Embedded below is a nice new video “When Scientists Ignore Science: The Second Law of Thermodynamics” produced by Mark Champneys.
112 Replies to ““When Scientists Ignore Science…” by Mark Champneys”
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Mark Champneys is a Mormon/evangelical Christian who publishes a website called “Evolution Demolition”. I would not be inclined to regard him as an authority on the Second Law of Thermodynamics,
‘2nd law prohibits evolution’ arguments go back to at least the book Scientific Creationism in 1974.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF001.html
@1 Seversky
If he were a barnacle collector with a big beard, then almost surely we could trust his expertise in… whatever, for example bacteria becoming dinosaurs thanks to a mindless mind that ‘selected’ the outcome and never was scientifically proven.
I’ve never found this argument especially convincing, maybe because I don’t find the 2nd law itself especially convincing. Unlike Newton or Ohm, it has the feel of a statistical manipulation, more like a poll than a formula.
I didn’t buy ID until I started studying (and teaching via courseware) the details of human perception. Every single thing in our anatomy and physiology proves design.
Contrary to Seversky, Jim Thibodeau and Polistra all dissing the second law as not really being impressive evidence for design, the second law, i.e. entropy, is actually one of the most powerful evidences, if not the most powerful evidence, for design that we have.
First off, Entropy is, by a wide margin, the most finely tuned of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Finely tuned to an almost incomprehensible degree of precision, 1 part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power. As Roger Penrose himself stated that, “This now tells us how precise the Creator’s aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123.”
In the following video, Dr, Bruce Gordon touches upon just how enormous that number truly is. Dr. Gordon states, “you would need a hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, universes our size, with a zero on every proton and neutron in all of those universes just to write out this number. That is how fine tuned the initial entropy of our universe is.”
This extreme fine-tuning of the initial entropy of the universe creates some fairly embarrassing problems for atheistic naturalists.
As Dr. William Lane Craig explains,
On top of the fact that Boltzmann Brains, via the initial 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe, driving atheistic naturalism into catastrophic epistemological failure as a coherent explanation for the initial entropy of our universe, entropy and how it relate to quantum mechanics, also empirically refutes naturalism as a rational explanation for the initial 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of our universe.
One line of empirical evidence is from the Quantum Zeno effect.
An old entry in wikipedia described the Quantum Zeno effect as such “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay.”
Likewise, the present day entry on wikipedia about the Quantum Zeno effect also provocatively states that “a system can’t change while you are watching it”
Atheistic materialists have tried to get around the Quantum Zeno effect by postulating that interactions with the environment are sufficient to explain the Quantum Zeno effect.
Yet, the following interaction-free measurement of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrated that the presence of the Quantum Zeno effect can be detected without interacting with a single atom.
In short, the quantum zeno effect, regardless of how atheistic materialists may feel about it, is experimentally shown to be a real effect that is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation.
Moreover, on top of the Quantum Zeno effect demonstrating that an ‘observer’ must somehow have a intimate relationship with the entropy of the universe in that “an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay’,,, on top of that astonishing fact, in 2011 researchers “show that when the bits to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,,
In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
And as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence, “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
This statement is just fascinating! Why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe, entropic actions which also happen to explain time itself,,,,
,,, why in blue blazes should the finely tuned entropic actions of the universe even care if I am consciously observing them or not unless ‘conscious observation’ really is more foundational to reality than the finely tuned 1 in 10^10^123 entropy of the universe is? To state the blatantly obvious, this finding of entropy being “a property of an observer who describes a system.” is very friendly to a Mind First, and/or to a Theistic view of reality which holds that it is the Mind of God who is “describing the universe” and is thus behind the initial 1 in 10^10^123 initial entropy of the universe.
Moreover, Christianity predicted God to be behind the initial entropy of the universe. For instance, Romans chapter 8: verses 20 and 21 itself states, “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
Thus atheistic naturalism is refuted as an explanation for the creation of the universe by mathematics, via Boltzmann Brains, and is also refuted by quantum mechanics, via the Quantum Zeno Effect and the experimental realization of the Maxwell Demon thought experiment.
As well this line of evidence from thermodynamics, i.e. quantum information theory, also plays out in the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate in molecular biology.
The positional information that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be on the order 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
In is important to note that the information to build a human, atom by atom, cannot possibly be contained within the embryonic cell. In fact, Darwinists have no clue how multicellular creatures, (nor even bacterial cells), achieve their basic biological form
As Dr. Doug Axe states in the following video at the 1 hour 16 minute mark, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
To give us a rough estimate as to how much ‘positional information’ is in a human body, since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells in the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate, (via the 10^12 bits calculated to be in bacterial cells from the thermodynamic prespective), of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within the books of the largest libraries in the world. Needless to say, that is a massive amount of positional information that is somehow coming into a developing embryo from the outside by some non-material method.
And as the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
So just where is this massive amount of ‘positional’ information coming from in a developing embryo if it cannot possibly be contained within the DNA of the fertilized egg of a human?
At about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Wells, using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be added to the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into multiple different states during embryological development.
Moreover, as the following video highlights, there is now found to be a massive amount of non-local, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement and/or quantum information within the molecular biology of living organisms.
The thing about quantum entanglement that is so interesting is that it requires a ‘non-local’ cause that is beyond space and time. As the following article states, ““Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a direct inference to God as the Intelligence behind life, (via the non-locality of quantum information and/or the non-locality of quantum entanglement ), has, for all intents and purposes, finally achieved experimental confirmation.
Darwinists simply have no beyond space and time cause to appeal to in order to be able to explain where this massive amount of positional and/or quantum information could possibly be coming from in a developing embryo. Whereas, on the other hand, Christians have postulated a beyond space and time cause all along.
On top of all that, quantum information is physically conserved and therefore cannot be created nor destroyed,,,
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious. That pleasant implication is, of course, the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
Supplemental note:
Thus in conclusion, while Darwinists, (and others), might try to play the second law, i.e. entropy, off as not that big of a deal, the fact of the matter is that, from top to bottom, entropy is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, scientific evidences that we have for Intelligent Design.
seversky- Pure cowardice has one attacking the messenger instead of the message. Nice own goal
The 2nd law isn’t needed. The fact that there isn’t any evidence for natural selection or any other blind and mindless process’s ability to create is all that is required. The fact that evos don’t even know how to test their own claims is the nail in the coffin.
My word.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is vastly more reliable than the inaptly-named Ohm’s Law.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to any macroscopic system.
Ohm’s “Law” does not. It only works for direct currents in the first place, only works for voltages in a certain range, doesn’t work if the conductor is moving, doesn’t work in a strong magnetic field, doesn’t work if the temperature changes, doesn’t work on “non-Ohmic” materials, doesn’t work in diodes, doesn’t work in semi-conductors…
Ohms law only ever works for a narrow set of phenomena, the Second Law of Thermodynamics works all over the place.
