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Author
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Topic: Granville Sewell and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
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The Pixie
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Member # 548
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posted 07. November 2002 08:15
Although I have been reading posts at ISCID for a few months this is my first post, and was prompted by a paper by Granville Sewell about the second law of thermodynamics (SLOT), and referenced in the archive of this forum. Granville Sewell's understanding of SLOT seems a little different to mine, and leads us to different conclusions about whether evolution is possible. Here are a couple of points that I have issue with.
quote:
I made the assertion that the underlying principle behind the second law of thermodynamics is that natural forces do not do extremely improbable things, and pointed out that this principle seems to have been violated on Earth, because it seems extremely improbable that atoms would rearrange themselves into encyclopedias and computers, even if the Earth does receive energy from the Sun.
Sewell seems to be arguing here that SLOT prohibits the making of encyclopedias and computers. And yet here they are.
So let us consider a set of atoms that is a man and the parts for a computer. It is quite possible for those atoms to rearrange themselves into a man and a computer, I would have thought. Similarly, if you have a set of atoms that is the whole world including several billion people, and a load of sand, metals and crude oil, those atoms can rearrange themselves into a world with several billion people and several billion computers.
Of course, both of these have intelligent agents at work, but they are intelligent agents that have to obey SLOT too.
As far as SLOT is concerned there are two types of processes; thermodynamically allowed and thermodynamically prohibited, and if a process is allowed, then the reverse process is prohibited (if entropy decreases one way, it must increase the other way). SLOT makes no comment about whether something requires intelligence, programming, etc.
quote:
We can define another "entropy" and another "order" to measure randomness in the distribution of any other diffusing substance, for example, we can talk about the "carbon order" in a solid...
How does this fit with a plant growing? Plants use sunlight as an energy source. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to make more plant, i.e. to grow. All that carbon spread out though the atmosphere whizzing about as a gas before, is now concentrated in a single plant, held firmly in place. This seems like a process where "carbon order" is greatly increasing!
Pixie
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jhappel
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Member # 320
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posted 07. November 2002 11:41
Sewell seems to be arguing here that SLOT prohibits the making of encyclopedias and computers. And yet here they are.
So let us consider a set of atoms that is a man and the parts for a computer. It is quite possible for those atoms to rearrange themselves into a man and a computer, I would have thought. Similarly, if you have a set of atoms that is the whole world including several billion people, and a load of sand, metals and crude oil, those atoms can rearrange themselves into a world with several billion people and several billion computers.
Of course, both of these have intelligent agents at work, but they are intelligent agents that have to obey SLOT too.
As far as SLOT is concerned there are two types of processes; thermodynamically allowed and thermodynamically prohibited, and if a process is allowed, then the reverse process is prohibited (if entropy decreases one way, it must increase the other way). SLOT makes no comment about whether something requires intelligence, programming, etc.
Intelligent agents are mechanisms for directing energy. To decrease entropy there must be a sufficent mechanism to direct energy. Random energy only increases entropy and a return to equilibrium. Remember to generate life from simple chemicals requires movement to higher energy level which is a less probable state than say crystalization which goes to lower energy level or more probable state.
How does this fit with a plant growing? Plants use sunlight as an energy source. They absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to make more plant, i.e. to grow. All that carbon spread out though the atmosphere whizzing about as a gas before, is now concentrated in a single plant, held firmly in place. This seems like a process where "carbon order" is greatly increasing!
A living plant contains a mechanism to direct the energy from the sun to increase order. Put a dead plant in front of the sun. What happens? The mechanism is no longer in place and the random energy from the sun only accelerates the break down and a return to equilibrium for the plant compounds.
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John Bracht
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posted 07. November 2002 15:01
Hi all,
A post of mine from another thread seems highly relevant here, so I'll re-post what I wrote there:
This business about entropy and energy flows seems worth exploring. The following quote is from Erwin Schrodinger, "What is life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell," a series of lectures delivered in February 1943.
