Posted on 10/19/2006 4:36:37 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
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.
Because when the mutations are favorable, in one way or another, they are selected for, when they are not favorable, they are usually disastrous, they are selected against. "Favorable", at the stage of complex life, say from the the amoeba on up, means more likely to survive to reproduce, or just more likely to reproduce.
Pretty much the same at lower levels, except that the concept of "reproduce" becomes more chemical or biochemical than biological. But the principal is the same.
This guy's version of the first and seconds laws of thermodynamics are not the ones I was taught in an Engineering Thermodynamics. And not just taught in the sense of memorizing something, but of understanding. Don't think I could reproduce the logic here, it has been 35 or so years ago, and it's not an area I work in.
Combined Law of Thermodynamics
For energy E, temperature T, Entropy S, pressure P, and volume V, (The little 'd' stands for delta or change in)
However, people decrease entropy all the time, an air conditioner does it, but always at the expense of doing work (using energy) and increasing entropy in the larger system.
The Devil is in the details ...
Nice piece. Thanks for posting it.
It's a perfectly valid choice, and is exactly correct.
The local decrease in entropy in the AC system is more than offset by the increase in entropy at the power plant.
It's all in how you draw your control volume, and account for the energy flows across it.
Just because we use "real-world" measure like COP to measure the effectiveness of our mechanical creations at creating cool air, doesn't mean that the underlying thermodynamics don't adhere to the First and Second Laws.
Ok, I am trying to understand this 2nd law.
Would it be correct to say that all matter, in a closed system, is degrading so to speak ?
This sounds like the basis for "carbon dating".
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.
I can barely read this but even I know the article doesn't say that.
Nor are they the ones I learned in graduate chemical thermodynamics courses.
No.
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