Posted on 10/19/2006 4:36:37 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
INTREP [TLAC]
I can barely read this but even I know the article doesn't say that.
Nor was that an allegation of it.
It need not "degrade", but without an energy input, and without causing more "degradation" (Not really the right term, increase in entropy or randomness would be more correct) somewhere, it's can't "un degrade".
Sure they do, more heat energy is rejected to the outside world than was removed from the air inside the house. It came from the "work" (which could be a gorilla turning a crank. :) ) needed to pump the heat "uphill" from cold to hot.
The sad thing is that according to his CV, he has an MS in Mechanical Engineering, in addition to his 5 years earlier PhD in Math. (that'a mite odd, but not unheard of)ME is the very department where Engineering Thermo (and Fluids) is usually taught. Have to wonder if they made him take the undergrade course for his M.S.?
Even though the paper indicates he's in the Math Department of A&M, you'll notice that the link takes you to UTEP (U. Texas El Paso), where he's been since '83. He has been or was Visiting Prof at A&M '04-'06. ( a mite unusual, "visiting" is generally for a single year or even semester).
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.
Good summary. The poor boy's brain's made of mush.
Gah! From the quality of this article I assumed he was an undergrad!
The Second Law says (among other things) that within a given system, entropy increases globally, even if it might increase at particular locations within the system. In a simple example of heat transfer, one side of you can be warmed by a fire (more order, local decrease in entropy), even as the net entropy of the room is increasing. His basic question is, in the case of so-called self-ordering systems, where does the "order" come from globally, such that it can increase, locally?
That's a pretty good question.
Having laid out his point, we can now turn to your analogy. Sewell actually addresses your analogy head-on, in his comment that "order may walk in through the door." As it applies to the airplane/gravity problem, we'd apply that idea in the obvious way: the airplane would always fall down, unless some other force "walked through the door" to hold it up.
There are problems with Sewell's discussion. Your analogy, however, fails to address them.
Gah! From the quality of your replies, I'd say you don't have a real response. Care to take an honest crack at it?
These enzymes are, of course, coded for in the DNA, activated by mechanisms coded for in the DNA, etc. etc. etc. All cellular activity transpires spontaneously, and in accord with physical law, without the direction or intervention of any external agent.
This is exactly backwards, and it is just what is wrong with the examples of entropy increase, such as broken teapots, that Sewell cites.
Entropy is a calcuable quantity of a physical system in thermal equilibrium, and the "order" imposed by macroscopic manipulation of objects implies an incredibly miniscule decrease in entropy, which is dominated by the dynamics at the level of atoms and molecules.
The concept of entropy lends no weight whatsoever to intuitive appeals for the rejection of self-organizing physical systems.
I'm sorry, I'm not in a mood lately to suffer fools.
ping for later.
Beat me to it!
One answer, from a naturalistic perspective, is something like this: 1. The mutations that led to speciation were either directed by intelligence, or they happened randomly. 2. It's outside the realm of science to consider the existence of some intelligence that manipulates the mutation of organisms. 3. Therefore, from a scientific point of view, the mutations in question must have happened randomly.
This line of reasoning, of course, has holes in it you could fly a C-5 through. The first of these is that point 1 is a false dichotomy; just because a process happens naturally, without exterior guidance, emphatically does not mean that the process is random. A large subset of science is devoted to the derivation of mathematical formulae that describe the operation of the universe, and there's no reason to believe that speciation doesn't operate according to its own attendant formulae.
I didn't go through this exercise to construct a straw man, however. I just mean to point out what I see may be inarticulated assumptions in the common naturalistic point of view.
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