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 ...
Then I already answered your question. Why are you asking it again?
I've set my timer to record the interval until we get a serious statement from a textbook or peer reviewed article concluding that thermodynamics precludes evolution.
11:39 am, Dec 30, 2005, EST. Waiting...
It used to be graduate level, but I would think it would be considered a rather essential field now considering how many other specialty fields can be shown to be special cases of or derivable from AIT. Computer science in particular should have an undergraduate course in this since it underlies all computational theory. I never learned it at the university actually, but spent a decade working on it back when it was barely a recognizable field. The mathematics around finite AIT have really started to blow some old doors off computer science in particular -- finite AIT is my specialty.
You can argue that the most minimal set of information constitutes an algorithm, or set of instructions, and thus the whole universe is programmed, but I was rather hoping that these questions could be resolved by remaining strictly at the level of "basic science".
One of the many reasons that AIT is gathering a lot of interest, and it is a young and under-developed area of mathematics, is that it can be used to explain a lot of physics that there was no "why" behind, thermodynamics being a very good example of this. It is very useful for a systems level analysis of why our universe is the way it is and what we can expect out of it.
Most likely, a change in environment (which includes a change in food availability).
If you are looking for the 'cause' of life in general you'll have to wait for the study of abiogenesis to bear fruit or look to your religion.
"Using the Schroedinger's cat illustration, these critters either lived in the water or they didn't, as being equally efficient on both is illogical.
This is a false dichotomy. There are animals which spend time both in the water and on land and are adapted to both - pinipeds, otters, beavers, penguins and others. In the Cetartiodactyl sequence there is a gradual change in the hip joint that shows loss of function on land that is accompanied by changes in the spine that show better adaptation for water.
"Anyone who came across these, who had no preconceived ideas about them would say they were all different creatures an none gave rise to the other.
That is doubtful. Don't forget that recognition of sequences in the fossil record predates Darwin and all Darwin did was recognize a few of the main mechanisms that created those sequences. Scientists prior to Darwin spent many years trying to find Biblical explanations for the obvious geological stratification that imposed a relative time sequence on lines of similar fossils. It was not some bias against creationism that caused them to recognize the sequence, the sequence is there and obvious.
bump for later
Because dishonest people insist on conflation evolution with theories on the origin of life. No one asserts that we understand the origin of life, and no intellectually honest person asserts that this is relevant to understanding ongoing processes that we can observe.
The argument that evolution requires inference is just stupid and ignorant. Everything in science involves inference. Do you believe Newton's raw data conforms to his equations?
"I have no idea how much randomness vs determinism this davison fellow suggests is involved, but it sounds like randomness is almost totally ruled out as part of new species generation."
Pretty much yes for primary structures.
"The evolutionary mechanism of random mutation and natural selection inspired the computer science field of evolutionary computation."
No, it simply renamed non-deterministic computing.
"Solutions to complex problems can be generated using the principles of mutation and selection in genetic algorithms and genetic programming."
Non-determinism only acts beneficially when aided by the program. Basically, the difference between a blind and an assisted search. If you will note most "evolutionary" algorithms are very, very assisted -- at minimum in their semantic constraints on the possible datasets. You should read Dembski's Searching Large Spaces:
http://www.designinference.com/documents/2005.03.Searching_Large_Spaces.pdf
The point that ID makes is not that stochastic processes don't operate, its that stochastic processes are useless unless assisted in weeding out a large portion of the solution domain. Evolutionists completely ignore this when they point to "evolutionary" algorithms.
"So random change and selection are capable of design."
No, they aren't. Only when guided by an overseeing process that limits the choice available drastically (i.e. it only works when designed).
"1) A fitness function, which estimates how fit any given individual is. 2) A format for the genome that represents each individual. Getting these two right is what makes or breaks the effectiveness of the algorithm to design a solution."
Exactly! The semantic constraints within #2 must be properly designed, or the algorithm will not work at all. Likewise, in an organism, the changeable parts of the genome must follow internally consistent semantic rules, and be changed with respect to those rules, or it will not work at all. In both organisms and programs, it requires design to impose these semantic constraints.
"Basically what I am getting at here is that a better and simpler explaination of front-loading exists than the one davison presents: The first single-celled lifeform on earth was intelligently designed in a way that allowed mutation and natural selection to produce the diversity of life we see today and in the fossil record. That is true evolutionary frontloading and is the position many theist evolutionists have."