Evolutionism doesn’t work. No one uses it for anything.
Seversky- So if my resume was better than yours, only then would the arguments in my video be true? This is called the ad hominem fallacy. Why not argue your case, instead of personalities?
ET- “The 2nd law isn’t needed.” Granted, but by itself it is sufficient. More than that, it is foundational mathematical reality, within which evolution would have to work. Life is all about arrangements, and arrangements are the essence of the second law. At its heart, the evolution model is supposed to be an explanation for ever-more-sophisticated “fantastically improbable” arrangements. But to make such an attempt without reference to a law of mathematical reality? Pure nonsense.
Polistra- “…I don’t find the 2nd law itself especially convincing.” How about gravity? Do you find that convincing? You depend upon the generalized second law every day of your life, but you say you don’t find it convincing? So are you worried that the particular corner of the room you are in will not have 20% oxygen near your face when you take your next breath? Just sayin’…
BA77
If the second law is the most powerful evidence for ID then the second most powerful evidence must be extremely weak, little more than wishful thinking.
Ed George, perhaps instead of a snide comment, you can honestly address the evidence? But then again, if you honestly addressed the evidence, you wouldn’t be an atheistic troll on the internet would you?
Of note, there is a comment between posts 5 and 6 that is hung up in moderation, Hopefully it will be out of moderation shortly.
LoL! @ Ed George- Unlike your position at least ID has something positive. You can’t even account for the any laws, let alone the 2nd LoT.
@Momentoftruth ” So if my resume was better than yours, only then would the arguments in my video be true? This is called the ad hominem fallacy.”
It could be but not necessary! There will be always two sides of the medal.
@Ed George I do think second law arguments are the best creationists have, and I would encourage them to take even the simplest thermodynamics classes, to understand why they’re complete nonsense. Creationism makes more sense the less you know.
If somebody wants to take all three calculus classes, then ordinary differential equations, then partial differential equations, so they can understand the heat equation, so they can take a decent thermodynamics class, I would love to hear the explanation of how delta S means evolution can’t happen.
@15 EG
And now Ed George presents the self-assembling Universe…
Once Upon a Time…
Jim T@20:
I wake up every day to the effects of the 2nd Law but now I have to have differential equations to actually understand it?
Hahahahahaha! wheeze Hahahahaha!
Best bluff yet!
@12 Momentofruth:
You know, when adversaries resort to the ad hominem, it reeks of desperation. 🙂
Excellent video, thank you Marks Champneys. Watched it in its entirety (something that others did not do).
___
It seems this thing entropy has already casted its shadow upon that silly darwinian theory of evolution (via RM+NS). Because it is already starting to lose form, to decay, to disintegrate. 🙂
___
Look at this paper (a peer-reviewed one, not a pre-print). 🙂
Updating Darwin: Information and entropy drive the evolution of life
[…]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5200945.1/?report=reader#!po=11.8750
The argument is still valid – information theory prohibits highly specified information suddenly emerging from an open or closed system – if you don’t have a mind, you are not going to get encoded and decoded specific information, no matter how long you wait. Also life both uses entropy AFTER it takes molecules to a state of low entropy – this is impossible in a materialistic world. A cell will build up molecules using lots of energy (and moving to low entropy), stores it for later, and then releases it suddenly in a state of very high entropy – this does not happen in a materialist only landscape, no laws of physics or chemistry permit this… accidental evolution is nonsense sold as science.
@23 Latemarch
The fact that moderators let certain types to post here is a testament to their intrisic goodness.
You shall shelter the mentally challenged. 🙂
Not to mention – when molecules react naturally, they go to useless junk for life, they do not build up organic membranes and organelles – AND once they make one fatal but natural reaction, moving to get to a low energy state, there is no going back – random evolution ignores this, that each step of the way is impossible X impossible X impossible
Jim Thibodeau
As to, “so they can understand the heat equation” in particular, in the very first part of the video, starting at 1 minute 23 seconds, the narrator states that it is not just about heat, and further comments that it is amazing how many scientists have not gotten the memo but it is not just about energy.,,
Apparently Jim Thibodeau did not watch the video and/or he is one those who have not gotten the memo. Most likely both.
Moreover, Granville Sewell, Brian Miller and Andy McIntosh are certainly no slouches in terms of understanding the math behind entropy,
A few more notes,
In the following paper, Andy C. McIntosh, professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory at the University of Leeds, holds that non-material information is what is constraining the cell to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Moreover, Dr. McIntosh holds that regarding information as independent of energy and matter ‘resolves the thermodynamic issues and invokes the correct paradigm for understanding the vital area of thermodynamic/organisational interactions’.
Here is a video by Dr. Giem, that gets the main points of Dr. McIntosh’s paper over in a fairly easy to understand manner for the lay person:
David Berlinski, who is also no slouch in terms of understanding mathematics, weighs in here,
@28 Bornagain77:
Both. And if I don’t recall it badly, he said he sells cosmetics…
Since we are talking about the second LAW, it is interesting to note that one of the main reasons that Darwinian evolution fails to even qualify as a rigorous science in the first place is because there is no ‘LAW of evolution’ within the known physical universe for mathematicians and physicists to ever build a realistic mathematical model for evolution upon.
As Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated. “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
Robert Marks weighs in here, “there exists no model successfully describing undirected Darwinian evolution. According to our current understanding, there never will be.,,,”
In fact, not only is there no ‘law of evolution’ within the known physical universe for Darwinists to ever build a realistic mathematical model upon, the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, a law with great mathematical explanatory power in science, almost directly contradicts, if not directly contradicts, the primary Darwinian claim that greater and greater levels of functional complexity can easily be had and/or ‘naturally selected’ for over long periods of time. Indeed, entropy’s main claim is that, over long periods of time, everything in the universe will decay into simpler and simpler states until what is termed thermodynamic equilibrium is finally reached.
And please remember,, we find that life is far from being anywhere near thermodynamic equilibrium. (see post 6 in this thread).
And whereas Darwinian evolution has no known law of the universe to appeal to so as to establish itself as a proper, testable, science, Intelligent Design does not suffer from such an embarrassing disconnect from physical reality. In other words, Intelligent Design can appeal directly to ‘the laws of conservation of information’ (Dembski, Marks, etc..) to base its math on and to build realistic mathematical models upon in order to establish itself as a proper, testable, and rigorous science.
And since Intelligent Design is mathematically based on the ‘law of conservation of information’, that makes Intelligent Design very much testable and potentially falsifiable, and thus makes Intelligent Design, unlike Darwinism, a rigorous science instead of a unfalsifiable pseudoscience.
