| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Mirage" |
| Date: |
05 Dec 2007 03:26:05 PM |
| Object: |
On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
Creationists love to trumpet various scientific things which to them
seem to go against evolution (or some other science which is utterly
incompatible with their confused worldview), so it should come as no
surprise that when they encounter a gem saying what they think is
"chaos always increases," their dim little idea bulb flickers on.
The second law of thermodynamics, of course, says nothing of the kind.
Yes, it is often written as "entropy always increases", but this is
not actually responsible reproduction of the law. The observation is
not that "entropy always increases", but that "entropy never
decreases." In short, the law (which is simply an observation, one
must remember, it's not like physicists go around making these things
into laws by voting on them or something) states that entropy will
always either increase or stay the same.
I'll open with the quote which most likely incenses much of their
reason to try and claim it is contradictory to evolution:
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme
position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that
your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is
found to be contradicted by observation -- well, these experimentalists
do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against
the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is
nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(1927)
And that is absolutely true. Were evolution to violate the second law
of thermodynamics, it would indeed be a pile of rubbish. We could no
more reasonably adopt an evolution that defied thermodynamics than we
could make perpetual motion vehicles, for the very same reason. If
this were not the case, we wouldn't be complaining about gas prices
and we'd have an awful lot more free time on our hands for dreaming
about what might be.
However, evolution is indeed the case, and perpetual motion is not.
According to the creationists' argument, evolution represents
increasing order. Technically speaking, evolution is nothing of the
sort. It is a system in which, by natural selection, completely random
(high entropy, here) organisms mutate (more entropy) in a constantly
changing (more entropy) environment, being wiped out randomly
(entropy) by asteroids and other extinction-level events, in which
only those which work in the essentially completely arbitrary (you get
the picture) conditions of nature.
Out of all that, you can view life as a casserole, placed in the dish
washer whole in the pan. As the water begins to do its solvent thing,
we have an extinction-level event among the vast majority of the
casserole, which due to its physical properties is disintegrated and
removed from the pan. Upon removing the pan after the wash is done,
you're left with just the crusty, burnt-onto-the-pan parts, and those
are the survivors of evolution. To say that such a system constitutes
anything other than rapidly multiplying chaos is to ignore the entire
argument.
The problem is that Creationists do not understand evolution at all.
They seem to imagine a system in which pre-apes become more and more
humanlike over their generations and then they're human, and point out
that that doesn't make sense. What they don't realize is that their
thought experiment is completely flawed. What happens in each of those
generations is that new trait combinations appear, leading to possibly
longer or shorter lifespans, or one of the many millions of bizarre
and apparently equally useful variations in humanity we see today.
Then at the end of that generation, there are more of the more
successful organisms than the less successful ones, and they will with
time crowd the others out. What evolution really is is a continuous
sequence of tiny variations and micro-extinctions.
When you die, the genetic set that is you dies with you unless you
have an identical twin. You have, in that sense, gone extinct. Were
everyone with blue eyes to die, then blue eyed people would be extinct
(although, more accurately, everyone who *carries* blue eye genes
would have to die as well to make the trait go away entirely).
Suppose genetic engineers made a mouse that did not fear cats. I bring
this up because this actually happened, recently, and the first
response to the news article I read smacked of complete idiocy. The
response was essentially, "As long as they don't release [the
genetically engineered mice] into the wild, we should be fine." How
the idea that we have anything to fear from these mice even got into
their head, I have no idea, but the very next response, much to my
satisfaction, was "Why would it matter? How long would mice that don't
fear cats even survive?"
That's the thing -- they'd go extinct very fast. Everyone ought to be
able to see why, and that's evolution. That simple. I'm sure mice
which do not fear cats have cropped up many times in nature, and
obviously they didn't do too well or mice would get along with cats a
lot better.
What blows my mind is the sheer volume of people who do not understand
this, or don't bother trying to understand it simply because they'd
rather it weren't the case. They're convinced of their deity, they've
bet perhaps half their life on it by now, and are reluctant to admit
that they may have wasted all that time, so they just tune the idea
out.
Anyway, I've wandered from the topic a bit. I just wanted to maybe
shed some light on the desire to make evolution seem to defy cardinal
laws of physics, as well as concisely pointing out that it does no
such thing.
-- k8
_______________
Countdown to New Year: 26 days, 10 hours, 35 minutes, 15 seconds
.
|
|
| User: "puttipoot" |
|
| Title: Re: On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
05 Dec 2007 09:16:11 PM |
|
|
On Dec 5, 2:26 pm, Mirage <fennecfana...@gmail.com> wrote:
Creationists love to trumpet various scientific things which to them
seem to go against evolution (or some other science which is utterly
incompatible with their confused worldview), so it should come as no
surprise that when they encounter a gem saying what they think is
"chaos always increases," their dim little idea bulb flickers on.
