The Truth About Evolution and Religion

Consider a deck arranged with all the suits together (spads-hearts-diamonds-clubs) and another deck where individual cards are all arranged (1S, 2S, 3S...1H, 2H, 3H). The entropy of the the first deck is greater than the entropy of the second deck because the chances of getting the first deck is greater than the chances of getting the second deck.

So, you've got problems with simple calculations as well? Both decks have the exact same probability of forming! It's the meaning we assign to the decks that makes it " important". Any 52 card deck has exactly the same probability of forming as any other 52 card deck. Also, none of this has anything to do with entropy.

Each deck has a chance of one in 52 factorial.The real problem here is the attempt to assign a probability based on the order of the deck. What the probability mostly depends on, is the procedure used to put the deck in that order. If the procedure was one based on a good randomization, then all possible orders have the same probability. If the procedure is to just collect the cards together after playing a round, and to not apply any randomization, then the probabilities are very different due to the orderings that arose during the playing of the last hand.

You are correct that each deck has a probability of one in 52! The number of decks with any order is 52! The number of decks with a specific order is 1. The entropy of a deck with a specific order is very small. The entropy of such a deck will increase until the deck is fully shuffled. You need to understand this to understand evolution. Let me repeat the following quote from my YouTube video:"Considered thermodynamically, the problem of neo-Darwinism is the production of order by random events." (Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Chance or Law, in Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Life Sciences, The Macmillan Company, 1969, page 76)

What is it with creationists and quotations? Are they trying to borrow other peoples credibility or something? They must know that we are aware of their penchant for quote mining. How can they imagine that tossing quotations about lends them any authority?If they want to use the ideas involved in their quotes, they must still show that the quoted notions are valid.In any case, this quotation omits to mention the role of selection, which is not random, and so is irrelevant.

If you are looking at neo-Darwinism as a thermodynamics question, then you are totally misunderstanding it.The primary driving force of evolution is biological reproduction. People don't emphasize this because reproduction is so much taken for granted. So they talk of natural selection as a filter. But it is biological reproduction that forces things through that filter. And it is those biological processes and that biological reproduction that allows for self-organization, and that makes your thermodynamic arguments irrelevant.In a strict pedantic sense, you are right that neither mutation nor natural selection explain the evolution of complexity, but only if you look at them apart from the biology and biological reproduction that drives the evolution.Your whole argument is based on taking things out of context, and missing the importance of the biological processes that drive the system.

Hi, Wounded King. Oh, I see. You're right: I did say there were four "core processes," and I probably took that from their four periods of innovation in Table 1.I didn't catch that on my first response to you: I didn't even see the first half of your message to me, so I completely didn't know what you were saying. My mind must have been somewhere else this morning.Thanks for the correction: I'm breaking protocol and altering my original post with this information now.----- By the way, you linked to Message 46 (message ID = 258), when I think you meant to link to Message 258: at first, you had me worried that I'd done this on more than one post!

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi dkroemer Amusingly it saysThe Process of Speciation

quote:

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Given enough time and successive splittings, the processes that produce two species from one will result in the entire diversity of life.

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In other words evolution is sufficient to explain speciation, and specieation, along with more evolution, is sufficient to explain the entire diversity of life.Now, in case you missed it, the entire diversity of life includes those organisms that are complex (however you define it) and how they developed. Intriguingly, the links I gave your for Berkeley did not mention complexity: are you mixing up terminology again?They do say
An introduction to evolution - Understanding Evolution

quote:

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Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today.

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Which is the same as what UMich says.Or did you find
Looking at complexity - Understanding Evolution

quote:

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Life is full of grand complications, such as aerodynamic wings, multi-part organs like eyes, and intricate chemical pathways. When faced with such complexity, both opponents and proponents of evolution, Darwin included, have asked the question: how could it evolve?

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There are several ways such complex novelties may evolve:

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• Advantageous intermediates: ...
• Co-opting: ...

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Along with the following pages
Page not found
and
Looking at complexity - Understanding Evolution
?Enjoy.

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You're really a card, dkroemer.Still confusing probability with entropy? They both have the same entropy. The entropy of the deck has nothing to do with the order of the cards or the probability of having that order. And someone choosing to specify one specific arrangement over all others does not give it any more energy. It is the same as the entropy of a deck of unknown order, ie any of the possible arrangements. Amusingly there is no real way to determine if a deck is "fully shuffled" -- you could shuffle it a million times and then just happen to end up with the cards all in their original order, or in some other specified arrangement. Except for one small problem: it has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. You don't have random mutations introducing new cards into the deck and you don't have natural selection eliminating some cards and duplicating others. You don't even have genetic drift, where all the cards of one suit are eliminated. And, fascinatingly, this is still as fatuously false as the first time. If you were paying attention (and trying to learn the truth) you should know this.Enjoy.

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Gerhart and Kirschner perform the probability calculations in a way that is consistent with natural selection. Without natural selection it would take one computer millions of years to generate "to be or not to be". Natural selection can be taken into consideration by stopping the program when it gets part of the phrase. Also, instead of selecting letters at random, only select dictionary words. With these changes the computer can generate the epigram is what Gerhart and Kirschner said was a "short time."However, a protein is hundreds of amino acids long. Gerhart and Kirschner did not do the calculation for a sonnet, which would more closely relate to the size of a protein. The reason there is no calculation like that, I am suggesting, is that no one is trying to argue that the complexity of life can be explained by natural selection. The complexity of the primary structure of a protein does not even begin to measure the complexity of life. There is also the complexity of molecular machinery made up of dozens of proteins. Also, there is the complexity of the timing of biological processes.A biologist who went to the trouble of calculating how long it would take to generate a sonnet by random chance would look very foolish.

No, they all have a specific order.If you believe that there is only 1 "specific order", would you mind telling us what it is, and how it is identified? Actually, you can understand evolution without making your trivial blunders about thermodynamics. Your mistakes are in fact more of a handicap and an obstacle than anything else. Could you please quote the next paragraph of this essay? Thank you.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

We don't doubt that complexity evolved. The question is what were the processes? It stands to reason there were processes, but the process could not be natural selection. The U. Mich lessons say nothing unscientific. But the Berkeley lesson says natural selection explains the complexity of life. Likewise Gerhart and Kirsner and Kenneth Miller do not say natural selection explains the complexity of life, but Richard Dawkins does.

Daughter populations have different genetic material from parent populations. This differential has an effect on how well different members of the daughter population compete for limited resources. Any competitive advantage that a portion of the daughter population enjoys will tend to be expressed in greater percentage in the next daughter population. This process will continue for each succeeding generation.Please tell me, in detail, exactly why this process cannot create the world we see today. Don't tell me about someone else's quote. If you want someone else to speak, bring them here. If you cannot do that, explain in your own words why the process I described cannot account for what we observe today.

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Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. -- Thomas JeffersonFor we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and non-believers. -- Barack ObamaWe see monsters where science shows us windmills. -- PhatIt has always struck me as odd that fundies devote so much time and effort into trying to find a naturalistic explanation for their mythical flood, while looking for magical explanations for things that actually happened. -- Dr. Adequate

And of course, as every biologist knowns, natural selection was not the only process operating.The process that produced complexity is described in the theory of evolution, of which the law of natural selection is but a part.How many times does this have to be explained to you before you understand it?

So far, everything they've written.To take one example, they pretend that irreducibly complex things can't evolve.