In fact there is currently up to a 10 million dollar prize being offered for the first person that can “Show an example of Information that doesn’t come from a mind. All you need is one.”
Thus again, by all rights, Intelligent Design, since it is based on a universal law, (i.e. the conservation of information), qualifies as a rigorous and testable science that is ‘potentially’ falsifiable, whereas, again, Darwinian evolution, since it has no universal law it can appeal to, fails to qualify as a rigorous science.
Shoot, by any other reasonable measure one may try to use to determine if Darwinism even qualifies as a science, Darwinism fails those other criteria as well
Verse
@seversky yeah the basic expression of the second law of thermodynamics is dS/dt>0 for an isolated system. When somebody tells you this is some kinda problem for evolution, all they’re really saying is they’ve never calculated dS.
Oh goody, Seversky references talkorigins as a supposedly authoritative source on entropy. (must try not to LOL)
Tell you what Seversky, if you, or any authoritative source of your choosing, can give a reasonably coherent explanation for the following question, then I will believe that Darwinists are not just blowing smoke when they try to claim entropy is not that big of a deal for Darwinian premises.
What power, force, and/or thing, is constraining life to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium for precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer?
Or as Stephen Talbott so eloquently put the question, “,,, the question, rather, is why things don’t fall completely apart — as they do, in fact, at the moment of death. What power holds off that moment — precisely for a lifetime, and not a moment longer?”
Unlike Darwinists, ID advocates have a ready explanation. Life is constrained to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, for precisely a lifetime, simply because it is immaterial information and/or the ‘soul’ that is holding the trillions of molecules of a organism into a single unified whole for precisely a lifetime.
Verse:
Talk origins is nothing but a propaganda site. Notice how they FAILed to produce any evidence or science that refutes the claim.
I’m sitting here looking at the snow falling and concluding that the snowflakes must be designed because they have lower entropy than water and, by BA77’s logic, violating the 2nd law.
Ed George. unfortunately for you, I did not, nor did any of my references, make the claim that snowfalkes violate the second law. .
What you have done by attributing an argument to me that I did not make is known as a ‘strawman argument’
@Ed George I don’t believe that those supposed “snowflakes” exist. Snowflakes are more ordered than water molecules, and therefore they violate the Second Law. 🙂
Didn’t Answers in Genesis say that creationists should stop using second law of thermodynamics arguments because it makes them look dumb?
Anybody who’s ever had thermodynamics knows that thermodynamic equilibrium means the same temperature. That’s literally the definition. When people die they do not immediately go to room temperature, it takes several hours.
Who is arguing for Young Earth Creationism? i.e. another strawman argument
Bornagain77 @ 31
Tree rings!
I claim my prize! (Not holding my breath)
Sev
Radioactive decay.
Bornagain77 @ 34
What’s this “precisely for a lifetime” supposed to mean?
Human beings die before they are born or live to be over a hundred and all values in between.
They can die suddenly from acts of violence or being struck by a fast-moving vehicle. They can die of natural causes which may take minutes or hours. They can die of disease which can take months or years. They can simply drop dead from no detectable cause.
So what is the justification for this nonsense about some power holding off the moment of death “precisely for a lifetime and not a moment longer”?
The Earth will continue in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium for as long the energy from incoming sunlight is balance by the radiation of heat into space If you were to switch off the Sun the planet would cool slowly but inexorably to the temperature of the void around it and all life would cease.
You maintain thermodynamic equilibrium by balancing the energy used by your metabolism and radiated as heat by the food and drink you consume. Stop eating and drinking and your physical processes will stop and your body’s temperature cool slowly to being in equilibrium with that of the environment around you. In other words, you would be dead.
Ill-founded speculation about immaterial information and ‘souls’ is just that, speculation, nothing more.
BA77
OOH! OOH! Can I play? Chemical reactions? I guess pathologists haven’t heard that human bodies reach thermodynamic equilibrium immediately after death. How many people have been wrongfully convicted because of this oversight.
^^^^^^^^^^^^ Sigh
https://tenor.com/view/neil-patrick-harris-sad-upset-disappointed-sigh-gif-14295309
@Seversky 45
So being struck by a fast-moving vehicle is not a ‘natural’ cause?
Are you implying that cars are ‘supernatural’?
According to naturalism, ‘everything is nature’, wasn’t it? Everything must include cars then. Well, everything includes everything of course.
BA77
My point exactly. Although, I did find it strange that a devout Christian would project using a gif of an open and proud sinner.
@49 Ed George
I am proud of consensually f*****g my dad! (It’s all cultural, you know? And we are both adults. And it ‘exists in nature’).
Whatever Ed. I am not the one using strawman arguments to avoid dealing honestly with the evidence.
BA77
I’m not the one making claims that a high school kid knows are erroneous.
TruthFreedom
Most people take pride in their work, or their children. But if having sex with your father is what you are proud of, who am I to suggest otherwise?
Only a moron thinks that tree rings are a code or information. Trees are data recorders and they are themselves ALIVE. So seversky, the moron, is trying to use that which requires an explanation to do the explaining.
Ed George:
They exist in a designed universe, on a designed planet, which acts according to its design.
And still absolutely no evidence to refute the claim of the OP. And that is very, very telling.
What is the difference between data, ie tree rings, and information? Data is only information once it is analyzed and given meaning. Analyzed and given meaning by a mind.
@EG maybe it’s his biggest accomplishment?
A big accomplishment for Ed, Jim and seversky would be to understand what science is. However it is obviously way too much to ask. 😛
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/492042-nih-begins-clinical-trial-to-test-hydroxychloroquine-to-treat-covid-19
They need to use it in combination with zinc. I see a faulty trial by the NIH…
@53 Ed George
My father takes a lot of pride in his children (me). Specially when I’m on my knees.
Absolutely no one. You and your ilk are those that support ‘consensual sex between adults’. Meaning you support incest.
This is the society you are leaving to your grandaughter.
It is interesting to note that all the Darwinists on this thread, in their attempt to downplay the second law as not being that big of a deal for Darwinian premises, have not offered any empirical evidence that Darwinian processes are capable of overcoming the dissipative effects of Entropy. Appeals to ‘snowflakes’ not withstanding. 🙂
Which is just as well, Darwinists simply have no empirical evidence that Darwinian processes are capable of overcoming the continual dissipative effects of Entropy. All the evidence we have tells us that life. instead of evolving into greater complexity, will instead devolve with what is termed ‘genetic entropy’ by Dr. John Sanford:
Dr. Michael Behe has come to the same conclusion as Dr. John Sanford which he outlined in his latest book, “Darwin Devolves”:
Darwinists simply have no evidence that rare beneficial mutations are capable of overcoming the relentless onslaught of detrimental mutations in the genome that lead to ‘Genetic Entropy’?