The second law of thermodynamics, of course, says nothing of the kind.
Yes, it is often written as "entropy always increases", but this is
not actually responsible reproduction of the law. The observation is
not that "entropy always increases", but that "entropy never
decreases." In short, the law (which is simply an observation, one
must remember, it's not like physicists go around making these things
into laws by voting on them or something) states that entropy will
always either increase or stay the same.
I'll open with the quote which most likely incenses much of their
reason to try and claim it is contradictory to evolution:
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme
position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that
your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is
found to be contradicted by observation -- well, these experimentalists
do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against
the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is
nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(1927)
And that is absolutely true. Were evolution to violate the second law
of thermodynamics, it would indeed be a pile of rubbish. We could no
more reasonably adopt an evolution that defied thermodynamics than we
could make perpetual motion vehicles, for the very same reason. If
this were not the case, we wouldn't be complaining about gas prices
and we'd have an awful lot more free time on our hands for dreaming
about what might be.
However, evolution is indeed the case, and perpetual motion is not.
According to the creationists' argument, evolution represents
increasing order. Technically speaking, evolution is nothing of the
sort. It is a system in which, by natural selection, completely random
(high entropy, here) organisms mutate (more entropy) in a constantly
changing (more entropy) environment, being wiped out randomly
(entropy) by asteroids and other extinction-level events, in which
only those which work in the essentially completely arbitrary (you get
the picture) conditions of nature.
Out of all that, you can view life as a casserole, placed in the dish
washer whole in the pan. As the water begins to do its solvent thing,
we have an extinction-level event among the vast majority of the
casserole, which due to its physical properties is disintegrated and
removed from the pan. Upon removing the pan after the wash is done,
you're left with just the crusty, burnt-onto-the-pan parts, and those
are the survivors of evolution. To say that such a system constitutes
anything other than rapidly multiplying chaos is to ignore the entire
argument.
The problem is that Creationists do not understand evolution at all.
They seem to imagine a system in which pre-apes become more and more
humanlike over their generations and then they're human, and point out
that that doesn't make sense. What they don't realize is that their
thought experiment is completely flawed. What happens in each of those
generations is that new trait combinations appear, leading to possibly
longer or shorter lifespans, or one of the many millions of bizarre
and apparently equally useful variations in humanity we see today.
Then at the end of that generation, there are more of the more
successful organisms than the less successful ones, and they will with
time crowd the others out. What evolution really is is a continuous
sequence of tiny variations and micro-extinctions.
When you die, the genetic set that is you dies with you unless you
have an identical twin. You have, in that sense, gone extinct. Were
everyone with blue eyes to die, then blue eyed people would be extinct
(although, more accurately, everyone who *carries* blue eye genes
would have to die as well to make the trait go away entirely).
Suppose genetic engineers made a mouse that did not fear cats. I bring
this up because this actually happened, recently, and the first
response to the news article I read smacked of complete idiocy. The
response was essentially, "As long as they don't release [the
genetically engineered mice] into the wild, we should be fine." How
the idea that we have anything to fear from these mice even got into
their head, I have no idea, but the very next response, much to my
satisfaction, was "Why would it matter? How long would mice that don't
fear cats even survive?"
That's the thing -- they'd go extinct very fast. Everyone ought to be
able to see why, and that's evolution. That simple. I'm sure mice
which do not fear cats have cropped up many times in nature, and
obviously they didn't do too well or mice would get along with cats a
lot better.
What blows my mind is the sheer volume of people who do not understand
this, or don't bother trying to understand it simply because they'd
rather it weren't the case. They're convinced of their deity, they've
bet perhaps half their life on it by now, and are reluctant to admit
that they may have wasted all that time, so they just tune the idea
out.
Anyway, I've wandered from the topic a bit. I just wanted to maybe
shed some light on the desire to make evolution seem to defy cardinal
laws of physics, as well as concisely pointing out that it does no
such thing.
-- k8
_______________
Countdown to New Year: 26 days, 10 hours, 35 minutes, 15 seconds
You shouldn't cast all people who believe in a "Creator" in the same
light. You can believe in a "Creator" that obeys the laws of nature. A
creator does not have to fit the Evangelical version which of course
seems a little far fetched. A creator would use the nature processes
he understands or controls to create life. A creator could set in
motion the natural process of evolution to accomplish his creation.
Life is extremely complex. So complex that many molecular biologists
conclude that what we see today is far to complex to be due to random
events. There are just to many events that had to occur in the right
time and order to develop life. Cellular processes even in the most
minute of creatures are so complex that Man is still trying to figure
out how it all comes together to become animated and responsive to
stimuli. The higher level multi-cellular organisms pose an even
creator task to unfold.
