Re: found a picture of evolution in process ...


"AEF" <spamsink2001@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1180385389.937333.124640@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On May 26, 5:46 pm, ultra...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 22, 9:33 pm, AEF <spamsink2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 21, 7:46 pm, ultra...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/mantomonkey.htm

http://www.whoisyourcreator.com/

This is a clever ruse to appear to be scientific, but in fact is not.
The Thermodynamics section shows either a lack of understanding or
(more likely) is a purposeful snow job intended to impress those who
lack a certain amount of scientific knowledge.

This thermo section claims that evolution theory violates the Second
Law because something more "organized" appears on its own and then, of
course, this leads to God, creationism, and such. But in fact, the
total entropy still increases even in evolution.

Look at water. Water, on its own, can freeze into snowflakes, which
are much more "ordered" than the molecules in water vapor, yet there
is no violation of the Second Law. The entropy from the heat given off
by the freezing water vapor more than compensates for the loss of
entropy from the creation of the more structurally organized
snowflake. Weather systems are another example, especially all types
of storms, which appear to oragnize spontaneously. None of these
violate the 2nd law.

The analogy of the Second Law with "disorganization" (given in the Web
site but also given in more reputable sources) is only approximate and
taken too seriously leads to nonsense. (There was actually an aritcle
about this I think less than a year ago, though I forget what
publication it was in.) Thermodynamics is involved with energy, the
conservation thereof, and its increasing unavailability for doing work
in a closed system. Then entropy changes involved with heat exchanges
fantastically exceeds any macro-organizational "entropy".

Quotes of scientists, while the few I checked appear to be accurate,
are misused.

Another section talks of the lack of transitional species. Again I
strongly suggest picking up Asimov's "Asimov's New Guide to Science"
or whatever its most recent incarnation is called. You will find
transitional species in there. p. 784: lungfishes -- the transition
between ocean and land animals. A few such species still exist in
Africa and Australia. Egg-laying mammals: the duckbilled platypus
(which had hair, produced milk, though had no nipples and laid eggs!),
the echidua is another example of animals at the somewhat blurry
boundary between reptiles and mammals. These animals are also
imperfectly warm-blooded.

The site appears to be just propoganda intended to look scientific,
but isn't. (This is interesting because it tries to make a point using
science while simultaneously deriding it!) It makes a big deal of any
gap in knowledge, no matter how small, to show that evolution is not
correct. Seventy or eighty years ago it wasn't known how the Sun
produces energy. Back then a Web site like this could have said "No
one has the slightest idea of what powers the Sun! Surely it must be
God." Well, we now know what powers the Sun: nuclear fusion. And it is
well understood.

Of course there are gaps in our knowledge. But these gaps eventually
become filled as our total understanding increases. Sometimes apparent
gaps lead to new discoveries, as in the case of neutrinos being the
energy-balancing "gap" from the energetics of beta decay. These gaps
do not automatically imply that the theory is incorrect. It just means
something needs to be investigated further.

Also, note how easily the mind is altered by physical and chemical
effects -- leading one to suspect that even the mind may be nothing
more than a manifestation of the brain, a phsycial entity.

Anyway, enough for now.

AEF

and let us see what Ken Ham has to say about this ...

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v3/i2/thermodynamics.asp


Well, he doesn't say anything about weather systems, which I mentioned
above.

Anyway, here goes.

This page starts out with this statement: "The Second Law of
Thermodynamics states simply that an isolated system will become more
disordered with time." Again, disorder is not the right term. It is
too vague to use as a law of physics. The correct term is "entropy"
which has a rigorous mathematical definition. Disorder is a quality
that is somewhat subjective. So already we're off on the wrong foot.
Systems having higher entropy in general do appear more disordered,
but "disorder" is too subjective for a physical law. (See my other
posts in this thread for more on this.)

I give the correct Second Law at the end of this article.

Then he brings up three examples.

(1) He says a seed growing into a plant is not analogous to evolution.
I agree. (!) Fine.

(2) The he talks about machines making machines. "It takes machines to
make machines..." he says. Well, people have been making machines for
thousands of years of increasing complexity. And the first machines
were made by hand -- or more accurately, the first tools were. And he
says the information to make these things originated in the mind. But
the mind generates heat, and the body that keeps the mind alive
generates yet more heat, which is a lot more "disorder" than the
change from being machineless to having machines. Again, disorder is
only a qualitative thing and is not exactly equivalent to entropy,
though it is related and comes about in a similar way. The Second Law
states that the entropy of a closed system never decreases. I don't
buy his "information" arguments. I don't think they're right, but I'm
not prepared to discuss further at this point except to bring up
weather systems (especially storms, and more especially tornados!) and
the evolution of the Solar System. In both cases there's more
"information" than there was before, yet the Second Law is not
violated.

