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"A Mathematician's View of Evolution"

T'ai Chi said:
Here is an interesting article that appeared in a 2000 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer.
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the same old fallacies, misstatements and outright lies.

this is my favorite
The other point is very simple, but also seems to be appreciated only by more mathematically-oriented people. It is that to attribute the development of life on Earth to natural selection is to assign to it--and to it alone, of all known natural "forces"--the ability to violate the second law of thermodynamics and to cause order to arise from disorder. It is often argued that since the Earth is not a closed system--it receives energy from the Sun, for example-- the second law is not applicable in this case. It is true that order can increase locally, if the local increase is compensated by a decrease elsewhere, ie, an open system can be taken to a less probable state by importing order from outside. For example, we could transport a truckload of encyclopedias and computers to the moon, thereby increasing the order on the moon, without violating the second law. But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen**, and it is absurd to argue that because the Earth receives energy from the Sun, this principle was not violated here when the original rearrangement of atoms into encyclopedias and computers occurred.
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This interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics, if accurate, would not only make evolution impossible, it would make all life impossible, the full grown plant is more complex than the seed.
 
Brodski, you should email the author or write a counter-article.
 
T'ai Chi said:
Brodski, you should email the author or write a counter-article.
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ah, so you didn't want it to be discussed here, you where soliciting for peer review?
The hackneyed argument that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics has been debunked so many times, and by people far more qualified and eloquent than myself, I doubt contacting this obviously willfully ignorant author would be worthwhile.
 
This is really poor Tai Chi. You should take the hakema off and wear it on your head, your center appears to have risen to your head.
 
T'ai Chi said:
or write a counter-article.
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Like this one ( http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Sewell.cfm ) which I found with ten seconds of googling?

I'm not enough of an expert to comment on the 2nd law, but this statement caught my eye in Sewell's article:

But the second law of thermodynamics--at least the underlying principle behind this law--simply says that natural forces do not cause extremely improbable things to happen**,
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I just want to note that the number of improbable things that can happen in 4 billion years is surprisingly high.
 
What exactly is so interesting by having the same fallacies repeated yet again?

And why do you never, ever want to discuss the article yourself, Justin? This is a discussion forum, after all. Why do you keep up this "post and run" tactics instead of actually trying to debate the merits of the article/book/whatever you link to? Why are you so afraid of discussing honestly? Why do you never properly answer people's questions? Why do you instead wait until someone comes with a snarky comment that, taken out of of context, you can twist into something that could be counter-argued? Why do you make such strawmen all the time instead of adressing the questions? Why do you lie about adressing the questions when it's clear to everyone that reads that you don't do it.

In short, why are you being so bloody dishonest all the time?
 
Is the author utterly unaware of just exactly how much energy the sun adds to the biosphere every second. Increasing complexity is more than just a possibility, it is a mathematical certainty.
 
Sigh, here is an example for the obtuse purveyor of such garbage.

EVOLUTION DOES NOT VIOLATE THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS!



Lets us first of all look at the biology of living creatures, you take an ordered product (protein, carbohydrates) and eat it, creating disorder through mastication, then further disassembly and fracturing of order through digestion. So while the food is high in ordered products at intake, when it is excreted it in less order than it was before.

So we have billions of creatures over billions of years doing what? Sucking energy out of the ether?

Absolutely not, they live by the intake of ordered objects and decreasing the order to harvest the chemical energy in the food. So what happens over a billion years? The creatures that arise from evolution create disorder every day of their lives, they take things and disorder them simply to live. So what happen, does order increase or decrease over time?

It is like saying that the phone line system is a clear violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You have this neat orderly system of transmission of electrical signals.

Until you look at the fact that the metal came from concentrations of ore in the earth's crust, and while the metal in the wires is highly purified it is also spread over a wider area and distributed in very small amounts overall, more disorder. How did it get smelted and manufactured? Through the burning of ordered substances and taking ordered objects and disordering them , like tree to make the poles. And then distributing the whole thing across the terrain through more disorder and destruction. Outcome , more disorder over all.

TAI CHI - How does life function except through the law of entropy, how else do living organisms get their energy? Does it matter if a creature is considered to be ordered if through the fact of its existence it must create more disorder than it ever creates? How do you think digestion and metabolism work?
 
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Dancing David said:
It is like saying that the phone line system is a clear violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You have this neat orderly system of transmission of electrical signals.

Until you look at the fact that the metal came from concentrations of ore in the earth's crust, and while the metal in the wires is highly purified it is also spread over a wider area and distributed in very small amounts overall, more disorder.
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This is actually wrong. Phone wires have less entropy than the raw materials that formed them. But it's not a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because nothing about the 2nd law dictates that a system cannot decrease its entropy, provided that it increases the entropy of its surroundings at least as much. And the earth does that all the time, by dumping heat into the cold void of space.
 
I suppose that in a sense, natural selection is very very similar to Maxwell's Demon. Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment where you have two boxes of gas hooked up to each other by a small pipe and you have one box get warmer than the other by having a "demon" check each molecule as it moves through and only letting the more energetic molecules into box B. This seems like a violation of entropy, but it turns out that it isn't really, because the proccess by which you check the atoms would neccesarily increase entropy.

Similarly, with evolution, you have the "demon" of natural selection stepping in and making actions so as to allow lower entropy organisms to form, but the proccess of checking organisms is hugely entropy increasing.
 
Hawk one said:
What exactly is so interesting by having the same fallacies repeated yet again?

And why do you never, ever want to discuss the article yourself, Justin? This is a discussion forum, after all. Why do you keep up this "post and run" tactics instead of actually trying to debate the merits of the article/book/whatever you link to? Why are you so afraid of discussing honestly? Why do you never properly answer people's questions? Why do you instead wait until someone comes with a snarky comment that, taken out of of context, you can twist into something that could be counter-argued? Why do you make such strawmen all the time instead of adressing the questions? Why do you lie about adressing the questions when it's clear to everyone that reads that you don't do it.

In short, why are you being so bloody dishonest all the time?
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What T'ai is doing is reminiscent of when Albert Knabe - much better known here as "King of the Americas" - called Howard Stern on his show.

Albert wanted to promote one of his lengthy tracts, where he expounded on one of his many crackpot ideas. Howard Stern did not want to spend time on something he didn't know what was, so he asked Albert if he could give a brief summary of what he had written.

Albert refused. He insisted that Howard Stern read the whole thing, and then get back and discuss it. After some back-and-forth, Howard Stern simply hung up.

(posted elsewhere, too)
 
Ziggurat said:
This is actually wrong. Phone wires have less entropy than the raw materials that formed them. But it's not a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, because nothing about the 2nd law dictates that a system cannot decrease its entropy, provided that it increases the entropy of its surroundings at least as much. And the earth does that all the time, by dumping heat into the cold void of space.
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I meant that in creating the very ordered wires a large amount of entropy or disorder was created. I should be more careful, thanks.
 
For some reason, I've always thought that the 2nd law of thermodynamics was only applicable to THERMODYNAMICS. Maybe I'm just weird, but comparing evolution to a closed-loop heat engine seems just plain stupid.
 
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