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 ...
"I am skeptical about that (no evolution in Muslim countries.) I've seen evolution promoted in Muslim countries. Can you please post a link? Thanks."
I cannot post a link, however I read it earlier on a thread on FR the same day I posted here.
It said Saudi Arabia, not muslim countries. I will wager they go with the same type of literalist scriptural interpretation, as our more rigid Bible followers.
This is an expression of faith that cannot be fully supported by evidence.
Minor evolution is not the disagreement.
The leap of faith is that minor evolution can be extrapolated to a change from one species to another.
One of the things to consider is that eyes are essentially the same in all mammels, whales, sharks, birds and other species that are not claimed to be in the evolutionary chain for each other.
When was the design of eyes fixed so that they could be inherited by all these species across so many unrelated lines?
The fact that species may have some of the same features does not show that they evolved from one to the other.
The claim that evolution will explain these issues is where the expressions of faith are necessary.
Expressions of faith are not wrong to explain what you don't understand. I do it all the time.
I don't have time to pick apart all the mistakes in this twaddle; I have to be ready for New Year's Day... of 2007. So, just one example:
first, the fact that species are so well suited to their environments is offered as evidence that they have "adapted" to them. Of course, if they were not well-adapted, they would be extinct, and that would be offered as even stronger evidence against design.
Evolution by natural selection is consistent with the observation that some species go extinct and others -- the ones better adapted to the environment -- do not. "Intelligent Design" is rather more difficult to square with the former: if the designer can create species adapted to the environment, why massivly waste resources creating ones that aren't?
If I hit a golf ball, it will be found on top of a certain tuft of grass. Your argument is equivalent to asserting that I am a phenomenally excellent golfer because I hit that tuft of grass rather than any of the millions of others in the neighborhood.
How about in the evolution of automobiles? Your postulate suggests that we should expect everyone to still be buying and driving Model Ts.
If a design of anything becomes obsolete, it disappears and another design appears. That is not a waste of resources.
It doesn't take much of a leap of faith to beleive that someone is designing automobiles.
Co-evolution is when natural selection works on two or more species based on their interaction. Such a case would be the cheetah / antelope co-evolution where the fastest antelope would be more likely to escape the cheetah and pass on their genes until the majority of antelopes could outrun the cheetahs. At that point the slower cheetahs would starve to death leaving only the fastest to pass on their genes. This seesaw battle continues until a limit is reached in one organism's or the other's, or both, body type, the relation between the co-evolutionary species changes or the environment changes, allowing one of the species (in this case the predator) to change its food source. Although the back and forth of my description is overly simplified it gives you a good idea of what co-evolution is all about; there is nothing Lamarckian in it.
You: So even if there was no origin of life, ToE would still operate????
Huh? The ToE is a theory that describes the variety of life. All I said was that it doesn't matter how the earlier life came about; ToE doesn't address this point.
I think you meant to say that ToE assumes the origin of life, otherwise I'm not sure where you get your inheritable variation, mutation, etc.
No, all ToE assumes is that there is life, and that it has the properties listed. The origin is irrelevant
So what are you saying? You don't need any evidence of evolution now? It's just obvious? You can just assume there's no genetic boundaries to this inheritable variation?
Yeah, I'd say that it is obvious. Differential survival means that the frequencies of the various alleles will change from one generation to the next. If we assume that any gene can occasionally mutate, then there is the possibility of that gene spreading throughout the population. This can happen by random drift (if the mutation is neutral), or it can happen via selection(if the mutation increases the probability of reproduction)
If you assume there are some sorts of limits, then the succeeding generations, obviously, will stay within those limits.
Differential survival can just as easily (more so?) ensure stasis. Does your little creation cocktail make stasis so obvious too? If so, which is more likely? Don't you need to factor in the environment? What if that's constant?
If the environment is constant, there can still be favorable mutations, but the probability of this decreases as the population is more and more adapted to this environment. This is stasis.
The "differential survival" (I should have said success at reproduction) part depends on the environment.
Well, I think one basic concept is amiss here.
Take my yard. It really, REALLY wants to be a textbook example of the Second Law. Except that I work quite hard (but not hard enough for my wife) to prevent such.
In the same regard, I think that DNA and life (and the two are inseparable, IMO) work much harder than I do at fighting the second law. Because if you had a life force that was too wampy to do otherwise, it wouldn't exist. So evolution, by definition, HAS to encompass life that can rise above chaos, or else I wouldn't be posting on FR. And, as my home page says, I freep, therefore I am.
Try saying 'accumulated differences'.
Depends on the field. Some disciplines need information from other disciplines so subscriptions would span those fields.
The leap of faith is that minor evolution can be extrapolated to a change from one species to another.