This is an ID position. The funny thing is that you still want to hang on to RM/NS as the primary mechanism of change when there is no reason -- experimentally or logically -- to do so! Atheists must hang on to RM/NS precisely because they cannot allow any teleology at all. There is no experimental reason to do so. ID'ers are not so constrained. The fact that when biological searches occur they are non-deterministic rather than deterministic is fairly irrelevant. But there is no reason to assume that complex adaptations must occur within a broad set of possibilities. In fact, according to the No Free Lunch algorithms, each beneficial step must have a smaller search space than 500 bits (and realistically much smaller than that). But if you assume a designer for an origin-of-life scenario, there is no reason to commit to the idea that the range of possible steps is very big at all, even if they are complex.
You might be interested in a short article I'm working on. I've got a work-in-progress version of it available here:
http://www.eskimo.com/~johnnyb/creation_change.html
In addition, if you grant the special creation of an individual life form, there is no experimental reason not to grant multiple special creations, even if you believe that they all occurred at the single-celled level. In fact, such an idea is precisely what Doolittle and others are working on, and even they are working from an entirely atheistic origin-of-life scenario.
Again, I think your biggest problem with ID is not that you disagree with it, but that you haven't understood what it says.
Maybe you should switch to decaf... ;-)
Again, why? We know the components for single-generation germ-line change in animals exist. We know that some changes can be influenced by the environment. Please give a reason, either theoretical or experimental, why these kinds of changes cannot happen in concert.
Do you accept as plausible, as most creationists do, that all horses, donkeys and asses (members of Family Equidae) might be related by common descent? How about dogs (Canidae)? If so, given your supposed requirement that a male and female must simultaneously appear with the same genetic mutations, how did various species of horses and various species of dogs develop, for instance, differing chromosome numbers? Heck, there's even a single SUBSPECIES of mouse, the common house mouse Mus musculus domesticus, which has some 40 different chromsomal races. And that's just in Northern Italy. But then I already told you about this.
Do you think those 40 some races of domestic mice are separate creations?
"The argument that evolution requires inference is just stupid and ignorant."
I must have missed where this argument was made.
There were, in fact, many attempts to work out a series of creations in which God got better at making things. The historical sequence was accepted long before Darwin's explanation.
It will eventually be possible,/B> to directly verify it when the technology is available.
YOu are making a statement based soley on faith that something in the future will occur with nor knowledge that it will occur. That is speculation. If not, why use the word "possible". Wors have meaning and the clear meaning of your sentence is that you are speculating or expressing a religious belief through faith about something for which there is no proof or evidence.
I presume you mean after I stop laughing? You CAN'T be serious. Can you?
I think you've missed a lot of things, But I will accept your assertion that you have not personally made it on this thread.
Google Lamark, Lysenko, "midwife toad".
You add water, a polar molecule essential for life.
When I said nothing lives on inorganic dust, rocks, sand, I meant nothing lives on dust, rock, sand. In the universes I refer to there would be no water.
Water is the first thing we look for when exploring other planets becaus of its importance for life, as we know it. Water has a transformational capability which helps extract energy from other molecules.
What a bizarre thread.
I do have knowledge it will occur. The trend in knowledge and technology shows it to be inevitable. When we know enough about the mechanisms of genetics and we have fast enough computers then we can simulate organisms on computers. We won't need to use live organisms anymore, and there will be no time constraints as we wait 2 years for the next generation. Evolution of an organism's genome over millions of generations will be testable. Therefore evolution will become directly verifiable. It will either fall, or it will be verified beyond doubt of anyone.
Wor[d]s have meaning and the clear meaning of your sentence is that you are speculating or expressing a religious belief through faith about something for which there is no proof or evidence.
REALTY CHECK! Let's remind ourselves what bds was specifically referring to, shall we? He was saying that we should eventually be able to look as a DNA sequence and calculate the full structure of the protein that it codes for (and then having that information be able to assess the functionality of the protein). Currently this is not possible as the folding of proteins (the transformation of a chain of amino acids into the functional 3-D protein) is complex and not yet fully predictable.
But obviously DNA does (via RNA, etc) code for proteins. Are seriously claiming that it's a "religious belief" that this problem is scientifically soluble? Do you realize how STUPID that sounds?
Sorry for the ad homenim, but as you note "words have meanings," and that one certainly seems to apply.
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