(I originally found the quote on the ARN discussion board http://www.arn.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001863.html):
quote:
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Every process, event, happening -call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy -or, as you may say, produces positive entropy -and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is of death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy -which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
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quote:
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Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of he orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists continually sucking orderliness from its environment.
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But how does an organism "suck orderliness" from its environment? It seems that energy is required; I've often heard the objection to evolutionary theory that it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, along with the standard response that entropy can decrease as long as energy is input into the system. But this answer misses something. After all, an explosion is a huge release of energy, but it tends to lead to more disorder, rather than more order. Likewise, burning organic molecules will tend to produce high-entropy, disordered goo (have you ever cleaned out a barbecue grill?). Something else is required. Somehow, the flow of energy must be properly channeled or constrained to achieve the reduction of entropy. In biosystems, these constraints or channels through which energy flows are embodied in enzymes that guide and direct energy flows. And those enzymes, in turn, come from DNA. Now, it's interesting that DNA contains vast amounts of information, and information has its own form of entropy. Furthermore, it appears that informational (negative) entropy is being used to produce enzymes that further channel the flow of energy to maintain low-entropy conditions within the cell. Intriguingly, this suggests that perhaps we can speak of entropy flows much as we speak of energy and information flows. Perhaps it is this flow of entropy, orchestrated and guided by information, that is the key element of life itself. Somehow, the information contained in DNA is finding a way to express itself and directly impact the physical world through living beings. The universe is fundamentally responsive to the information that ramifies through it.
What of thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy? They both have the same mathematical form and it makes intuitive sense that they would be, in some way, able to influence each other.
Thermodynamic entropy:
S = k ln W
or
S = -k ln P
where
k = Boltzmann's constant
W = equiprobable, equal-energy microstates (ways the system can be arranged) for a given macrostate, and
P = the probability of any given microstate.
Informational entropy:
H = -K log2 P
where
P = the probability of the signal given the reference class of possible signals that could have been sent.
K = a constant, usually assumed to be unity.
Alternately, we can represent informational entropy as
H = K log2 N
where
N = number of possibilities from which the signal in question was selected.
Thus, the mathematical forms of informational and thermodynamic entropies are equivalent. Furthermore, the idea of thermodynamic entropy as a measure of the number of possible states from which the existing state was selected is remarkably similar with the informational entropy as a measure of the number of possible bit strings ruled out when the signal was sent.
If the law of conservation of information holds, it seems that perhaps there is also a corresponding law of conservation of negative entropy. According to this law, low entropy can only arise from pre-existing low entropy. That pre-existing low entropy can be thermodynamic or informational, and can flow through the environment just as information and energy do.
Furthermore, it seems that some concept of "signal agreement" or "meaning" is the mechanism by which informational low entropy gets transformed into thermodynamic low entropy. The genes "mean" enzymes and other proteins involved in ordering the flow of energy and matter through the cell. This abstract correspondence, signal agreement, between the DNA and the proteins it encodes, is the essential transforming step by which the two types of low entropy interconvert.
There are several interesting questions that arise at this point. For instance, can we determine the amount of entropy being transferred? Which embodies more order (negative entropy), the DNA, the enzymes produced by that DNA, or the metabolic pathways regulated by those enzymes? It shouldn't be hard to measure them both and see whether negative entropy is conserved. I would like to hear from physicists on these ideas, especially on whether I've correctly understood and described thermodynamic entropy.
John Bracht
(from: http://www.iscid.org/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000001 )
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Granville Sewell
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Member # 550
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posted 07. November 2002 17:14
Thanks for the input, glad to see someone actually read my article.
The fact that the second law of thermodynamics does not prevent order from increasing in an open system has led to the widespread notion that natural forces can do extremely improbable things (more precisely: macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view) in an open system, as long as they are "compensated" somehow by decreases in order outside the system. The point of my article was to show that this is not the case, that increases in order in open systems occur not because extremely improbable things are happening, but because order is being imported from outside.