I don't see why a leap of faith is necessary; if enough minor changes accumulate on two different lines from the same ancestor, it seems obvious to me that eventually you'll get to a point where interbreeding is impossible. Again, what's to stop it?
Consider the chihuahua or teacup poodle, etc., and the wolf.
One of the things to consider is that eyes are essentially the same in all mammals, whales, sharks, birds and other species that are not claimed to be in the evolutionary chain for each other.
When was the design of eyes fixed so that they could be inherited by all these species across so many unrelated lines?
The common ancestor of all the vertebrates you listed was a fish. It had eyes. I'm not how far back eyes can be traced before that.
The fact that species may have some of the same features does not show that they evolved from one to the other.
True. They may have adapted to the same niche (eg placental and marsupial sabertooth "tigers").
However, if the various genomes have exact matches in things like ERVs and errors, common descent is the simplest explanation.
Indeed! Those changes do not just include climatic changes but interaction with other species, food availability/preference, even geology.
Who knows if we can't? As far as I know no one has (thankfully) tried
In your mind this automatically invalidates all other scientific models, despite the fact our level of knowledge and our ability to measure phenomena is magnitudes above what it was back then?
As for your contention that evolution is based on faith, this is simply a manifestation of your fear that the evolutionists are correct and you not only share a common ancestor with apes but are behaviorally similar. There is a huge difference between you faith in God and the Bible and our acceptance of evolution as the best scientific explanation for the variation of life on Earth. That difference is the scientifically tested and accepted physical evidence for the process of evolution and the theory that explains it.
No matter how many times you scream at the top of your lungs, or fingers in this case, that evolution is nothing but speculation and therefore faith, it will not change the amount or validity of the tested evidence that has been collected over the last 150 years. So scream on!
Strawman. Dispense with the probability-from-the-assumption-of-an-unbiased-distribution argument already. It is not applicable. Furthermore, you clearly do not have much of an idea of how just how severely strong biases in the phase space cut into the "improbability" that you are asserting for some arbitrary molecular construct. All of which is trivially verifiable with elementary analytical chemistry.
Are you trying to say that evolution is not abiogenesis?
In other words, the creationist would likely reply with the punchline to that old joke, "No. Get your OWN dirt."
BTW, what on earth are you referring to (specifically) by "strong biases in the phase space" ?? Steric hindrance? "Handedness?" You're not being quite specific enough, increasing the odds that you and the other poster will be talking past one another.
Cheers!
...not too much longer on this thread, I've gotta go see "CATS" down at ASU...
"b_sharp seemed to find it on his own. Perhaps you can too. It's not my responsibility to read stuff for you, read it to you, or bring you milk and cookies. "
What I found was Sewell's book. I do not believe it is a text book, at least I hope not, the appendix the article this thread is based on is so full of errors and misses so much relevant information as to be useless even as a casual read.
"Of course in the narrowest sense ToE, by virtue of the mechanism of natural selection, presupposes life, and only operates on life, but evolution in the more generally accepted, though arguably more slack, understanding of the term, certainly assumes a gradualist and Naturalist theory of abiogenesis"
Sewell's article is supposed to be a science based piece, what is he doing using common definitions unless he needs the room to set up strawmen? The reason we can't argue abiogenesis within evolution is because it may or may not use the same mechanisms as evolution. If it turns out that life results from evolutionary mechanisms acting on pre-life then we can include it in the debate. We haven't reached that point yet.
"Also, tell me exactly what is the most primitive form of life necessary for ToE to operate? Are we talking protein? amino acids? Nucleotide? Enzyme? RNA? DNA? Complete unicellular organism? At what point do we hand things off to Darwin?
We don't know yet. Bacteria certainly. Virii almost positively. Prions, I'm unsure. Nanobes, that is not known.
Cray? So what do you think of the NEC Earth Simulator (massive collection of vector processors...)?
Not to mention hydrogen bonding in the water as opposed to the oil...
I didn't say in any of my posts that evolution is nothing but speculation. I do not believe that.
I said that Darwinists fill in the gaps in knowledge with statements of faith. There is nothing wrong with using statements of faith to explain what you can't prove.
I am sure that in the future your faith will be rewarded in filling in some gaps with more knowledge.
My point in talking about the sun revolving around the earth is to illustrate that politically correct explanations have been used before and it set science back 1500 years.
When "scientists" become dogmatic, as Darwinists are, it doesn't advance science. It suppresses other points of view.
They excercise their political muscle to force acceptance of their faith just as much as was used in the middle ages by the church to enforce their faith that the sun goes around the earth.
In the middle ages, heretics were execuited, now they are just flunked or thrown out of school.
My problem with Darwinists is their use of political muscle to enforce their doctrines.
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