Nick Matzke – Book Burner?

_{Barry Arrington
June 30, 2013

Intelligent Design

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Intelligent Design}

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Nick Matzke famously got the publishing company Springer to suppress the publication of the papers of a conference held at Cornell. See here. He did this without having seen, much less read, any of the papers. Obviously, his motivation could not have been the content of the papers. He was motivated by the mere fact that several of the conference participants were well-known ID proponents.

Let us do a little thought experiment. Suppose that Nick had published his famous piece on Panda’s Thumb a few days later, and the head of Springer had called him up and said, “Hey, Nick, I’ve got some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that it is too late to stop publication of the book. The printer has done his work and the first printing of the book is finished. The good news is that not a single copy has left the printer’s warehouse, and they are all in a pile that has been drenched in gasoline. Nick, all you have to do is come over and toss a match on the pile of books and it will be as if they were never published in the first place.”

Nick follows UD and posts here from time to time, so I have two questions for him:

(1) Nick would you have tossed the match?

(2) If the answer to (1) is “no,” are you not a hypocrite? After all, the ultimate outcome from tossing the match would be identical to what you actually did – i.e., no book out there for people to buy.

BKA: Updated in response to Dr. Sewell’s comment @ 2.

Comments

Timaeus:
In any case, I’ve always thought that, in Sewell’s various versions of this argument, the discussion of TVs, planes, computers, etc. is the feeblest part of the presentation; it isn’t necessary for his argument, and could be excised. He could go straight to the question of thermodynamics and its alleged connection with the possibility of evolution. And that’s in fact what most of the article in question is about — with the planes, trains etc. examples serving only to get in the way and obscure the subject, which is the evolution of living forms, not the appearance of high-tech manufactured products.
It wouldn't help. His argument would then simply be no more or less than Dembski's. We can debate Dembski's, and do, regularly, but the point is that it isn't the "TVs, planes, computers, etc." that are irrelevant to Sewell's argument, but the 2nd law of thermodynamics. And if the title and abstract of your article includes a claim that the existence of designers and designed-things violate the 2nd Law, then saying that the article would be fine without the 2nd Law part doesn't make the paper valid! In fact, I'd say that if anything, what the 2nd Law implies is that interventionist design by an immaterial designer would be a violation of the 2nd law. But is quite different from saying "design, therefore 2nd law violated". Material designers do not violate the 2nd law. Only if material designers were designed by immaterial designers is the 2nd law violated. But the inference of such a violation would an implication of that conclusion, not a reason to conclude it.Elizabeth B Liddle_{July 3, 2013
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Timaeus, Scientific papers are judged by their contents. The contents of Granville's paper are awful. Based on those contents, and using Granville's own words, I have shown that Granville: 1. Mistakenly asserts that "the increase in order which has occurred on Earth seems to violate the underlying principle behind the second law of thermodynamics, in a spectacular way." 2. Titles his paper Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems without realizing that the second law is actually irrelevant to his improbability argument, since it is not violated by evolution. 3. Misunderstands the compensation argument and incorrectly rejects it. 4. Fails to understand that the compensation argument is a direct consequence of the second law, and that by rejecting it he is rejecting the second law itself! 5. Fails to realize that if the compensation argument were invalid, as he claims, then plants would violate the second law whenever their entropy decreased. 6. Asserts, with no evidence, that physics alone cannot explain the appearance of complex artifacts on Earth. 7. Offers, as evidence for the above, a thought experiment involving a simulation he can neither run nor analyze. 8. Declares, despite being unable to run or analyze the simulation, that he is "certain" of the outcome, and that it supports his thesis. 9. Confuses negentropy with complexity, as Lizzie explained. 10. Conflates entropy with disorder, as Lizzie explained. Granville was unable to defend his paper, so he bailed out of the thread. You are now retreating also -- probably a wise move. It remains to be seen what Eric and CS3 will do. If Lizzie and I are able to expose egregious faults in Granville's paper, using his own words, and none of you are capable of defending it, then how can you claim that his paper was good science that deserved to be accepted by the BI organizers? By accepting Granville's paper, the organizers showed that the BI was not a serious scientific conference. Springer did the right thing in refusing to publish.keiths_{July 3, 2013
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Timaeus
(b) Did Springer approve the general concept of the book, then advertise the book, and only afterward look for reviewers for the individual articles, to make sure they were good? If the process was (b), then Springer was behaving incompetently. And since it is allegedly a good science publisher, this incompetence is surprising and requires explanation.