I offered the tautology "if an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable", and gave two examples to illustrate this. One was a solid (eg steel) in which carbon is diffusing: the "carbon order" can increase, but not faster than it is imported from outside. Of course, the carbon order even in a closed solid can increase, if there are sources or sinks (which I assumed in my example were not present), and another type of order is sacrificed. But in every situation you will find that the laws of probability at the microscopic level are obeyed, as they apply to all macroscopic phenomena--at least when living things are not involved.
On the other hand, when life is involved, the laws of probability seem to often be broken in spectacular ways, that was my main thesis.
Granville Sewell
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Mark Szlazak
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Member # 391
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posted 07. November 2002 20:46
Hi Granville.
I think the second law in it's modern Quantum Theory version takes into account that added process, which is non-Newtonian and non-Laplacian and considered to be something consciousness-like. Here's a bit out of the under construction book by Quantum physicist Henry Stapp.
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There are huge differences in the quantum and classical workings of the second law. Von Neumann’s book discusses in detail the quantum case, and some of those differences. In one sense there is no nontrivial objective second law in classical physics: a classical state is supposed to be objectively well defined, and hence it always has probability one. Consequently, the entropy is zero at the outset and remains so forevermore. Normally, however, one adopts some rule of “coarse graining” that destroys information and hence allows probabilities to be different from unity, and then embarks upon an endeavor to deduce the laws of thermodynamics from statistical considerations. Of course, it can be objected that the subjective act of choosing some particular coarse graining renders the treatment not completely objective, but that limited subjective input seems insufficient to warrant the claim that physical probability is closely tied to knowledge.
The question of the connection of entropy to the knowledge and actions of an intelligent being was, however, raised in a more incisive form by Maxwell, who imagined a tiny “demon” to be stationed at a small doorway between two large rooms filled with gas. If this agent could distinguish different species of gas molecules, or their energies and locations, and slide a frictionless door open or closed according to which type of molecule was about to pass, he could easily cause a decrease in entropy that could be used to do work, and hence to power a perpetual motion machine, in violation of the second law.
This paradox was examined Leo Szilard, who replaced Maxwell’s intelligent “demon” by a simple idealized (classical) physical mechanism that consumed no energy beyond the apparent minimum needed to ‘recognize and responded differently to’ a two-valued property of the gas molecule. He found that this rudimentary process of merely ‘coming to know and respond to’ the two-valued property transferred entropy from heat baths to the gaseous system in just the amount needed to preserve the second law. Evidently nature is arranged so that what we conceive to be the purely intellectual process of coming to know something, and acting on the basis of that knowledge, is closely linked to the probabilities that enter into the constraints upon physical processes associated with entropy.
Von Neumann describes a version of this idealized experiment. Suppose a single molecule is contained in a volume V. Suppose an agent comes to know whether the molecule lies to the left or to the right of the center line. He is then in the state of being able to order the placement of a partition/piston at that line and to switch a lever either to the right or to the left, which restricts the direction in which the piston can move. This causes the molecule to drive the piston slowly to the right or to the left, and transfer some of its thermal energy to it. If the system is in a heat bath then this process extracts from the heat bath an amount ‘log 2’ of entropy (in natural units). Thus the knowledge of which half of the volume the molecule was in is converted into a decrement of “log 2’ units of entropy. In von Neumann’s words, “we have exchanged our knowledge for the entropy decrease k log 2.” (k is the natural unit of entropy.)
What this means is this: When we conceive of an increase in the “knowledge possessed by some agent” we must not imagine that this knowledge exists in some ethereal kingdom, apart from its physical representation in the body of the agent. Von Neumann’s analysis shows that the change in knowledge represented by Process I is quantitatively tied to the probabilities associated with entropy.
Among the many things shown by von Neumann are these two:
(1) The entropy of a system is unaltered when the state of that system is evolving solely under the governance of Process II.