.
|
|
|
| User: "Matt Silberstein" |
|
| Title: Re: On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
05 Dec 2007 11:00:46 PM |
|
|
On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 19:16:11 -0800 (PST), in alt.atheism , puttipoot
<puttipoot@gmail.com> in
<756d6b8b-3558-42fb-a708-aee93f5feb72@o6g2000hsd.googlegroups.com>
wrote:
[snip]
You shouldn't cast all people who believe in a "Creator" in the same
light. You can believe in a "Creator" that obeys the laws of nature. A
creator does not have to fit the Evangelical version which of course
seems a little far fetched. A creator would use the nature processes
he understands or controls to create life.
You say this, then below seem to argue that natural processes could
not do it. I think you need to think about this a bit more.
A creator could set in
motion the natural process of evolution to accomplish his creation.
Life is extremely complex.
Do you know of any way to measure this complexity so we can compare it
to other things?
So complex that many molecular biologists
conclude that what we see today is far to complex to be due to random
events.
Chemistry is not random. We have learned lots about how life might
have formed and so far it seems to follow natural laws.
There are just to many events that had to occur in the right
time and order to develop life.
Really? Can you give one specific thing that had to occur at the
"right time and order"?
Cellular processes even in the most
minute of creatures are so complex that Man is still trying to figure
out how it all comes together to become animated and responsive to
stimuli.
So it is hard for us to understand: that speaks to our ability to
understand, not to the source of life. Weather used to be hard to
understand as well: was it created then and natural now?
The higher level multi-cellular organisms pose an even
creator task to unfold.
--
Matt Silberstein
Do something today about the Darfur Genocide
http://www.beawitness.org
http://www.darfurgenocide.org
http://www.savedarfur.org
"Darfur: A Genocide We can Stop"
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "satyr" |
|
| Title: Re: On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
06 Dec 2007 10:51:13 PM |
|
|
On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 19:16:11 -0800 (PST), puttipoot
<puttipoot@gmail.com> wrote:
You shouldn't cast all people who believe in a "Creator" in the same
light. You can believe in a "Creator" that obeys the laws of nature.
You can believe in a "Creator" who blows entire galaxies out his bung
hole for all I care. He still doesn't exist.
A
creator does not have to fit the Evangelical version which of course
seems a little far fetched.
Not to the Evangelicals apparently.
A creator would use the nature processes
he understands or controls to create life. A creator could set in
motion the natural process of evolution to accomplish his creation.
He doesn't have to. Evolution doesn't require god. That is the
point.
Life is extremely complex. So complex that many molecular biologists
conclude that what we see today is far to complex to be due to random
events.
But virtually no molecular biologist doubts that it is due to
evolution.
Creationist idiots like to focus on random mutation and ignore the
second half of the theory, natural selection. But you are not one of
them, are you pooty? You believe that the "Creator" set in motion the
natural process of evolution to accomplish his creation, right?
There are just to many events that had to occur in the right
time and order to develop life.
And isn't it fortunate that they happened on our planet.
Cellular processes even in the most
minute of creatures are so complex that Man is still trying to figure
out how it all comes together to become animated and responsive to
stimuli.
How long did it take man to figure out that the Earth went around the
Sun? Is the Solar System so complex that it required a creator to
make it?
The higher level multi-cellular organisms pose an even
creator task to unfold.
Well put.
--
satyr #1953
Chairman, EAC Church Taxation Subcommittee
Director, Gideon Bible Alternative Fuel Project
Supervisor, EAC Fossil Casting Lab
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "sleepykit" |
|
| Title: Re: On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
06 Dec 2007 08:32:24 PM |
|
|
puttipoot wrote:
On Dec 5, 2:26 pm, Mirage <fennecfana...@gmail.com> wrote:
Creationists love to trumpet various scientific things which to them
seem to go against evolution (or some other science which is utterly
incompatible with their confused worldview), so it should come as no
surprise that when they encounter a gem saying what they think is
"chaos always increases," their dim little idea bulb flickers on.
The second law of thermodynamics, of course, says nothing of the kind.
Yes, it is often written as "entropy always increases", but this is
not actually responsible reproduction of the law. The observation is
not that "entropy always increases", but that "entropy never
decreases." In short, the law (which is simply an observation, one
must remember, it's not like physicists go around making these things
into laws by voting on them or something) states that entropy will
always either increase or stay the same.
I'll open with the quote which most likely incenses much of their
reason to try and claim it is contradictory to evolution:
"The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme
position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that
your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's
equations -- then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is
found to be contradicted by observation -- well, these experimentalists
do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against
the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is
nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World
(1927)
And that is absolutely true. Were evolution to violate the second law
of thermodynamics, it would indeed be a pile of rubbish. We could no
more reasonably adopt an evolution that defied thermodynamics than we
could make perpetual motion vehicles, for the very same reason. If
this were not the case, we wouldn't be complaining about gas prices
and we'd have an awful lot more free time on our hands for dreaming
about what might be.