According to Franklin's link, this is what the Springer spokesman said had happened. Actually, worse: the implication was that they considered their review of the "proposal" adequate, but decided that "further review would be necessary" after representations had been made. As I said, I don't find it that surprising, because often agreement to publish conference proceedings are made before the conference (i.e. on the basis of a "proposal", before the papers are more than abstracts, which will have been reviewed by the conference organisers). In fact, it appears that my original assumption was actually correct, and what the people who protested to Springer achieved (I still have no direct evidence that Matzke was one of the people who wrote) was "further review" i.e. review of the actual papers, as opposed to the proposal and possibly abstracts. To that extent, yes, it seems as though the letters did in deed result in full review - but, according to you, review that should have happened anyway. There is a good reason why citations to "conference proceedings" do not normally carry the same weight as citations to peer-reviewed papers - they are often only reviewed by the conference committee, and usually only the abstracts. That's fine, because no implication of full peer-review is implied - and you could object that this should have happened here, but didn't because those pesky pandas forced full peer-review. But if your position is that the conference proceedings should have been fully peer-reviewed, then all the pandas did was ensure that they were. In light of all this, I'd say that yes, it looks as though the panda letters did result in a book of conference proceedings receiving fuller review than would normally be done, and more than non-ID conference proceedings would have done. You could legitimately call this bias. But not because Springer were bullied into rejecting a book they had previously accepted after full review, but because they were "bullied" into fully reviewing a book that they had approved on the basis of a "proposal" only (probably with abstracts). Hence my scare quotes round the second "bullied". I don't think they were "bullied" - I think they thought "yikes, didn't realise this was ID, we'd better check the quality of the papers". And, having read many of them now, including Sewell's, which is indeed a repetition of his already well-known argument, I would agree that at least some of them simply do not meet the minimum criteria for peer-reviewed science.Elizabeth B Liddle_{July 3, 2013
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keiths re 203: You seem to have trouble understanding the difference between "establishing what argument an author is making" and "assessing that argument to determine its worth." You cannot do the second thing until you have done the first thing. Hence, I and several others here have tried to make sure that the first thing has been done, and done properly, in the case of the Sewell paper. You, on the other hand, have wanted -- without first being absolutely clear about what Sewell's thesis *is* -- to say "his thesis is wrong, wrong, wrong." That has been my objection. Repeating myself again will do no good. So I'm done.Timaeus_{July 2, 2013
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Timaeus, Regarding Granville's statement about the fundamental forces, you write:
And I would agree with that as it stands, because the blind processes generated by four natural laws would not throw out computers, televisions, etc. Nor does the most diehard atheist materialist think they would.
Again, are you kidding? The brain is a physical object, like any other. It behaves according to the laws of physics. There is absolutely no evidence of any unknown or magic force that "animates" the brain and creates intelligence. Yet Granville makes this forceful statement:
If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much.
He says he's certain that we would not see those things. What's his evidence? He thought about a simulation. That's it. He thought about it. It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous scenario: 1. Person proposes that there must be a new force of nature. 2. This would be worthy of a Nobel Prize if he were correct. 3. Person has no evidence for this force. 4. When asked why he thinks this force exists, person responds that he a. ...thought about a simulation... b. ...that cannot be run in reality... c. ...that also cannot be analyzed in reality... d. ...but he's certain he knows what the result would be. If you think this paper should have been accepted at any scientific conference in the world, then all I can say is: You have got to be kidding me.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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Timaeus:
I never undertook to debate the contents of Sewell’s paper.
You have got to be kidding me. Our entire discussion has been about Granville's paper, whether it constitutes good science, and whether it should have been accepted by the BI organizers. This entire comment of yours, for example, is about nothing but the contents of his paper. You've made statements like "Sewell’s article did not argue that..." and "His article is meant to show..." How could those statements NOT be about the contents of the paper? Have you suddenly gotten cold feet about defending the paper, Timaeus?keiths_{July 2, 2013
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keiths: I never undertook to debate the contents of Sewell's paper. I do not necessarily defend every statement in it; in fact, I think I disagree with several statements in it. Your italicized summary statement about the four forces lifts Sewell's words out of context and rearranges them into a proposition, but they were originally a hypothetical question along the line of: "Would our computer simulation predict such an outcome, if only the four fundamental forces of nature [sc. and no intelligent planning or guidance] were involved?" And he suggests the answer, "No, our simulation wouldn't predict that." And I would agree with that as it stands, because the blind processes generated by four natural laws would not throw out computers, televisions, etc. Nor does the most diehard atheist materialist think they would. Yet Sewell's scenario is misleading, because the theory of evolution doesn't claim that the blind forces of nature have produced TVs, planes, etc. The theory of evolution says that evolution produced *man*; planes etc. were not evolved but *manufactured by man*. The two processes, evolution and manufacture, are quite different, and I think Sewell introduces unnecessary confusion by treating "evolution" as if it runs from atoms to machines. But suppose we change cars, TVs, planes, etc. to "man"; would Sewell's statement be bad science then? I don't see why. Stephen Jay Gould tells us that evolution is highly contingent, that if you rewound the tape, you would get a different result each time. If he is right, a computer simulation would *not* predict the emergence of man -- at least, not as any more than one out of many, many possible outcomes (lifeless planets, planets with only unicellular life, planets with nothing higher than reptiles, planets with primates but without man, planets where the bear line or the octopus line reached human-level intelligence, etc.). So Sewell's remark, as it stands, wouldn't be in conflict with Gould's notion of evolution. Now if Sewell said that man was, not an unlikely, but an *impossible*, outcome of the four natural forces, then I would say that he was being dogmatic, and hence unscientific. But I don't see that as his argument -- not in the paper we are talking about, anyway. In any case, I've always thought that, in Sewell's various versions of this argument, the discussion of TVs, planes, computers, etc. is the feeblest part of the presentation; it isn't necessary for his argument, and could be excised. He could go straight to the question of thermodynamics and its alleged connection with the possibility of evolution. And that's in fact what most of the article in question is about -- with the planes, trains etc. examples serving only to get in the way and obscure the subject, which is the evolution of living forms, not the appearance of high-tech manufactured products.Timaeus_{July 2, 2013
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timaeus: What still remains unclear to me is: (a) Did Springer have the articles externally reviewed, find the reviews mostly positive, then advertise the book, and only *later* (after hearing from Matzke or whoever it heard from) change its mind about publication? or (b) Did Springer approve the general concept of the book, then advertise the book, and only afterward look for reviewers for the individual articles, to make sure they were good?