(2) The entropy of a system is never decreased by any Process I event.
The first result is analogous to the classical result that if an objective “probability” were to be assigned to each of a countable set of possible classical states, and the system were allowed to evolve in accordance with the classical laws of motion then the entropy of that system would remain fixed.
The second result is a nontrivial quantum second law of thermodynamics. Instead of coarse graining one has Process I, which in the simple ‘Yes-No’ case converts the prior system into one where the question associated with the projection operator P has a definite answer, but only the probability associated with each possible answer is specified, not an answer itself.
One sees, therefore, why von Neumann rejected Carnap’s attempt to divorce knowledge from physics: large tracts in his book were devoted to establishing their marriage. That work demonstrates the quantitative link between the increment of knowledge or information associated with a Process I event and the probabilities connected to entropy. This focus on Process I allowed him to formulate and prove a quantum version of the second law. In the quantum universe the rate of increase of entropy would be determined not by some imaginary and arbitrary coarse graining rule, but by the number and nature of objectively real Process I events.
[ 08. November 2002, 13:59: Message edited by: Mark Szlazak ]
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The Pixie
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Member # 548
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posted 08. November 2002 06:23
Hi jhappel
quote:
Intelligent agents are mechanisms for directing energy. To decrease entropy there must be a sufficent mechanism to direct energy. Random energy only increases entropy and a return to equilibrium. Remember to generate life from simple chemicals requires movement to higher energy level which is a less probable state than say crystalization which goes to lower energy level or more probable state.
I can have a decrease in entropy here, as long as there is a greater increase in entropy there and there is some mechanism to channel the effect, I agree. Intelligent agents can use those mechanisms (for example, reducing the temperature in a refrigerator can be achieved by burning coal at a power plant miles away), but intelligent agents are not the actual mechanism.
quote:
A living plant contains a mechanism to direct the energy from the sun to increase order. Put a dead plant in front of the sun. What happens? The mechanism is no longer in place and the random energy from the sun only accelerates the break down and a return to equilibrium for the plant compounds.
Agreed, but this does not answer my point. A living plant appears to break SLOT according to Granville Sewell, as he looks at the "carbon order" in isolation.
Hi John Bracht
quote:
Somehow, the flow of energy must be properly channeled or constrained to achieve the reduction of entropy. In biosystems, these constraints or channels through which energy flows are embodied in enzymes that guide and direct energy flows. And those enzymes, in turn, come from DNA. Now, it's interesting that DNA contains vast amounts of information, and information has its own form of entropy. Furthermore, it appears that informational (negative) entropy is being used to produce enzymes that further channel the flow of energy to maintain low-entropy conditions within the cell. Intriguingly, this suggests that perhaps we can speak of entropy flows much as we speak of energy and information flows. Perhaps it is this flow of entropy, orchestrated and guided by information, that is the key element of life itself. Somehow, the information contained in DNA is finding a way to express itself and directly impact the physical world through living beings. The universe is fundamentally responsive to the information that ramifies through it.
I am not so familiar with information entropy, but it is a different quantity to thermodynamic entropy. Some points (unfortunately the word "negative" becomes a clumsyif necessary qualifier):
SLOT, as the name suggests, is about thermodynamics and therefore thermodynamic entropy. SLOT appears to be universal and absolute (well, perhaps not at the quantum level, but we can hopefully ignore that). Informational entropy seems to be something that has just hitched a ride on the back of SLOT - thermodynamic entropy always increases, therefore informational entropy always increases. I have never seen any convincing proof that this is true (but may the proof is out there).
Your argument seems to be that cells can convert negative information entropy into negative thermodynamic entropy. Can you offer any equation that allows them to be interconverted. Thermodynamic entropy has the units of energy divided by temperature, presumably different to the units of informational entropy (if only because information is not temperature dependant).