Of supplemental note:
Shoot, Darwinists, for the most part, don’t even seriously contest the fact that the vast majority of mutations are deleterious.
So it is not a matter of Darwinists not knowing the science, it is a matter of Darwinists simply ignoring the science since it directly contradicts what they want to be true beforehand. Namely, they are, for whatever severely misguided reason, emotionally committed to atheism being true beforehand. Evidence to the contrary be damned for all they care!
The thread pertains to them ignoring the science…
More (peer-reviewed) on the barnacle collector being wrong. My pleasure. 🙂
Updating Darwin: Information and entropy drive the evolution of life
truthfreedom- Thank you for the link to Cohen’s paper. He refers multiple times to the “autocatalysis” of information without explanation or definition. Using a chemistry term with information does not make it so. Words do not spontaneously bond to form sentences (or letters to make words) like a chemical reaction. So while it is Interesting psychobabble that is completely meaningless, it seems to be the basis of his _entire_ proposed ETM (as I defined it) for the arrival of information out of thin air. Are we supposed to be convinced?
Jim T @21:
xkcd
Thought you might appreciate this……
bornagain77- I am so pleased to find that there are others who have thought deeply about these things. Granville Sewell confided to me that he often feels like one of the few voices “crying in the wilderness” to communicate to scientists that the second law is not just about energy. It is about statistical mechanics and the arrangement of anything in large numbers. But we are few who seem to notice this. There are those who have deep knowledge of the principle as it relates to chemistry and energy, as you have so astutely cited. But I am still waiting for our evolutionist friends to show any signs of having watched the video, and to hear acknowledgement of the expression of the generalized law in terms of probability of arrangement, or acknowledgement of the arrow of time, or acknowledgement of the role of constraints, or especially acknowledge the concept of entropy transfer mechanisms (ETM’s) that alter local probabilities. Snowflakes follow the probabilities (in terms of chemical geometry). They do not violate the law. When the photosynthesis ETM is present, sunlight follows the probabilities to produce ATP and carbohydrates; and, when absent, that same sunlight follows the probabilities to randomness and destruction. So, Seversky et al, what is the proposed ETM for originating the coded instruction in DNA base sequences??? In other words, what could possibly make specified sequences more probable than randomized sequences? I’m not asking for much. Just that. Anything but the Jeopardy theme song? And why do you guys waste everyone’s time commenting on a video that you have not watched?
Heh. I actually used Rankine 2 times in the last 10 years. 🙂
Momentoftruth,
Thanks for the video. Since Darwinists here on UD will never honestly admit it, let me tell you that I personally think that you did an excellent job explaining the subject matter on your video.
Ed George @ 44
Radioactive decay of carbon isotopes in tree rings! Double whammy!
Split the prize fifty-fifty?
Bornagain77 @ 63
Life has existed on this planet for something over 3bn years. Has it not occurred to you that if Sanford were correct, that “genetic entropy” is an inexorable degradation of the genome, then even if it had managed ti get started in the first place, which seems unlikely, DNA-base life would have suffered a catastrophic collapse long ago. The evidence that Darwinian processes can overcome this effect is all around you – including you!
And is that fact in the Bible somewhere or was it perhaps discovered by materialist evolutionary biologists in spite of the lack of divine assistance?
Not all biologists are atheists as I’m sure you know but it was materialistic biologists who did the science and found the evidence that we are all discussing.
seversky and ed George are scientifically illiterate trolls. No wonder they accept evolutionism as something more than the nonsense that it is.
That’s your opinion. However reality says you have to know how the earth formed before you can determine its age.
Question-begging nonsense
They haven’t been able to find anything else but that. They can’t find a mechanism capable of producing eukaryotes given starting populations of prokaryotes.
Evolutionary biologists are so useless they don’t even know what determines form. Meaning they have no idea what makes an organism what it is!
That is also BS. But then again you are full of it, so there’s that
Sev
You would almost think that non-intellligence created information is found everywhere in nature.
Sev@72:
Given the evidence for genetic entropy maybe it would occur to you and others that life hasn’t existed on this planet for 3bn years….Just sayin’ ….real scientists don’t let the current paradigm blind them to the possible.
OK, so both Ed George and seversky are completely ignorant with respect to information. With $10 million on the line they won’t submit their findings, though. That is very telling.
Talk about being total losers…
.
Try using it to predict the gene code.
Imagine that. The primal control hierarchy that enables specification among alternatives (making life and evolution possible) requires a complimentary description to the equations of physical law.
That’s the rub, upright biped. The laws of nature cannot produce codes. And those laws are all mother nature has to work with. Enter chaos theory, as if that helps. 🙄
Seversky’s post at 72 is so disjointed that it is laughable. First off Seversky states this,
Instead of offering any evidence that it is possible for Darwinian processes to overcome the dissipative effects of entropy, Seversky instead offers the fallacious argument of presupposing his desired conclusion into the premises of his argument. i,e, In answering the question of “where did life come from?, Seversky answer is, basically, “life exists so it must have evolved.” This logical fallacy is known as circular argumentation:
Seversky arguments don’t get any better. Seversky goes on
This answer is just astonishing.
Seversky’s hatred for Christianity is apparently so overwhelming that it has completely blinded him to the obvious fact that it is the evidence itself that falsifies a hypothesis no matter who discovers that falsifying evidence. Hitler himself could have discovered the fact that the vast majority of mutations are deleterious and just because it was Hitler himself who discovered that fact that still would not matter one bit in regards to the fact that it is the evidence itself that falsifies the theory, not the person.
As Richard Feynman stated, “it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Seversky goes on to state,
Actually I would like to see Seversky prove that point. I gave a list of reference of several studies in post 63. Perhaps Seversky would be so kind as to look up the religious beliefs of each scientist in that long list of studies? I bet quite a few in that list would turn out not to be atheist but to be Christian or Jewish, or some other faith..
Moreover, adding the adjective ‘materialist’ to the word biologist or to the word scientist, as Seversky did in his sentence, is an oxymoron.
Materialism has nothing to with biology or to whether you are a scientist or not. Materialism is a philosophical presupposition. Moreover, it is a philosophical presupposition that has been falsified by advances in quantum mechanics. i.e. falsified by science:
Moreover, contrary to what many people have been falsely led to believe by Darwinian atheists, about Intelligent Design supposedly being a pseudo-science, the fact of the matter is that all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism and/or atheistic materialism.
From the essential Christian presuppositions that undergird the founding of modern science itself, (namely that the universe is rational and that the minds of men, being made in the ‘image of God’, can dare understand that rationality), to the intelligent design of the scientific instruments and experiments themselves, to the logical and mathematical analysis of experimental results themselves, from top to bottom, science itself is certainly not to be considered a ‘natural’ endeavor of man.