It appears that you aren't considering a third option. That third option would be that the proposal submitted and reviewed by Springer was not representative of the final product. If that is the case then it may have been by design or perhaps inadvertent on all the authors part.
timaeus: No one seems to be able to provide a crystal-clear timeline that gives the order of events.
That would also include the authors of the submitted manuscripts as well. I can't help but wonder why the authors would not present the review they submitted so a comparison could be made between that and the manuscripts. I do agree that something smells fishy but it might be coming from Springer. But as you state why won't all parties provide the material you wish were available?franklin_{July 2, 2013
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Timaeus, I'll address the rest of your comment separately, but let's concentrate for now on the scientific quality of Granville's paper. Let's even set aside, for the moment, the contentious issue of what Granville thinks about evolution and the second law. Even with that out of the way, this fact remains: Granville thinks that what has happened on Earth cannot be explained by the fundamental forces of nature. Read the passage I quoted. His meaning is absolutely clear. He offers no evidence for his assertion other than a pure argument from incredulity. He describes an imaginary computer simulation of the Earth, and then flatly states:
If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much.
He also offers no evidence for any unknown or magical force that can explain what has happened on Earth. Do you consider that good science? Does anyone?keiths_{July 2, 2013
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Elizabeth: Of *course* the articles should have been reviewed! And Springer should *not* have advertised that it was going to put out the book until it had read and approved not only the general proposal but also at least the majority of the individual articles. What still remains unclear to me is: (a) Did Springer have the articles externally reviewed, find the reviews mostly positive, then advertise the book, and only *later* (after hearing from Matzke or whoever it heard from) change its mind about publication? or (b) Did Springer approve the general concept of the book, then advertise the book, and only afterward look for reviewers for the individual articles, to make sure they were good? If the process was (b), then Springer was behaving incompetently. And since it is allegedly a good science publisher, this incompetence is surprising and requires explanation. If the process was (a), then there are two possibilities: (i) warned by outsiders, Springer looked more closely at the papers, decided that the papers were not very good, and pulled the book; (ii) warned by outsiders, Springer looked more closely at the papers, saw no problems with them, but chickened out because the "ID word" had been mentioned, and they wanted no association with ID people, whether the papers were good, poor, or indifferent. If the actual case was (i), then Springer's decision was reasonable; if the actual case was (ii), then Springer's decision was spineless. And when governments, officials, judges, universities, publishers, etc., start making spineless decisions, tyranny is just around the corner (whether it's the tyranny of a special interest or the tyranny of the mob). We *know* that in the case of the MI article of Sewell, the decision was based on spinelessness. The editor declared that there was no technical inadequacy in the article. It was pulled because Sewell is an ID guy and the journal didn't want to be embarrassed by the association, not because the journal thought the article was bad. The decision was political, not academic. It is still not clear to me whether spinelessness was a factory in the Springer case. No one seems to be able to provide a crystal-clear timeline that gives the order of events. And of course, precisely if there was some less than proper behavior involved, those responsible are not about to provide us with a clear timeline. Only if everything was on the up-and-up would all parties be glad to be clear about exactly what happened, and when, and why. So I still smell something rotten in Denmark. (Or wherever Springer is located.)Timaeus_{July 2, 2013
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keiths: Are you even trying to listen? "To say the [sic] evolution violates the second law is atrociously bad science," *Sewell's article did not argue that.* That is what we have all been telling you, but you aren't listening. Read it again, without anger, without pride, and without thinking "I'm gonna show the world this ID guy is full of crap." Read it to understand what he is arguing. Abandon your preconceptions of what he is *probably* arguing ('cause he's an ID guy) and follow what he *is* arguing. He is very cautious, and he tried to write his article in such a way as to forestall misunderstandings such as yours. But even the most careful author can't prevent *willful* misunderstandings. His article is meant to show the inadequacy of the "compensation" argument. His article may fail to do that. But that is all that it tries to do. It does not try to prove that evolution is incompatible with the second law. It leaves that question unsettled. I have been making a literary argument here, not a scientific one. Your *reading* is inaccurate. You want to criticize Sewell for view you believe that he holds, but your job, if you are evaluating a *paper*, is to criticize only the argument he makes in the *paper*. It doesn't matter if he holds a thousand stupid or false views, if they aren't argued