If you are saying that the negative informational entropy in DNA can be used to reduce the thermodynamic entropy of the cell, presumably the informational entropy of the DNA is constantly increasing to compensate. As we age we can expect the DNA in every cell of our bodies to be corrupted on an hourly basis, as our bodies struggle to maintain stasis.
quote:
If the law of conservation of information holds, it seems that perhaps there is also a corresponding law of conservation of negative entropy. According to this law, low entropy can only arise from pre-existing low entropy. That pre-existing low entropy can be thermodynamic or informational, and can flow through the environment just as information and energy do.
I wonder at the validity of the law of conservation of information. What happens when cells divide? Surely each one has a copy of the original DNA, so the amount of information has doubled? Granville Sewell mentioned encyclopedias, where did all that information come from?
Hi Granvill Sewell
quote:
The fact that the second law of thermodynamics does not prevent order from increasing in an open system has led to the widespread notion that natural forces can do extremely improbable things (more precisely: macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view) in an open system, as long as they are "compensated" somehow by decreases in order outside the system. The point of my article was to show that this is not the case, that increases in order in open systems occur not because extremely improbable things are happening, but because order is being imported from outside.
But I still feel you are wrong. Reducing the temperature inside your refrigerator is an improbably event; it requires heat energy to be ordered so that a specific region of space is maintained at a very different temperature to the suroundings. And yet we do it routinely by importing order from the power plant's coal.
quote:
On the other hand, when life is involved, the laws of probability seem to often be broken in spectacular ways, that was my main thesis.
Are you implying that SLOT is not obeyed by living things?
Here is another example, then, of increasing "carbon order" that excludes life. Take a saucepan of water and heat it up, then add sugar until no more will dissolve (do not let it get too hot; the sugar will turn to toffee). Now the sugar molecules (which are mostly carbon) are spread out throughout the water. Turn off the heat, and leave it (no living entity is involved during this part). When you look at it a few hours later, the sugar will have crystallised; the sugar molecules have come together and concentrated themselves spontaneously in a very ordered structure. How would you explain this highly improbable ordering event?
Thank you for your replies.
Pixie
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John Bracht
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posted 08. November 2002 12:47
Pixie,
I think you're missing the point. The idea I'm trying to communicate (along with jhappel and Granville Sewel) is that increasing entropy in one part of the universe is, by itself, not enough to cause a coincident decrease of entropy (ordering) in another part of the universe.
Rather, there are very specialized channels that have to connect the increase in entropy in one part of the universe with the decrease in another part. An explosion increases entropy without necessarily causing any sort of ordering anywhere else. The same of merely burning glucose in a bunsen burner. But if that glucose were consumed in controlled ways in my cells, then negative entropy can be extracted and used by my cells to maintain order. The same is true of a refrigerator. Sure, it reduces entropy at the expense of increasing entoropy in other places. But how many refrigerators do you know that can be produced by natural processes? Is it really reasonable to use this as an example of how entropy can be reduced "naturally"? This is a case where large amounts of intelligent design set up the constraints and guides on the system to provide that ability to reduce entropy in one place at the expense of increased entropy at another place.
The argument I'm making is, sure, entropy can decrease in one place (with coincident increase somewhere else)--only if there are the appropriate guides and channels to direct that flow of "negative entropy". These channels are themselves very interesting; in biology, they are the enzymes that guide the flow of energy through various biochemical pathways, directing reactions in desirable ways. In the case of the refrigerator, there is the casing and the systems that pump the heat energy from inside to outside. In both cases, we're looking at huge amounts of specified complexity: information that is guiding this flow. The bottom line? My argument is that entropy can only decrease in one area (at the expense of entropy increase in another area) if information is utilized in the process.
You also comment on how exactly to interconvert informational entropy and thermodynamic entropy. That's a good question that I cannot answer. My post was meant as a brainstorm just to stimulate thought and hopefully someone more mathematically astute than myself might tackle the interconversion. I'm just trying to lay out the broad outlines of an idea that I think is fundamentally correct (based on other ideas like the conservation of information), namely that informational flows in the universe have the effect of ordering the world by reducing entropy (locally), and that this ordering cannot be achieved without informational input.