Not one scientific instrument would ever exist if men did not first intelligently design that scientific instrument. Not one test tube, microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or etc.. etc.., was ever found just laying around on a beach somewhere which was ‘naturally’ constructed by nature. Not one experimental result would ever be rationally analyzed since there would be no immaterial minds to rationally analyze the immaterial logic and immaterial mathematics that lay behind the intelligently designed experiments in the first place.
Again, all of science, every nook and cranny of it, is based on the presupposition of intelligent design and is certainly not based on the presupposition of methodological naturalism and/or the presupposition of atheistic materialism.
In post 34 I asked Darwinists to answer this question,
My answer to that question was,,,
Seversky at 45 and Ed George at 46 tried to answer the question. Their answers reveal that they have no real clue as to what the question actually is. To repeat the question,
Or to put the question another way,
That Darwinists have no clue how to answer this question is revealed by the following,
In 2006 Harvard University, via “BioVisions”, made a video entitled The Inner Life of the Cell
The video was one of the first videos that animated some of the amazing molecular machines that are now being found in cells.
The overwhelming impression of design of the cell literally leaps out of the video. Since the Intelligent Design of the cell is readily apparent in the video for all to see, Dr. William Dembski, one of the pioneers of the Intelligent Design movement, would, circa 2007, show the video in some of his talks on Intelligent Design:
When Harvard BioVisions found out about Dr. Dembski using the video in his lectures they ‘warned’ him not to use the video.
Their effort to stop Dembski was futile since the video soon went viral on the web and anyone with access to a computer could download the video and watch it whenever they wanted., and see for themselves the amazing design that is readily apparent in the cell.
Anyways, fast forward to 2013. In 2013, apparently trying to undo some of the damage done to Darwinian thinking by the ‘Inner Life of the Cell’ video, Harvard BioVisions then made another video entitled ‘Inner Life of the Cell: Protein Packing’.
In this 2013 video, Harvard Biovisions tried to make the inner workings of the cell look as random, chaotic, and haphazard as possible. As you can see in the video clip, they tried to make the inner workings of the cell look as random and accidental and therefore “Darwinian” as they possibly could so as to try to dispel any impression of design in the cell that they had inadvertently created in their first video.
And here is a New York times article on the ‘Protein Packing’ video. In the article, Carl Zimmer states that ‘ “In the 2006 version, we can’t help seeing intention in the smooth movements of the molecules” but of the 2013 video he said that the molecules of the cell are “barely constrained randomness.’ and that they ‘flail blindly in the crowd. Our cells work almost in spite of themselves.’
Moreover, although the Darwinists at Harvard Biovisions and Carl Zimmer, and thus Darwinists in general , believed that life is dominated by “barely constrained randomness’ it is now found that life is anything but “barely constrained randomness.’
For instance, in the following 2016 paper, it was found that “crowding in cells doesn’t hamper protein binding as much as they thought it did.” In fact, finding a lack of ‘collisions’ in the crowded cell was a ‘counterintuitive surprise’ for the researchers: Specifically one of the researchers stated: “This was a surprise,” “It’s counterintuitive, because one would think collisions between a protein and other molecules on DNA would slow it down. But the system is so dynamic, it doesn’t appear to be an issue.”
There are many more examples in the Darwinian Materialism vs. Quantum Biology that falsify the Darwinian belief in “barely constrained randomness.’
But what is more troubling is that Darwinists, (whether it is tightly controlled randomness, or whether it is “barely constrained randomness’ as they had falsely presupposed), never tell us exactly what it is that is supposedly doing the so called ‘constraining’ within their reductive materialistic framework, i.e. “What power, force, and/or thing, enables life to resist the ravages of entropy, that all forms of inanimate matter are subject to, precisely a lifetime and not a moment longer?”
Darwinists simply have nothing within their reductive materialistic framework to appeal to so as to tell us what exactly it is that is doing the so called ‘constraining’.
This is no matter of playing semantics (as Darwinists are fond of doing), This irresolvable problem of providing a overarching ‘context’ to any given situation is inherent to the reductive materialist framework.
For example, Jim Al-Khalil states, “Biologists, on the other hand have got off lightly in my view. They are very happy with their balls and sticks models of molecules.,,, living organisms have a certain order. A structure to them that’s very different from the random thermodynamic jostling of atoms and molecules in inanimate matter of the same complexity. In fact, living matter seems to behave in its order and its structure just like inanimate matter cooled down to near absolute zero.
To further drive this point home that Darwinists have no clue as to exactly what it is that is ‘constraining’ life to be so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Gödel and Turing enter quantum physics’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
In short and in conclusion, Darwinian materialists have no clue, and never will have a clue in how they might answer this question,
Whereas Christians, to repeat, readily do have an answer, i.e. immaterial information and/or a ‘soul’
Verse
In further examining entropy, it is interesting to note that, “supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy” and that “supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated.”
And as the following article states, “when black holes form they do have thermodynamic properties and possess a colossal entropy.,,,” and “the early universe began in an exceptionally uniform state, which, if Penrose is right, corresponds to a very low entropy. Since then entropy has greatly increased, above all through the formation of black holes.,,,”
In the following quote, Kip Thorne gives us a good illustration as to just how ‘colossal’ the entropy actually is of a black hole,
Thus since entropy is the primary reason why we grow old and die,
And since gravity, specifically the gravity of black holes, are “the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy”, then it follows that if Jesus really did conquer death in his resurrection from the dead, then Jesus must have somehow dealt with the entropy that is deeply associated with gravity.
And that is exactly what has been found in the examination of the details of the Shroud of Turin,
In the following video Isabel Piczek states,,, The muscles of the body are absolutely not crushed against the stone of the tomb. They are perfect. It means the body is hovering between the two sides of the shroud. What does that mean? It means there is absolutely no gravity.
The following article states that ‘The bottom part of the cloth (containing the dorsal image) would have born all the weight of the man’s supine body, yet the dorsal image is not encoded with a greater amount of intensity than the frontal image.’
Kevin Moran, an optical engineer working on the mysterious ‘3D’ nature of the Shroud image, states, “The radiation that made the image acted perfectly parallel to gravity. There is no side image.,,, It is not a continuum or spherical-front radiation that made the image, as visible or UV light. It is not the X-ray radiation that obeys the one over R squared law that we are so accustomed to in medicine. It is more unique,,, This suggests a quantum event where a finite amount of energy transferred abruptly. The fact that there are images front and back suggests the radiating particles were released along the gravity vector.”
Thus we find that the entropy that is deeply associated with gravity, and is thus deeply associated with death itself, was ‘mysteriously’ dealt with in Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.
