Evolution or Devolution?

I didn't imply that. I said "there are many correct ways to state 2LOT." I provided a couple simple definitions as examples and then said, "A correct statement of 2LOT does not appear in [Kerner's] paragraph." If you believe Kerner makes a correct statement of 2LOT somewhere then find it and quote it. Kerner is wrong because he's applying human standards of order and disorder to thermodynamics. Entropic disorder is not a measure of the messiness of a room. It is not a measure of how complex a living organism is. Entropy is a measure of disorder on the molecular level. Following your suggestion to look again at the Kerner quote, it contains this: If there is really such a thing as devolution then all Kerner need do is offer evidence in support of his hypothesis. Given that we know that reproduction at the cellular level involves replication of the genetic material with errors (mutations) followed by selection by environmental conditions, current views of evolution have strong supporting evidence from the field of genetics. When we look at primitive organisms there is little in their genetic codes that could be interpreted as precoding for future evolution, including the Hox genes. What Kerner is doing is using a false understanding of 2LOT to argue for a devolutionary process for which there is no genetic evidence.--PercyThis message has been edited by Percy, 02-26-2005 17:32 AM

Evolution doesn't contradict that, because in the simplest case of evolution, where an organism gives rise to improved offspring, that's two different systems (the parent and the offspring). That's not one state turning into a more ordered state, or one system's entropy decreasing.The order of states has no relevance to the evolution of organisms. This is impossible. Overall, the action of selective forces in the presence of reproduction with variation ("mutation") leads to evolution, not devolution.

Houses do not tidy themselves. Given enough time they do become messy as their constituent parts rot,crumble,rust,collapse and fall down. Yes it is through energy that the status quo is changed and some of the energy might come from outside and some from inside. Everything breaks down from order into chaos given time unless subjected to an ordering influence (such as you tidying your house). Our bodies, the houses we live in, everything is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Living things are not exempt. We are all subject to ageing and death. From the moment we are conceived we begin to die despite the input of energy.
I'm sorry you feel the need to make personal attacks and accusations. In my discussion of the 'direction' of evolution I was attempting to make a distinction between the actual theory of mutations and natural selection and the commonly held perception of evolution held by many people who believe that evolution has produced sentient human beings as a gradual fortuitous development from sea invertebrates.
It was the direction of evolution that was under discussion not the fact that species change.
In the 1980s when I was a medical student, the eminent evolutionary biologist Prof John Maynard Smith came to my university town to give a public lecture entitled "did Darwin get it wrong?" The subject of his lecture was not of course whether evolution occurs or not and was not even about the direction of evolution. His lecture was about whether evolution happens entirely by a process of gradual change or whether it occurs partly by a process of "punctuated equilibrium"
Following the lecture there was an opportunity for the audience to comment. I actually made a point in three parts drawing from a previous work by Kerner which I had read:
My first point was about thermodynamics and about the postulation that in a universe where everything moves from order into greater states of chaos that it would seem unlikely that any given number of apes would eventually give rise spontaneously through gradual mutations to a Shakespeare or a Gandhi.
My second point was about the human brain. I had recently read that contrary to commonly held belief it had been found through studying palaeontolgical remains that neandarthal and cro-magnon men and women actually had larger cranial capacities (taking into account body size) than modern humans. Also there had been some published work by Professor John Lorber, professor of paediatrics at Sheffield, England which looked at hydrocephalics who had merely a sliver of their cerebral cortex intact and yet had no demonstrable functional deficit. Some had even been high achievers academically. One of the students at Sheffield who had an IQ of 126 and was awarded a first class honours degree in mathematics for example was a hydrocephalic who had virtually no detectable cerebral cortex on a CT brain scan. I suggested that if as Lorber's research suggested we can get by with no apparent functional deficit with only 10% of our cortex intact then perhaps since evolution is not expected to make something in anticipation of possible future benefit but only adapts to selective pressures operating in the present that perhaps our ancestors used more of their brains or perhaps used their brains more than we do and the 90% we no longer need might just be a vestigial remnant of that. My third point was about natural selection itself. I mentioned that what are commonly considered to be "lower" forms of life may often be better adapted to survive than we are. For example human "progress" leads inexorably to the creation of more powerful weapons that can threaten our continued existence as a species. Man's inhumanity to man is magnified by technology and weapons of mass destruction although cockroaches could survive a nuclear holocaust. So in conclusion, I suggested that Darwin perhaps didn't get it wrong to suggest that mutations and selective pressure can result in species adaptation and speciation itself but that perhaps the direction of evolution might be more likely to make a monkey out of man than a man out of a monkey.
The professor was not familiar with Lorber's work and questioned my sources but it so happened that unbeknownst to me one of the original members of Lorber's team was in the audience that evening and he verified that the research had suggested that most of our cerebral cortex we could do without with no noticeable deificit. I had suggested that we only need 5% of our cortex but he corrected me and said that it was more like 10%
I will never forget Professor Maynard-Smith's reply to all this. He said that he couldn't fault my logic but he didn't agree with me!