John
P.S. To understand why the reproduction of an organism's DNA doesn't double the total amount of information present, I highly recommend reading Dembski's No Free Lunch, where he addresses that very issue (and several other issues you bring up).
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The Pixie
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Member # 548
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posted 08. November 2002 17:33
John Bracht,
quote:
The idea I'm trying to communicate (along with jhappel and Granville Sewel) is that increasing entropy in one part of the universe is, by itself, not enough to cause a coincident decrease of entropy (ordering) in another part of the universe.
Agreed, some mechanism is required to "channel" the negative entropy. Where we disagree is whether this mechanism must be intelligently designed and implemented. And as far as SLOT is concerned, this is not a requirement.
To put it the other way round, SLOT cannot be used to prove that intelligence (specified complexity) is required in any mechanism. Using SLOT alone, we could not prove that a refrigerator was designed, for instance.
If you want a "natural" example, how about a black rock in a desert. At night the heat energy is distributed evenly across the landscape, the rock and surroundings are at the same temperature; thermal equilibrium, the lowest entropy state (considering heat only).
Then the sun rises, and warms the desert. But the rock, being black, absorbs more heat and gets hotter than the surroundings (it is a matter of common experience that some things get hotter than others on a hot sunny day). Heat is concentrated in one region; an improbable arrangement, a more ordered state. Entropy has decreased locally, but it is compensated for by an increase of entropy in the sun, and the negative entropy has been channeled through sunlight.
quote:
My post was meant as a brainstorm just to stimulate thought and ...
Fair comment, it did read as such.
I will try to find No Free Lunch at the library tomorrow.
Pixie
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John Bracht
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posted 08. November 2002 20:43
Just a quick comment on the "black rock" example. This seems a little disingenuous to suggest that this is an example of entropy being reduced by natural means--after all, even the surrounding area (around the black rock) got heated up somewhat from the sun, and hence these areas had their entropy increased (their molecules were moving more chaotically after the heating than before), not decreased. I could argue that these "para-rock" areas actually "reflected" away the entropy they could have acquired (by reflecting heat energy from the sun) while the black rock absorbed more entropy. But notice that both surfaces (black rock and surrounding area) had their entropy increased, overall. In other words, the entire system became more disordered, having higher entropy. This is very different from the situation with a refrigerator or living organism where entropy actually decreases in one section of the universe at the expense of an entropy increase somewhere else.
John
[ 08. November 2002, 20:44: Message edited by: John Bracht ]
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The Pixie
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posted 09. November 2002 16:25
John
The point is that some areas are at different temperatures to other areas.
During the day there is more heat energy around, so the entropy will be greater, as you say. But entropy would be maximised if the heat energy was spread out evenly, i.e. the entire area was at a constant temperature. If the sun goes behind a cloud, the rock will cool and the surrounding heat up as they try to attain this condition.
Of course, the whole area loses entropy naturally at night, as it cools down.
I accept it may be a tenuous example, but the fact remains that SLOT makes no issue of mechanism or design.
Pixie
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Art
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posted 09. November 2002 20:50
IMO, this business about the SLOT as it pertains to the "order" of living things is a distracting canard, and it really confuses a lot of pretty basic issues.
First and foremost, it is very important that we avoid equating macroscopic disorder (macroscopic in this case can pertain to the level of cellular and subcellular structures) with entropy. The example of the separation of oil and water shows us how incorrect this is - a state that is perfectly ordered in a macroscopic sense is in fact the state of greater entropy. (It's not a matter of "buying" order, either - greater entropy drives macroscopic ordering.)
The same is true of a cell - virtually every structure exists, in part if not wholly, because the macroscopically ordered state is greater in entropy than the macroscopically disordered state.
All of this means that the order seen in a cell is not "microscopically improbable", nor is it "bought" at the expense of entropy elsewhere in some hypothetical system. It exists precisely because of the SLOT, not in spite of it.