I find this ‘defiance of gravity’ witnessed in the Shroud of Turin to be yet another ‘surprising’ piece of evidence that further confirms the contention of Christianity that the primary reason why this entire universe exists in the first place is so that God could defeat death, (evil, and sin) once and for all:
Of supplemental note; besides gravity, (i.e. entropy), being dealt with, the shroud also gives us evidence that Quantum Mechanics itself was dealt with. In the following paper, it was found that it was not possible to describe the image formation on the Shroud in classical terms but they found it necessary to describe the formation of the image on the Shroud in discrete quantum terms.
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
One final note: allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
January 2020
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/welcome-to-the-brave-new-world-of-science/#comment-690569
Verse and video
@66 Momentoftruth
What the paper is highlighting are the serious flaws of the neo-darwinian narrative and offering a new perspective based on seeing life as a flux that consists in the creation of information and its subsequent destruction via entropy.
Since science does not know how life originated (there is speculation), no scientist can offer proof of how that information (associated to ‘life’) originated.
That crappy survival of the fittest (individual organism) can not explain that:
@36 Ed George
Wrong.
The chemical bonding (between water molecules) is the ‘part’ that seeks to maximize entropy. The fact that what you see looks ‘symmetrical’ does not mean that it has lower entropy.
Folks,
My own way towards Id was shaped by thermodynamics and particularly the statistical form; cf. my always linked.
In key essence, the point is that we can set a space of possible outcomes W, where micro-states are consistent with macro-level gross state, so that we may cluster the microstates in relevant groups. What happens is readily seen by contemplating 1,000 coins . . . more relevantly, paramagnetic domains aligned with or against a weak B-field. Obviously, there are 2^1,000 possibilities. They form a peaked cluster dominated by being near 500:500 H:T, in no particular order. If we consider the coins to be continually agitated, in an enormous length of time far beyond age of cosmos to date, they would circulate through all states but on any reasonably observable time the cluster just described would dominate. Fluctuations beyond about 50 away from that peak would be rare indeed.
And, were the coins to start in one of the unusual states, say HTHT . . . and were it allowed to change by agitation, it would strongly move towards that cluster with a maximum of statistical weight.
That is in fact the heart of thermodynamics. Rich concentrations of energy or other special configurations tend towards that sort of equilibrium. As a result, heat tends to flow from a concentration to dissipate it by a sort of diffusion [and diffusion is actually a manifestation].
Where, too, uncontrolled energy injections tend to exponentially open up further configurations, leading to an even stronger tendency to the sort of sticky cluster of states spoken of. It normally takes configurational information driving a source of shaft work to build up special configurations. Tornadoes and hurricanes are possible on fluid flow but in turn do not tend to build a watch or fishing reel, much less a 747 when they pass through a junkyard. Precisely because of that domination of sets of micro-possibilities.
In the case of the living cell, we have coded genetic information used in algorithmic processes that build proteins. That is language, goal-directed process and execution machinery. There is no reasonable case that such could come about by blind thermodynamic processes. Appeals to open systems are frankly misleading, for the reason already pointed out.
Design.
KF
EG, It seems you tried to appeal to snowflakes, which can be accounted for on the intermolecular bonding and structure of water molecules, similar to other crystallisation. That has precisely nothing to do with aperiodic, functionally specific complex organisation and associated information. Especially, language in alphanumeric algorithmic code. But then by this time it is obvious that ideologically driven polarisation and selective hyperskepticism are at work. The same factors we have been seeing with HCQ etc. KF
Here is the entire 29,903-base-pair sequence of the novel coronavirus. I’m thinking some ID researchers can calculate some CSI on this thing and find out if it was designed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/all/?term=MN908947
I’m sure they’re working on it as we speak.
@90, 91 JT and Seversky
Where in the ‘Tree of Life’ can we locate SARS-CoV-2?
Could you please do me a drawing? I’ll lend you the crayons.
Which evolutionary biologists are working to see if blind and mindless processes can produce the virus? HINT- Not one.
And only an insipid troll thinks that CSI is the only methodology to see if something is designed. Enter Jim T.
Why are evos so ignorant and desperate? And why do they think their ignorance and desperation are arguments?
The responses to this post prove the point that evolutionists don’t care about science. Evolution is a religion with its true believers and no amount of evidence can discredit evolution to them. .
On a theological point – the universe was created THROUGH (Greek ???) Jesus, not BY Jesus. That is a fine point the evangelist is trying to make. It is too subtle for most people. What this means is that God the creator created the universe and Jesus participated as a vessel; not as the source of the creation. To say that Jesus created the universe is to make Him equal to God, thereby having two Gods. This theological impossibility is avoided by the evangelists by calling Jesus the ‘Son of God’ most of the time.
JT,
There is an informational school of thought regarding Entropy and thermodynamics, which draws out the reason why entropy pops up in information theory. In my always linked, I cited a summary against known ideological interest that was in Wikipedia at the time (I have no idea . . . and less interest . . . whether the April 2011 summary in the article on informational Entropy remains, that site suffers a sort of entropic ideological decay of soundness and elegant substance. ) The essential idea is missing information to specify micro-state on a given macro-state:
Harry S Robertson’s Statistical Thermophysics develops these ideas in detail. Let me excerpt:
This then sets up the context in which the strong tendency to the dominant clusters of possible microstates obtains, which then emerges as a sticky pattern, equilibrium in the statistical sense.
These of course bridge to the classical formulations which tend to be framed on partial differential equations and related inequalities. Those, deal in macro-observables. The bridge to information and to concepts of randomness, order and functionally specific organisation will also be key.
In the context of dynamical systems and states, Walker and Davies then point to some key related ideas, that draw out significance of fine tuning:
We may then go to a discussion of information-rich organisation, i/l/o Orgel:
In this context, we then take off blinkers and notice protein synthesis. Molecular technology functional units, alphanumerically coded information using prong height patterns [similar to a Yale lock], algorithms used to chain AA’s that fold, agglomerate and add extra bits to form proteins such as haemoglobin, so too language and discernible goal directed processes. Such things need to be explained and blind chance and/or mechanical necessity is not a serious candidate. The only serious candidate is language using intelligence directing configuration. (Which is not a theological inference, in principle a molecular nanotech lab some generations beyond Venter et al could explain it. It is cosmological fine tuning that suspiciously sets up a context for C-chem, aqueous medium cell based life that does point to a cosmos designed for life.)
KF
I am surprised that the Darwinists on this thread have not at least mentioned the fact that the earth is an open system and that it receives energy from the sun. That is usually their first line of defense when confronted with the contradiction that entropy presents to the entire notion of evolution. As Mark Champneys stated in his video at the 18:00 minute mark,
Perhaps the Darwinists on this thread were so enamored with their present ‘snowflake argument’ against entropy being applicable to biology that they forgot to mention their primary ‘open system argument”? 🙂
Anyways, to correct this oversight on their part, let’s go ahead and address their open system argument. As Mark Champneys. Granville Sewell, and many others have noted. pouring raw energy into an open system actually increases the rate at which disorder increases in the system. This simple fact is clearly illustrated by the fact that any object left out in the open in a warm and wet environment will deteriorate much more rapidly than any object that is left out in the open in a cold and dry environment.