for in the paper. Sewell's personal conclusion regarding evolution and thermodynamics may be wrong. His thesis in his paper about the compensation argument may also be wrong. But they are two different things. So *first* show he has been unfair to the compensation argument, and failed to refute it. *Then*, if he writes a paper somewhere else, asserting point-blank that evolution is incompatible with the laws of thermodynamics, hammer him for that conclusion, based on what he writes in *that* paper. In short, your academic procedure here is what is illegitimate. And that's generally the case with attacks on ID papers -- at least, those which appear on the internet. The writer is almost always too eager to show that the ID writer is wrong about *everything*, and this results in sloppy, careless, unfair, and uncharitable reading. I've made *no* defense of Sewell's personal views here. I haven't even defended the conclusions of this particular article! I'm merely demanding a responsible reading of the article. Don't drag Elizabeth's criticism in. She is criticizing a point of Sewell's *scientific contents*. That is fair game. But your criticism is based on a misreading of the structure and purpose of the article, a misreading which must be all the more frustrating for Sewell, given how hard he tried to circumscribe his argument. As for your final emotive dismissal of the contents of the article, please let us know the scientific achievements you have, which enable you to judge that Sewell's paper is "crap science." If you haven't done any science, how would you know? List me your science degrees and scientific publications, please. Particularly in the fields of thermodynamics, probability theory, and other fields close to the subject of the article. Or you just another internet bluffer, faking much greater acquaintance with science than you actually have, like 90% of the people who post on Panda's Thumb, Talk Origins, Pharyngula, Recursivity, Sandwalk, etc.? I really weary of this culture-war garbage. If the anti-ID movement had even an ounce of honesty in it, it would *occasionally* say things like (and these are purely hypothetical examples corresponding to nothing in particular in ID works): "Behe makes a good point about a defect of current evolutionary theory, even if his own account of evolution is very unsatisfactory"; or "Dembski has made some faulty assumptions in his probability discussion, and he should have been more careful, but to be fair to him, though his error means that the probability of life's arising due to chance is 10^15 higher than he claims, it is still very, very low." Etc. Just the odd statement like that, *once in a while*. Then people could believe that the anti-ID crowd were arguing in good faith. But as was said above by someone else, there's an unwritten rule that no ID critic should ever grant a point to an ID writer. This is what makes these internet debates academically dishonest and epistemologically worthless. I was at first impressed with your comments here, keiths. They seemed sane, balanced, moderate. I thought: "At last, an anti-ID person who is reasonable, and whom I can respect." But with your refusal to budge even an inch before polite and thoughtful responses here, and with your typical yahoo comment about "crap science," you appear to show your true colors. You're apparently just another thug, like 95% of the internet anti-ID crowd. Too bad. You may have the brains to be something better than that. But you've chosen the low road. Like Ken Miller, Eugenie Scott, Matzke, Shallit, Moran, Myers, Petrushka, Nakashima, and so many others.Timaeus_{July 2, 2013
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Franklin quotes:
Eric Merkel-Sobotta, executive vice president of corporate communications at Springer in Germany, said in an e-mail, that the initial proposal for the book was peer-reviewed by two independent reviewers. “However, once the complete manuscript had been submitted, the series editors became aware that additional peer review would be necessary,” Merkel-Sobotta said. “This is currently underway, and the automatically generated pre-announcement for the book on Springer has been removed until the peer-reviewers have made their final decision.”
I had missed this. It seems my original assumption was more or less correct - that the proposal had been reviewed prior to the advertisement, but not the actual material. In that case, while it is possible that the letters they received (I know now of two: Bob O'Hara and Sparc) precipitated the withdrawal of the ad, clearly Springer should have had the actual manuscript reviewed before finally accepting it for publication. I hope they would have done this anyway. So either the letters were unnecessary, or Springer was about to publish a manuscript they had not reviewed. I trust everyone agrees that the manuscript should have been reviewed.Elizabeth B Liddle_{July 2, 2013
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Read that passage I quoted again. Let it sink in. Granville isn't just arguing that the second law was violated on Earth, he is actually arguing that the four fundamental forces cannot explain what happened here either! What an embarrassment for ID.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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Timaeus, It's great that you and Eric are trying so hard to cover up Granville's mistake, because it shows that you know how serious a mistake it is. To say the evolution violates the second law is atrociously bad science, and the two of you clearly recognize that. Eric even states point blank:
The second law of course isn’t violated — it can’t be. :) And Granville knows that.