However, evolution is indeed the case, and perpetual motion is not.
According to the creationists' argument, evolution represents
increasing order. Technically speaking, evolution is nothing of the
sort. It is a system in which, by natural selection, completely random
(high entropy, here) organisms mutate (more entropy) in a constantly
changing (more entropy) environment, being wiped out randomly
(entropy) by asteroids and other extinction-level events, in which
only those which work in the essentially completely arbitrary (you get
the picture) conditions of nature.
Out of all that, you can view life as a casserole, placed in the dish
washer whole in the pan. As the water begins to do its solvent thing,
we have an extinction-level event among the vast majority of the
casserole, which due to its physical properties is disintegrated and
removed from the pan. Upon removing the pan after the wash is done,
you're left with just the crusty, burnt-onto-the-pan parts, and those
are the survivors of evolution. To say that such a system constitutes
anything other than rapidly multiplying chaos is to ignore the entire
argument.
The problem is that Creationists do not understand evolution at all.
They seem to imagine a system in which pre-apes become more and more
humanlike over their generations and then they're human, and point out
that that doesn't make sense. What they don't realize is that their
thought experiment is completely flawed. What happens in each of those
generations is that new trait combinations appear, leading to possibly
longer or shorter lifespans, or one of the many millions of bizarre
and apparently equally useful variations in humanity we see today.
Then at the end of that generation, there are more of the more
successful organisms than the less successful ones, and they will with
time crowd the others out. What evolution really is is a continuous
sequence of tiny variations and micro-extinctions.
When you die, the genetic set that is you dies with you unless you
have an identical twin. You have, in that sense, gone extinct. Were
everyone with blue eyes to die, then blue eyed people would be extinct
(although, more accurately, everyone who *carries* blue eye genes
would have to die as well to make the trait go away entirely).
Suppose genetic engineers made a mouse that did not fear cats. I bring
this up because this actually happened, recently, and the first
response to the news article I read smacked of complete idiocy. The
response was essentially, "As long as they don't release [the
genetically engineered mice] into the wild, we should be fine." How
the idea that we have anything to fear from these mice even got into
their head, I have no idea, but the very next response, much to my
satisfaction, was "Why would it matter? How long would mice that don't
fear cats even survive?"
That's the thing -- they'd go extinct very fast. Everyone ought to be
able to see why, and that's evolution. That simple. I'm sure mice
which do not fear cats have cropped up many times in nature, and
obviously they didn't do too well or mice would get along with cats a
lot better.
What blows my mind is the sheer volume of people who do not understand
this, or don't bother trying to understand it simply because they'd
rather it weren't the case. They're convinced of their deity, they've
bet perhaps half their life on it by now, and are reluctant to admit
that they may have wasted all that time, so they just tune the idea
out.
Anyway, I've wandered from the topic a bit. I just wanted to maybe
shed some light on the desire to make evolution seem to defy cardinal
laws of physics, as well as concisely pointing out that it does no
such thing.
-- k8
_______________
Countdown to New Year: 26 days, 10 hours, 35 minutes, 15 seconds
You shouldn't cast all people who believe in a "Creator" in the same
light. You can believe in a "Creator" that obeys the laws of nature. A
creator does not have to fit the Evangelical version which of course
seems a little far fetched. A creator would use the nature processes
he understands or controls to create life. A creator could set in
motion the natural process of evolution to accomplish his creation.
Life is extremely complex. So complex that many molecular biologists
conclude that what we see today is far to complex to be due to random
events. There are just to many events that had to occur in the right
time and order to develop life. Cellular processes even in the most
minute of creatures are so complex that Man is still trying to figure
out how it all comes together to become animated and responsive to
stimuli. The higher level multi-cellular organisms pose an even
creator task to unfold.
A Creator that uses natural processes to accomplish its goals is
irrelevant to the point at hand. If the creator works through laws of
nature then we can rule its touch out of the picture and search for the
laws it uses. Any creator cast into the role of a being simply starting
the time clock and letting the universe run on its own according to a
set of laws might as well not exist for all the good it does us.
--
sleepykit
"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating
that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as
well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers." - Richard Bach
.
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Michael Gray" |
|
| Title: Re: On Creationism's Abuse of Thermodynamics, Evolution |
06 Dec 2007 12:41:53 AM |
|
|
On Wed, 5 Dec 2007 13:26:05 -0800 (PST), Mirage
<fennecfanatic@gmail.com> wrote:
Creationists love to trumpet various scientific things which to them
seem to go against evolution (or some other science which is utterly
incompatible with their confused worldview), so it should come as no
surprise that when they encounter a gem saying what they think is
"chaos always increases," their dim little idea bulb flickers on.
One cannot use reason to talk someone out of a position that that they
have used primitive superstition to get into.
Mere facts and reason have ZERO effect on these mental midgets.
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