In fact the more quickly that you pour raw energy into an open system then the more quickly the object deteriorates. Granville Sewell used the illustration of a tornado. But a nuclear bomb would have gotten the same point across. i.e. Pouring a massive amount of raw energy into a open system actually makes the problem of entropy that much worse for Darwinists.
Obviously, in order for raw energy to be useful for life, it must first be somewhat ‘constrained’ in its disordering effects on physical objects and then further ‘harnessed’ so as to be of biological utility.
There are two major areas where this ‘constraining’ and ‘harnessing’ of energy, so as to be of biological utility, takes place.
First, the energy that is allowed to enter the atmosphere of the Earth is constrained, i.e. finely-tuned, to 1 trillionth of a trillionth of the entire electromagnetic spectrum:
As the preceding video highlighted, visible light is incredibly fine-tuned for life to exist on earth. Though visible light is only a tiny fraction of the total electromagnetic spectrum, it happens to be the “most permitted” portion of the sun’s spectrum that is allowed to filter through the atmosphere. All the other bands of electromagnetic radiation, directly surrounding visible light, happen to be harmful to organic molecules, and are almost completely absorbed by the earth’s magnetic shield and the earth’s atmosphere.
The size of light’s wavelengths and the constraints on the size allowable for the protein molecules of organic life, strongly indicate that they were tailor-made for each other, As Dr. Bradley notes:
Moreover, the light coming from the sun must also be ‘tuned’ to the ‘right color’
Moreover, even though the energy allowed to enter the atmosphere of the Earth is constrained, i.e. finely-tuned, to 1 trillionth of a trillionth of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, that still does not fully negate the disordering effects of pouring raw energy into an open system. (as was made clear previously).
To offset this disordering effect that raw energy has on objects, the raw energy from the sun, which I remind is already finely-tuned to 1 in 10^24, must be further harnessed to be of biological utility. This harnessing of raw energy is accomplished in biology by the elaborate process of photosynthesis which converts sunlight into ATP.
To say that the elaborate process of photosynthesis defies Darwinian explanations is to make a rather dramatic understatement:
At the 14:00 minute mark of the following video, Chris Ashcraft, PhD – molecular biology, gives us an overview of the Citric Acid Cycle, which is, after the 10 step Glycolysis Pathway, also involved in ATP production:
Moreover, there is a profound ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma with ATP production for evolutionists:
Moreover, ATP synthase is also, ‘unexpectedly’ for Darwinists, found to be, thermodynamically, 100% efficient
As well, besides ATP synthase, the entire photosynthetic process itself was also ‘unexpectedly’ found to be astonishingly efficient. Moreover, photosynthesis achieves this astonishing efficiency by overcoming thermodynamic noise by way of ‘quantum coherence’ which shows ‘remarkable resistance to the aggressive, random background noise of biology and extreme environments.’:
To repeat, photosynthesis is achieved via ‘coherence, a genuine quantum effect,,,’
To say that ‘coherence, a genuine quantum effect’, is a problem for Darwinian materialists is to make another rather dramatic understatement.
Quantum Coherence, like Quantum Entanglement, is a ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time. effect.
In fact, quantum coherence violates locality much more strongly than ‘simple’ quantum entanglement does,
A the following article states, ‘the greater the number of particles in a quantum hypergraph state, (such as what we see with quantum biology), the more strongly it violates local realism, with the strength increasing exponentially with the number of particles.’
The interesting thing about quantum ‘non-locality’ is that it is a ‘non-local’ effect. That is to say that it is a beyond space and time effect the requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its effect,
Darwinists simply have no beyond space and time cause that they can appeal to. Whereas Christians have always postulated a beyond space and time cause.
Thus in conclusion, the ‘open system argument’ of evolutionists, when examined in detail, (like all other arguments from Darwinian atheists), collapses in on itself and, in the end, proves the contrary. Namely that life requires far more than the earth itself to be an open system, so as to allow energy in, but life also requires the universe itself to be an ‘open system’ so as to be able to explain the ‘beyond space and time’ quantum coherence in life that allows life, particularly photosynthesis, to overcome the disordering effects of entropy.
@52 Ed George
Why embarrass yourself then with that silly ‘snowflake’ no-argument? I know teenagers that would not commit such a mistake.
bornagain77- see comment 32
Sev and EG, I scrolled up for a moment and saw your suggestions that RA decay and tree rings constitute in effect spontaneous creation of functionally specific organisation and/or information. RA decay is a random process and if anything is disorganisation. It certainly is not creating anything like coded information or the key-lock fitting typical of say parts in a fishing reel. As for tree rings, they are simply an outcome of seasonal patterns, carrying nothing like the above. If you mean “information” in the sense that any random string of coin tosses would produce, again, such a string is so utterly unlikely to generate 500 – 1,000 bits of FSCO/I that the resort to such examples simply shows how bare the evolutionary materialistic cupboard is. KF
kairosfocus, They are confused. They think that since we can create information from something that mindless processes put it there. Tree rings are not a code. Rad decay is not a code.
Thanks ET, I never got past the “The TalkOrigins Archive” headline on that post. So many of “TalkOrigins” claims have been found to be false in the past that I pretty much skipped right over that comment from Seversky when I saw the headline since I consider “TalkOrigins” itself to be so unreliable.
But post 32 does indeed mention the fallacious ‘open system argument’.
I absolutely understand. But, like you, I knew that was their “go-to” argument, so I had to take another look- a closer look. And there it was, as predicted. 😎
Seversky @72 “…over 3bn years. Has it not occurred to you that if Sanford were correct, that “genetic entropy” is an inexorable degradation of the genome, then even if it had managed ti get started in the first place, which seems unlikely, DNA-base life would have suffered a catastrophic collapse long ago. ” Sanford is a young earth creationist, and this is actually strong evidence for his position. The second law provides many such lines of evidence. The age of the universe/earth is an inference, not a known quantity, so I urge an open mind on this, as Sanford does also.