This in turn means that the thermodynamic SLOT argument vis-a-vis evolution is completely inappropriate. (I've never understood the relevance of this to ID anyway.)
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yersinia
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posted 15. November 2002 22:14
I have to agree, this whole discussion has fallen into the same-old misguided creationist debate that occurs when technical thermodynamics terms which have very specific definitions are confused with their colloquial definitions, e.g. "order".
There is nothing fancy about a system decreasing in entropy *at all*. Any time heat flows from hot object A to cooler surroundings B, A has decreased in entropy. It has become "more ordered" in the thermodynamics sense. In Sewall's confused sense of entropy, we should regard the concentration of a large amount of gas in a spherical shape, surrounded by all of that vaccuum (say, Jupiter), as intelligently designed because the odds of all of those atoms reaching that position by random chance are miniscule.
All this adds up to Sewall accusing Darwinists of saying "to Hell with the second law". If he can find a *single* respected physicist who would support him on this I would be surprised.
He goes on to assert that Darwinists think that natural selection is the only force that can create order out of disorder. Ridiculous!! Gravity can create "order out of disorder" in the colloquial sense that Sewell is using here.
Once Sewell gets going on natural selection, he appears to completely ditch his thermodynamics arguments for a lot of recycled argument-from-complexity stuff. In the process he makes it pretty clear that he doesn't even understand stabilizing selection, let alone natural selection in general, as he writes as if it were some kind of great mystery:
quote:
...that natural selection seems even slightly plausible depends on the fact that while species are awaiting further improvements, their current complex structure is "locked in", and passed on through many generations. This is inexplicable -- I don't see any reason at all why living organisms do not constantly decay into simpler components -- as, in fact, they do as soon as they die.
Not about to stop there, Sewall goes on to give us the traditional rehash of the Punk-Eek debate, yet without once mentioning Mayr's theory of allopatric speciation which is the key concept in the whole thing.
And he concludes,
quote:
And one can produce an endless array of publications by studying the similarities between species and the many ways in which species are magnificently "adapted" to their environment. About all you can say in response to all this is that evolution through natural selection or any other natural process is extremely improbable, and you cannot get too many publications out of repeating that. But is [b]is[/i] extremely improbable.
The development of intelligent life on Earth may have violated only one law of science, but that was the "supreme" law of Nature, and it has violated that law in a most spectacular way.
If the ISCID journal has the slightest smatterings of scientific rigour or hopes of being taken seriously by scientists, then I recommend that it reject this article on the grounds of it containing massive errors.
Now, if one wants to discuss an interesting question surrounding the 2LOT and evolution, how about this:
"What does the 2LOT say about the hypothesis that an unembodied, extranatural designer intervened in biological history to produce certain 'designs'?"
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Moderator
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posted 16. November 2002 01:06
Yersina,
First of all, ISCID allows people to submit articles to our Archive for pre-publication feedback. Acceptance into our Archive is not the same as acceptance into our journal.
Second of all, your comments above are not helpful...*at all*. In fact they are disparaging. If you have nothing constructive to say, just don't say it.
"same-old misguided creationist debate"
"Sewall's confused sense of entropy"
"makes it pretty clear that he doesn't even understand"
Even if Sewell is wrong, there are more congenial and productive ways of expressing this.
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Granville Sewell
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posted 16. November 2002 15:13
No matter how hard I try, no one seems to understand the point of my article, so let me try one more time:
There is a widespread belief that, since order can increase in open systems, the second law must allow extremely improbable things (read: "macroscopically describable things which are extremely improbable from the microscopic point of view") to happen in open systems. My article was supposed to show that is not the case: everywhere else in Nature, whether in an open or closed system, what happens is governed by the laws of probability. When matter condenses under the influence of gravity to form a planet, or ice crystals form when heat is removed, it is not because Nature can do extremely improbable things; what is happening is exactly what the laws of probability predict, when everything acting on the system is taken into account. When order increases in an open system, such as when carbon in a metal alloy becomes less randomly distributed, it is not because extremely improbable things are happening, but because something is entering (carbon order, in this case) which makes the increase in order not extremely improbable.