(3) Here he discusses crystals. He says -- let me quote some of it:
"Example No. 3 (crystals) is often cited, but has no relevance to the
problem. This is because biological growth processes involve
complexity, whereas crystal growth involves regularity. If you break
up a large salt crystal, you get a lot of smaller salt crystals. If
you break up a molecule of a biological protein, e.g. insulin, into
smaller pieces, it is no longer insulin since the information it
carries in its specific sequence of components is lost. A crystal of
ice, for example, carries no more information than a single water
molecule. The formation of a crystal involves molecules assuming a
rigidly predetermined pattern-there is no growth in information or
complexity, and again there is a pre-existing 'code'."

Breaking up a large salt cyrstal is hardly analogous to breaking up an
enzyme molecule. A molecule is the smallest unit of a substance that
maintains that substance's properties, so of course breaking it up
causes it to not be insulin anymore. A large crystal is not that at
all. I'm not sure what the smallest possible crystal would be, but
he's nowhere near that with a "large salt crystal". So it's a bogus
argument.

Then with the crystal of ice: Does not a snowflake have more
"information" than a molecule of water? In one sense, yes; in another,
no. So what? We really need a precise definition of "information"
here. Regardless, the Second Law is about entropy.

Then he talks about the "jack argument". Saying that the motions of
the jack being only up and down making it not random is not right. The
reason for this is that it *is* random GIVEN THE DEGREES OF FREEDOM OF
THE JACK. The jack has only two degrees of freedom: up and down. This
was chosen to make it simple. If you flip a coin, there are only two
possible outcomes, yet it is still random. In real life, with
evolution, there are many more degrees of freedom. So his criticism of
the "jack argument" doesn't hold because its two degrees of freedom
are enough to allow for randomness. Of course the jack argument at
best shows the possibility or reasonableness of evolution, but does
not prove it. The actual process of evolution is certainly a lot more
complicated than flipping a coin. But more importantly, Mr. Ham's
criticism here is not valid.

Another non-starter is his next example of a resistor. He correctly
argues that his system of a resistor and diode and motor can't work on
its own. The random motions of the electrons cannot be made to do
work, even though the diode acts as a one-way gate. Correct. But that
is a closed system. Apply a source of electrical energy and it will
work. So life on earth couldn't have evolved without some external
energy source. But there are at least three possible sources I can
think of: the sun, internal heat of the earth generated by the great
internal pressures, and heat from radioactive decay. Usually the sun
plays this role.

Again, absence of transitional forms is brought up, which I already
debunked in another post.

According to this article, weather systems, especially storms, (and
more so tornados!) cannot come into being because it would violate the
Second Law. (What makes life different from weather systems, of
course, is its ability to reproduce.)

If you want to say God created the universe, then you could say He
created it with a minimum of entropy, or at least a lot less entropy
than exists today. But I still see no reason from all of these Web
sites you posted to ditch evolution, and even if evolution were false,
that doesn't prove creationism is right.

>----o----<

Here is the correct Second Law:

First we need to define entropy which is defined thusly:

The entropy, S, is

S = k ln OMEGA

where k is Boltzmann's constant which is equal to 1.38054 E-16 ergs/
degree (Kelvin degrees, or "Kelvins"), "ln" is the symbol for the
natural logarithm function, and OMEGA is the number of accessible
states available to a system in the range between E and E + delta-E (E
is the total energy of the system), the precise value of delta-E
having a completely negligible effect (as in 55 compared to 10**24).

The Second Law is then

An equilibrium macrostate of a system can be characterized by a
quantity S which has the properties that

a. In any process in which a thermally isolated system goes from
one macrostate to another, the entropy tends to increase, i.e.,

DELTA-S .GE. 0

b. If the system is not isolated and undergoes a quasi-static
[i.e., slowly enough that equilibirum is maintained throughout the
total process] infinitesimal process in which it absorbs heat d-bar-Q
(I can't reproduce the proper symbol d-bar, but it just means that d-
bar-Q is an "inexact differential" -- just think of it as an
infinitesimal amount of heat), then

dS = d-bar-Q / T

where T is the absolute temperature of the system. (Adapted from Rief,
Fundamentals of statistical and thermal physics, pp.122-123)

Nothing I've seen so far shows that evolution violates the law given
above. Qualitative hand-waving arguments about order, disorder,
complexity, and information w.r.t. evolution do not show any violation
of the above law. These four terms (especially complexity and
information) need precise definitions to be used in this discussion.


AEF



Sadly, there are fewer scientists than raving loonies, bigots and religious
fundamentalists.

Dweeb




.

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