Unfortunately, Granville does not know that. On the second page of his paper, he writes:
In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution”, I argued against this view, asserting that the increase in order which has occurred on Earth seems to violate the underlying principle behind the second law of thermodynamics, in a spectacular way. [Emphasis mine] I wrote:
I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much.

(By the way, Timaeus, you seem to have missed that passage or overlooked its significance. What were you saying about reading the paper carefully? :)) In that passage, Granville argues quite clearly that he thinks there had to be a violation of "the underlying principle behind the second law of thermodynamics" in order for encyclopedias, computers and aircraft carriers to appear on Earth. (And of course he's conflating design complexity with negentropy, which is the error Lizzie described in her last couple of comments. It's very tiring keeping up with Granville's mistakes.) Granville's paper is crap science. The fact that it was accepted shows that the BI organizers were not conducting a serious scientific conference. Springer was right to quash publication.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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Timaeus:
He claims to have refuted certain statements of the compensation argument. His *article* stands or falls on the strength of that refutation, not on his ultimate personal judgment regarding evolution and thermodynamics.
Except that he doesn't. There is nothing wrong with the "compensation" argument - there are indeed local decreases in entropy on earth, but these are achieved by virtue (mainly) of input of solar energy, we only get it because the entropy of the sun is increasing Granville is correct that the compensation argument doesn't refute his, but that isn't because it is wrong. It's because it's not the argument he's making. It took me a long time to see exactly what he was saying, but it isn't that the sun can't cause local entropy decreases on earth (as he made clear when he responded to the obvious question: how do plants grow?) As I try to explain above, his error is much more fundamental than that: he has simply misunderstood the word "order" when thermodynamic entropy is described as "disorder". It's a notoriously bad description, and "non-uniformity" would be a better one. And design is simply not necessary to increase "non-uniformity". A tornado will do it. Here is Sewell's error. He defines Order (Footnote 1) thus:
note that in this paper, “order” is simply defined as the opposite of “entropy.”
However, throughout the paper, he uses the word "order" to mean the opposite of "chaos":
I was discussing the second law argument with a friend recently, and mentioned that the second law has been called the “common sense law of physics.” The next morning he wrote:
Yesterday I spoke with my wife about these questions. She immediately grasped that chaos results in the long term if she would stop caring for her home.
I replied:
Tell your wife she has made a perfectly valid application of the second law of thermodynamics
And there you have it. No, the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not say that chaos never decreases in a closed system. It says that entropy never decreases. Designers may decrease chaos; but that does not mean that design violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics. A messy house may be more chaotic than an "ordered" one (mine is), but it has no more, or less "entropy" than an ordered one. Although it may, come to think of it, have a little less, if I'm still in it, because I have done no work to clear it up. The first and second laws of thermodynamicsElizabeth B Liddle_{July 2, 2013
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And still no evidence that blind and undirected physical/ chemical processes are up to the task at hand.Joe_{July 2, 2013
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Eric:
The whole “open system” vs. “closed system” business is utter nonsense. Anytime an evolutionist or abiogenesis proponent responds to the improbabilities of life arising or new systems coming into being by saying “Yes, but the Earth is an open system . . .” you can immediately take it to the bank that they have absolutely no idea what they are talking about and have no understanding of the issues on the table. The entire “Earth is an open system” is a complete red herring.
It is, but probably not for the reasons you think :) Although when the answer you cite is given as the response to Sewell's argument, it is understandable – because even if it were true that designed things have reduced entropy (and living things, like trees, do have less entropy than the material they are made of had before it was as a tree, which is why we can use wood as fuel), that is not a violation of the 2nd Law, because Earth is an open system – we receive energy from the sun, and while the wood of the tree represents a local decrease in entropy, it is more than “compensated” (Sewell’s term) by the increase in solar entropy. Taken as a whole system, including the sun, the 2nd Law is not violated by trees. Sewell agrees, and gets irritated when people assume he is saying this. Indeed, it isn’t the argument Sewell is making. The mistake he is making is far more fundamental. He really does not seem to understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I'm sure he is a fine mathematician, but he is clearly not a physicist - in fact his argument can be seen to be fallacious by a HS student who has done Year 11 Physics (I know, because my Year 11 son pointed it out himself). Sewell is under the mistaken impression that thermodynamic entropy, which is sometimes called "disorder" means "disorder" in the sense of "mess" or "randomness", regarding designed objects, for instance computers, or Boeing 747s, or a pre-tornado house, as "ordered" because they are not "random", as a post-tornado house might be. He therefore claims that designed things are an exception to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, because by designing things, we increase the "order" of matter, and that this therefore violates the 2nd Law, and even the sun can’t help that much, because adding energy to a mess makes it worse not better (cf tornados). The problem is that the way Sewell defines “order” which he also, confusingly calls “complexity” is close to Demski’s definition of CSI – and quantified as a low-probability event. (Dembski refers to