If you are willing to argue that it only SEEMS extremely improbable, but really isn't, that the four known forces of Nature could create spaceships capable of travelling to the moon and back safely, and computers and the Internet, then you can argue that the underlying principle behind the second law has not been violated here, nothing I have said can counter that. But most people are not willing to argue that, they try to avoid the question of probability altogether by saying, basically, the laws of probability, and the second law, don't apply in open systems. But that isn't true: "If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable." Is that really so hard to understand?
Granville Sewell
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Frances
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posted 16. November 2002 15:31
Granville writes:
quote:
"If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it NOT extremely improbable." Is that really so hard to understand?
An increase in order in a closed system is extremely improbable (or better stated impossible) for the simple reason that the law of entropy does not allow this to happen. Entropy in a closed system can only increase or remain the same.
An increase in order in an open system may or may not be improbable depending on the specific details. For instance 'far equilibrium' thermodynamics show some exquisite examples of order arising. The probabilities are much higher than in for instance equilibrium thermodynamics.
Open systems allow for increase in order although it does not mean that increase in order needs to happen, if that is your argument. But open systems seem to be a requirement for order to increase.
Non equilibrium thermodynamics
quote:
Prigogine has taken this approach further than anyone using non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Chemical reactions generally tend to approach equilibrium (see chapter 7). Nevertheless, such reactions can be held very far away from equilibrium by the input of energy and/or matter. A living cell is a great example. Cells exist very far away from equilibrium. Prigogine has coined the phrase "disapative structures" to describe cells and other systems which use a flow of energy and/or matter to maintain their existence away from equilibrium.
Systems very far from equilibrium can exhibit spontaneous order. While this may be a curious and unexpected result, it does not help origin of life proponents. While this is a relatively new theory, it has the same old problems, Namely, order and information are different. Highly ordered systems contain little information. DNA contains information
Source
I have read Sewell's paper and I ran across many interesting assertions but one which caught my eye as it seemed to be a strawman was
quote:
What the Darwinists really want to say, but don't dare to say , is "to hell with the second law, we have a scheme that can beat it." They are convinced that natural selection is the one natural force in all the universe that can create order out of disorder.
This seems to be arguing for a strawman in that Darwinists are 'quoted' as if they reject the Second Law. On the contrary what Darwinists and in fact scientists are arguing is that locally entropy can decrease. Sewell suggest that Darwinists are convinced that natural selection is the one force that can create order out of disorder but that seems to be another strawman. What has been shown is how natural selection and mutation can increase the information/complexit of the genome through a 'Maxwell Demon'-like mechanism but unlike the Maxwell Demon that was proposed to show a violation of the Second Law, this Maxwell Demon compensates for the increase in information. Thus natural selection is one of many natural forces which can create order from disorder.
As I have shown 'non equilibrium' thermodynamics is another great source of spontaneous arise of order from disorder.
It would be helpful if Sewell would not use such strawmen to make his arguments. They first of all portray Darwinists as ignorant of the SLOT and furthermore they seem to be easily refuted.
And the conclusion/thesis that
quote:
On the other hand, when life is involved, the laws of probability seem to often be broken in spectacular ways, that was my main thesis.
is fascinating. Does Sewell propose that when life is concerned these laws seem to be broken? In what aspects? Could Sewell walk us through an example which demonstrates that the laws of probability seem to be broken? Perhaps the solution to his problem would be 'seem/appear' rather than actually.
As far as I know, no known violation of the SLOT exists, not even in life and I am not aware of any other laws being broken here either. I believe that Sewell's contribution would benefit from some worked out examples that show this to be the case.
[ 16. November 2002, 20:07: Message edited by: Frances ]
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