invisible speck, in fact. What about the second law in this case? Isn't it an obstacle to this spontaneous appearance of this incredible order? Indeed it is! And the reason it can happen is the continual flow of energy maintained by cellular metabolism.
Well, you might scoff, "The DNA provides the order! the instructions!" Instructions to whom? The DNA is a molecule. Its expression unfolds as a simple thermodynamic reaction. Why doesn't the DNA simply decay or dissipate? Where is the maintenance crew that keeps it going? Why isn't it like the 747 abandoned in the junkyard?
The point is that the unique nature of the spontaneous and undirected processes of life, including reproduction, ought to inform our thinking about the natural history of these life processes on the planet earth.
Food for thought and discussion. Thanks.
ping for later.
thanks, bookmarking....
"In Appendix D of my new book [Sewell, 2005], I take a closer look at the equations for entropy change, which apply not only to thermal entropy but also to the entropy associated with anything else that diffuses, and show that they do not simply say that order cannot increase in a closed system, they also say that in an open system, order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary. According to these equations, the thermal order in an open system can decrease in two different ways -- it can be converted to disorder, or it can be exported through the boundary. It can increase in only one way: by importation through the boundary. Similarly, the increase in "carbon order" in an open system cannot be greater than the carbon order imported through the boundary, and the increase in "chromium order" cannot be greater than the chromium order imported through the boundary, and so on."
Does anyone have the book?
From table of contents on amazon, one can see appendix D here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0471735809/ref=sib_dp_top_toc/102-8612528-6088129?ie=UTF8&p=S007#reader-link