Shannon entropy as “complexity”, which leads to further confusion as we shall see). But “disorder” in the context of the concept of entropy doesn’t mean what Sewell thinks it means. In fact it means almost the opposite. Essentially, a high entropy state means a highly uniform state in which very few different rearrangements are possible. If you have 99 coins laid Heads up and 1 laid Tails up, there only 100 ways you can arrange them in a row (without turning them over). And if you have 100 Heads (or 100 Tails), there is only one. This means that these near-uniform or uniform coin-states are “high entropy” – but in normal English usage, they look “ordered”! If you threw them as a series of coin tosses, you’d (notoriously) claim: Design! On the other hand, if you have 100 coins of which 50 are laid Heads-up and 50 Tails-up, there are a vast number of ways in which you can re-arrange them, and almost all of them will look like random coin-toss sequences. The exposed coin faces are highly non-uniform – and therefore “low entropy”. Yet they look, in most arrangements, much more "random". An unfortunately, Sewell equates “high entropy” with “randomness”. This is extremely misleading, and he is duly misled. A high entropy state is not “more random” than a low entropy state. Indeed, “random” is not a description of a pattern, or state, at all, but a process. A high entropy state is, however, more uniform. However, the opposite is true for Shannon entropy, aka Shannon information. The Shannon entropy of the 50:50 set of coins will have high Shannon entropy/information, whereas the Nearly-All-Heads set will have low Shannon entropy/information, In other words the amount of Shannon entropy is negatively correlated with the amount of thermodynamic entropy (represented by the arrangement of coins – whether they are mostly Heads, or more even split). As wiki has it:
...in the words of G. N. Lewis writing about chemical entropy in 1930, "Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more"
Sewell claims that his “order” is the opposite of thermodynamic entropy. This would indeed make sense if he defined “order” as Shannon entropy/information. But, as we have seen, he doesn’t. He defines it as CSI – a specified pattern with high Shannon entropy/information, not any pattern with high Shannon information. As Dembski has been to great pains to delineate, these two things are not the same. Any pattern can have high Shannon entropy – if you dropped a bunch of carefully type-set registers of type ready to print the complete works of Shakespeare, swept up the bits and shovelled them back into the register, you’d have exactly as much Shannon entropy/information, as well as exactly as much thermodynamic entropy, as you started with (as long as you hadn’t missed any of the bits). However, neither Dembski nor Sewell would call the result “order”, or indeed “CSI”. In other words, the 2nd law of thermodynamics has precisely nothing to do with CSI, and therefore precisely nothing to do with the concept of “order” that Sewell thinks is a problem for “evolution”, or for the inference of design. A computer does not have less thermodynamic entropy than the same materials pre-construction. It’s probably about the same. We do not remove entropy when we design a computer. If it did have more thermodynamic entropy, than it started, then it would be liable to corrode or possibly ignite. And it doesn’t have more, or less, Shannon entropy/information, either, because that measure does not take sequence-order into account (hence Dembski’s and Sewell’s additional requirement of Specification for CSI). It certainly has more CSI, but CSI simply has no simple relationship with thermodynamic entropy. Most human artefacts have as much if not more thermodynamic entropy than their ingredients, with the exception of energy-storage materials we might make, like the hydrogen we might produce by splitting water molecules, or dynamite, or cement. But none of those things have much CSI. On the other hand, living things do have less thermodynamic entropy than their constituent parts, because they store solar energy in usable form (sugar in plants, for instance). So he might have a point if he was claiming that only designed things can store energy/reduce entropy. But the problem there is that the ability to convert energy into usable form is not unique to living things. Indeed, a tornado, although it creates “disorder” where “disorder” means what it means in normal English usage, actually does, often, reduce entropy (decrease uniformity). If a tornado picks up a large heavy object and dumps it in high tree, the result might not look like “order” to us, in the usual sense of the word – but we now have a configuration of stuff that can do work, even if only to make a big hole in the ground when someone pushes it back down again. Therefore it has less entropy than when it was parked on the road. So is a car up a tree after a tornado “designed”? Sewell is explicit that it is not! So the only conceivably valid point Sewell is making has nothing to do with the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all. Once you have removed the stuff that is wrong, we are left with a restatement of Dembski’s CSI argument: that only intelligence can create CSI (only he calls it “order” or “complexity”). Which I argue is invalid for other reasons, but maybe we can leave that for another time!Elizabeth B Liddle_{July 2, 2013
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Timeaus: Thanks for the summary @190. Very helpful. As I said, I haven't spent a lot of time with Sewell's specific article, but your summary will be helpful background if I get a chance to go through it in more detail.Eric Anderson_{July 2, 2013