Kairosfocus@95 I tend to be a “look at the forest” kind of guy, rather than a “look at the individual leaves on the individual trees” kind of guy, but I marvel at your understanding of the details of informational entropy and Shannon information. Some things that I have gleaned in my study is that entropy can be considered on multiple layers. For example, the entropy of the _message_ must be low to have certainty, but a the same time, the entropy of the _medium_ must be high in order to have high informational capacity. Writing a message in the sand of a pristine beach illustrates this. If the beach is newly washed, you can use a fine stick to write many words. But if the beach is made of 2-inch pebbles, your detailed message will be lost in the confusion. Shannon was all about certainty or uncertainty as a measure of information as he defined it. In the same way, thermal entropy plays a crucial role in the building of huge delicate nucleic acids, while simultaneously informational entropy is working within those bonded atoms to either write or destroy the message carried by the base sequenes in the molecules. My point? Specification versus randomness is often (if not always) to be considered in nested layers.
Bornagain77: I, too, have been surprised that no one has yet taken up the “open system” argument or the compensation argument. (I would like to think that my video soundly precluded any such attempts, but, I doubt it.)
As to ATP Synthase: Yes, I have stated in the past that when evolutionists can explain a plausible origin of ATP Synthase, they may have the first rudiments of a chemical evolution theory, but not until. As you said, it takes enzymes to make ATP, and it takes ATP to make enzymes. But what a remarkable molecular machine bridges the gap! Absolutely stunning! The crazy thing is that it requires the second law itself in a probability gradient to power this ETM!!!
MoT,
in my observation, an appreciation — depth understanding requires sophisticated math, physics and chem — of the statistical and probabilistic foundations of the second law provides a context to see what is at stake. Especially, when we add the insight that this can be interpreted in informational terms shaped by the macro vs micro view of state and evolution of states leading to the implications of a predominant cluster. Notice, the Wiki clip: >>n the words of G. N. Lewis writing about chemical entropy in 1930, “Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more” . . . in the discrete case using base two logarithms, the reduced Gibbs entropy is equal to the minimum number of yes/no questions that need to be answered in order to fully specify the microstate, given that we know the macrostate.>>
Once such is in hand, we can look at information stored in configurations with fresh insights. In particular, in general an arbitrary 3-d entity can be described as a structured string of Y/N questions and answers through a suitably compact description language; yielding a configuration space from 0000 . . . 0 to FFFF . . . F for a space spanned by n bits. AutoCAD is of course Exhibit A.
Thus, description on alphanumerical strings is WLOG. Further, once string length reaches or exceeds 500 – 1,000 bits, it is maximally implausible for blind chance and/or mechanical necessity acting on the gamut of the sol system [10^57 atoms, ~ 5 bn y] or the observed cosmos [10^80 atoms, ~ 10^17 s] to sufficiently search the config space to make finding deeply isolated islands of function a reasonable project. That’s because at ~ 10^12 – 15 atomic level interactions/s, the sample of configurations that can be explored is vanishingly small relative to 3.27*10^150 to 1.07*10^301 possibilities. Worse, as a search is a sampled subset of a config space, the secondary config space of searches for a space of n bits is 2^n possibilities, the power set. Search for a golden search is exponentially harder.
That’s before we factor in the language and algorithms in DNA.
As for entropy, yes, it seems to be a bit of an industry to come up with different flavours these days.
The bottom-line is pretty clear, FSCO/I is a strong sign of intelligently directed configuration — design — as material causal factor. Of trillions of observed cases where we directly know the cause, it is design.
Which is ideologically unpalatable to many.
That carries us back to the headline above.
KF
KF,
“ideologically unpalatable to many”
Yes, agree, but serious science must be evidence-based.
That’s why the Darwinian flagship is taking so much water in through the widening cracks, leading some anti-ID scientists to jump out and swim to the exotic “third way” island, unaware of the Cat-7 hurricane (“upcoming discoveries” ) going their way.
at 72 Seversky stated,
At 80 I responded,
And at post 81, since they did answer the question properly the first time, I reiterated this question to Darwinists,
The answer is, of course, that it is immaterial information and/or a soul that enables life to resist the ravages of entropy for precisely a lifetime. As Stephen Talbott put it, “Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition (to death),,,, Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.”
And it is not just the classical sequential information on DNA that enables life to resist the ‘ravages of entropy’ for precisely a life time, but Quantum information is also directly involved, if not the primary thing, that enables life to resist the ‘ravages of entropy’ for precisely a life time,,,
As Dr. Elisabeth Rieper noted in the following video, practically the whole DNA molecule can be viewed as quantum information with classical information embedded within it
Shoot, Darwinists can’t even tell us how any particular organism achieves its basis biological form, much less can they tell us how it is possible for life to resist the ravages of entropy for precisely a life time.
But anyways, regardless of all these interesting questions that Darwinists leave on the cutting room floor, so as to try to pretend that the dissipative effects of entropy are not that a big of a problem to the entire notion of Darwinian evolution, Seversky still wanted to go on and claim that if genetic entropy were true then “life would have suffered a catastrophic collapse long ago.”
I guess that Seversky is trying to claim that God only introduced life onto earth one time? But that is not so. The Bible speaks of several creative acts by God in introducing life onto earth in stages, culminating, of course, with His creation of man, whom He created in His image.
And that is exactly what the fossil record, (and genetic evidence), reveals,
But Seversky has a point, if genetic entropy is true, then how long can a particular lineage of life go on before it subcumbs to the degraditive effects of genetic entropy? The answer is that a particular lineage can go on quite a long time before it goes extinct. For example, we find genetic entropy playing out in trilobites, over a span of 270 million years, in this way,
In fact, there is a general rule of thumb for Genetic Entropy, i.e. Dollo’s Law,
Of supplemental note to the ‘top down’ nature of sub-speciation from a parent lineage,
Thus, despite how badly Seversky and other Darwinists may hope and wish for Darwinian evolution to be true, they are, as far as the empirical evidence itself is concerned, found to be out of luck at each and every turn. From the fossil record, to the genetic evidence itself, to the real time empirical evidence of Doug Axe and many others, every piece of empirical evidence that we have betrays the Darwinist and supports the Christian.
The only place that the Christian might get into trouble with the empirical evidence is if he tries to force a Young Earth interpretation of the bible onto the empirical evidence. Myself, since God’s conception of time is vastly different from ours, I have no problem with an Old Earth interpretation of the Bible. Thus, for me at least, I have no problem whatsoever with the empirical evidnce.
@108 jawa:
A fantastic description. 🙂
I am very much enjoying the stimulating conversation by all. There are some other topics untouched, however. For example, I made the point that Darwin got natural selection wrong. He saw it as a preservative, when, in fact, nothing about natural selection preserves the genome. It kills and culls, or spares killing, but sparing is not preserving. His mechanism presupposes that something else is making it function coherently in the absence of being culled. Where does that integrated functionality come from? Both Darwin and neo-Darwinists have nothing but dumb luck to offer. Honestly, it blows my mind that no one seems to have noticed this glaring flaw on the cover of his book. Natural selection does not and cannot preserve arrangements. What was he thinking?