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keiths: Your "killer" passage doesn't prove what you want it to. Granville wrote: "Thus unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that at least the basic principle behind the second law has in fact been violated here." The key word is "unless." This leaves the door open for someone to *make* an argument "that the influx of solar energy etc." Sewell takes no stand *in the article* on any such argument, except for the version of the compensation argument discussed in the article. So if there were, say, 50 different arguments that Darwinian evolution does *not* violate the basic principle behind the second law of thermodynamics, Sewell is claiming to have refuted only one of those arguments. As for the other 49 arguments, it is up to their champions to present them, and then Sewell might choose to write rebuttals to them as well. So, even if Sewell has indicated in various places that he personally does not think that anything can rescue Darwinism from the law of thermodynamics critique, that is irrelevant *to the argument of the article*. The argument of the article is limited to showing the inadequacy of certain versions of the "compensation" argument. And for those with open minds, the article performs that limited task very well. On another point: you say that you do not understand what he meant by "the basic principle behind the second law." If you reread the article slowly, carefully, and with patience, instead of with a militant mindset determined to cut down the article merely because it's an ID article, you will find that he explains what he means by that: the ultimate principle behind the second law, he says, has nothing to do with heat dissipation, energy dissipation, etc. (which is usually how the second law is understood, because of the "thermo" in "thermodynamics"); what happens to heat, etc. are in his view just special cases of a deeper principle, which concerns the relative probability of various states of organization. So his general theoretical point is: any "thermodynamic" argument against Darwinism is ultimately a *probablilistic* argument against Darwinism. And his specific thesis is that *one* defense against such a probablistic argument -- the "compensation" defense -- does not work. Which does not rule out the possibility that *other* defenses against the thermodynamic/probablistic argument could be successful. The "unless" concedes the possibility of such hypothetical defenses. But their validity or invalidity is not taken up by the article. I am not asking you to share Sewell's beliefs -- whatever they may be -- about evolution and thermodynamics. I'm asking you to be scrupulously fair in responding to what he *argues*, as opposed to what you are convinced that he *believes*. And he doesn't, in the article in question, claim to have proved that evolution is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics. He claims to have refuted certain statements of the compensation argument. His *article* stands or falls on the strength of that refutation, not on his ultimate personal judgment regarding evolution and thermodynamics.Timaeus_{July 2, 2013
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Eric:
What I said is that Granville — like everyone else — obviously knows there can’t be a violation of the 2nd law. So perhaps his argument is a bit more nuanced than you are representing it — perhaps it is not simply “the idea of evolution violates the 2nd law and is therefore falsified.”
Eric, It's right there in the abstract:
Thus unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that at least the basic principle behind the second law has in fact been violated here.
Unless X, then Y. Granville denies X. Therefore Granville affirms Y. Simple logic. Substitute in for X and Y, and you find that Granville affirms that “we have to conclude that at least the basic principle behind the second law has in fact been violated here.” Embarrassing, but true. Think about it. Why mention the second law at all if he doesn't think that evolution violates it? He's not going on about the conservation of energy, after all. Evolution doesn't violate the first law. There is no reason to bring up the first law in discussions of evolution unless someone proposes a mechanism that does violate it. Evolution doesn't violate the second law. There is no reason to bring up the second law in discussions of evolution unless someone proposes a mechanism that does vilate it. All that's left is Granville's belief that (macro)evolution is improbable, a belief that he shares with every other IDer and creationist in the world. Nothing new. Entropy has nothing to do with it, yet the title of his paper is Entropy, Evolution and Open Systems, and he affirms his belief that evolution violates the second law (or "the basic principle behind the second law", whatever that means; a law is a law). It's overtly, obviously bad science. Anyone who claims that the BI symposium was a serious scientific conference needs to explain how Granville's paper got accepted.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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keiths, I have said and will say again, I am not here to defend Granville's use of 2nd law terminology at this stage, other than to point out that his application of the 2nd law to information is not unique to him. I hope at some point to go through his arguments in more detail and see if I can parse it all out. What I said is that Granville -- like everyone else -- obviously knows there can't be a violation of the 2nd law. So perhaps his argument is a bit more nuanced than you are representing it -- perhaps it is not simply "the idea of evolution violates the 2nd law and is therefore falsified." There might be more to it that merits attention -- even if one believes his use of terminology is poor. Maybe if I get a chance to go through his ideas in more detail I can report back on this point. What I will say is: (i) the open system idea is not a helpful concept for supporting abiogenesis/evolution, and (ii) the compensation idea is equally irrelevant and unhelpful. On (i), I am apparently in general agreement with Granville (as far as I have read his arguments); that is as much as I am willing to say at this point about my agreement with him. We haven't discussed (ii), but you brought it up, so I thought it appropriate to mention it as well.Eric Anderson_{July 2, 2013
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Eric,
The second law of course isn’t violated — it can’t be. :) And Granville knows that.
Timaeus made the same claim:
keiths: “Granville wants the second law to rule out evolution” — no, that is not his argument. He puts in many warning statements and precise qualifications in order to guard against that misinterpretation. You need to read his paper more carefully. cs3 has understood that Sewell’s paper is limited to a refutation of the usual versions of the compensation argument. The larger question, whether evolution is compatible with the second law, is not addressed.
CS3 agreed with Timaeus's statement. All three of you are wrong. As I explained to Timaeus:
Timaeus, From the abstract:
Thus unless we are willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude that at least the basic principle behind the second law has in fact been violated here.
Granville is not “willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable.” Thus, by a simple deductive inference, Granville believes that “we have to conclude that at least the basic principle behind the second law has in fact been violated here.”
Ridiculous, isn't it?keiths_{July 2, 2013
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keiths: As I said, I am not here to defend Granville, and I am most certainly not making the same alleged mistake you think he made. I am simply pointing out that the openness of the Earth is essentially irrelevant to things like OOL, whereas in the past I've heard abiogenesis proponents harp on the openness as though it solves some deep issue. It doesn't, and I'm glad to see you agree. keiths @175:
The compensation argument shows that evolution doesn’t violate the second law. It does not say whether evolution happened; that is a different argument. Granville confuses the two issues because of his misunderstanding of the compensation argument. Since the second law isn’t violated, it has no further relevance. Granville is skeptical of evolution, but his skepticism has nothing to do with the second law. He is just like every other IDer and creationist: an evolution skeptic. You can see why this is a huge disappointment to him. Imagine if he had actually succeeded in showing that evolution violated a fundamental law of nature!
Well, the compensation argument, though simple in theory, is pretty questionable in practice, but that is a topic for another time. :) The second law of course isn't violated -- it can't be. :) And Granville knows that. Here is where I think you might want to charitably consider that perhaps you are misunderstanding his argument. From what little I've read or listened to his arguments, it seems to me he is not saying that evolution violates the second law (obviously it can't), but that the origin of information-rich systems or complex functional systems goes against the normal arrow of time we usually observe. Whether Earth is an open or closed system is irrelevant to that point. Whether (through some unknown mechanism, somewhere else in the universe) entropy is increased when life on earth first arises is irrelevant to that point. I've gone on record before questioning Granville about whether he is using the right terminology and whether it is helpful to frame his arguments in the context of the 2nd law. However, Granville is certainly not the one who thought up the concept of informational entropy and its relation (whether direct or by analogy) to the 2nd law. That is a principle that has been around for a while and was not thought up by ID proponents or evolution critics, but by information theorists. Personally, I still haven't decided whether it makes sense to frame the issues Granville is trying to bring to light in terms of the 2nd law, or to just talk about information more generally, and so on. I'm reserving judgment until I've had a chance, if ever, to go through his arguments in a bit more detail. In the meantime, the openness of the Earth or the Solar System or the Galaxy or whatever system is, yes, singularly unhelpful in explaining the origin of life, the origin of biological information, the origin of complex functional systems. On that much, I can agree with Granville.Eric Anderson_{July 2, 2013
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The point being is the "open system" concept is used as some magical factor that allows for the unexaplainable to become explainable.Joe_{July 2, 2013
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keiths:
No one claims that OOL is a solved problem merely because the Earth is an open system.
Not merely, no. But that isn't what Eric is saying...Joe_{July 2, 2013
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Eric, No one claims that OOL is a solved problem merely because the Earth is an open system. There are other requirements. It's obvious -- otherwise there would be no need for OOL research! You're making the same silly mistake as Granville. Read my comment #175 above, in which I explain why the true red herring is Granville's introduction of the second law into the argument.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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keiths: We are talking about things like the origin of life, the origin of information-rich systems, the origin of biological systems. There is absolutely nothing about, say, the Earth being an allegedly "open" as opposed to "closed" system that has any meaningful bearing on that whatsoever. It is a complete red herring, and anyone putting it forth as some kind of explanation or answer to the obvious challenges of something like OOL is "advertising their ignorance" of the issues. Alternatively, of course, feel free to enlighten us. Let's say we have an early primitive earth with no life, but a bunch of chemicals floating around. We're trying to figure out how those chemicals could come together to form life but no-one can figure it out. Then one day a light bulb goes off and someone excitedly jumps up and says, "Yes, but the Earth receives energy from the Sun -- it is an open system!" Tell us, keiths, just how this openness changes the equation, making the implausible plausible? ----- BTW, there is another, more basic point that I can make, but I'll save it for later until you've had a chance to let us know your thoughts on the above.Eric Anderson_{July 2, 2013
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keiths, the ignorance is all yours. Your position cannot explain living organisms regardless of the system.Joe_{July 2, 2013
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I should add, more to UB's specific point, we've had a discussion on another thread a while back highlighting the fact that law-like processes -- and, yes, Virginia, that includes principles of thermodynamics -- are anathema to the creation of information-rich systems. At best they do nothing; often, like in the case of certain thermodynamic processes, they are actually information destroyers. The only known way to get an information-rich system is for an intelligent being to create a system that is able to temporarily counteract or withstand the normal effects of law-like processes such as entropy and the like. And no, this does not mean that any laws of thermodynamics are being "violated." It means the slow, relentless thermodynamic processes are temporarily held at bay through other principles (e.g., design, manufacturing, maintenance, etc.).Eric Anderson_{July 2, 2013
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Eric, You are advertising your ignorance. The distinction between open and closed systems is crucial in thermodynamics, physics and chemistry.keiths_{July 2, 2013
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