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I mentioned that what are commonly considered to be "lower" forms of life may often be better adapted to survive than we are. For example human "progress" leads inexorably to the creation of more powerful weapons that can threaten our continued existence as a species.

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Considered lower by whom? Not by anyone who understands that TOE.

I think Silverman might have mistaken the origin of creature advances in deceptive evolution with one's intution about creatures other than man but his comments on JMSmith seem consisent with my understanding of the man and belies indeed howcome I have such a hard time lifting the cold bloods past the dinosaur popularity in general and in particular a "lower" form can have a superiority, it seems to me, (given a good reading of Provine's book Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology) if IN FISHER'S words the lower forms, you name them, I just wont call them "greys", have a better equilibrium of the "constitutional disadvantage of the homozygous dominant."I am struggling to make this context independent and I know I have failed that but as soon as I saw that fireflies can flash in amazingly diverse patterns I realized that creatures could use "deceptive man-understood TOE" to outevolve any primate just as GOD could always change the laws of physics if physcists tried to alter them beyond GODS willingness (sic!). Obviously the last is absurd and rather speaks into where people assert PROOVE of GOD. But without god the query on deceptive evolution remains. Howfar this is related to 2LOT, I dont know.This message has been edited by Brad McFall, 02-26-2005 18:36 AM

This is a common misunderstanding of thermodynamics. Organisms do not accumulate increasing entropy until they die. If it were possible to measure the entropy of something as complex as a living organism (it isn't), its entropy over time would not be a function of age. My reaction to your "processes don't make claims" paragraph was that it wasn't a very constructive response, fairly similar to NosyNed's reaction. I just chose to ignore it. This is an erroneous statement of 2LOT. Those portions of the universe which receive energy to do work (life on earth from the sun, for example) decrease in entropy. Because of the erroneous starting point, your conclusions about evolution from apes to humans are incorrect. This is only sort of correct. First, while monkey and man share a common ancestor, man did not evolve from modern monkeys. And the apes are much closer relatives to man than monkeys. Second, there is no pre-ordained direction to evolution. Which characteristics are favored and selected is a function of the environment. Had those characteristics unique to humans not been favored in their ancestral environment then we wouldn't be here today. The adverse effects of most injuries to the cerebral cortex is sufficient to falsify this.--Percy

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My first point was about thermodynamics and about the postulation that in a universe where everything moves from order into greater states of chaos that it would seem unlikely that any given number of apes would eventually give rise spontaneously through gradual mutations to a Shakespeare or a Gandhi.

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Except the earth, on which we know living things exist, is not a closed system like the universe. It’s being bombarded by energy from the sun. What precisely do you think prevents a localized decrease in entropy on earth?Entropy decreases can occur spontaneously as long as they are coupled to and overcompensated by entropy increases elsewhere.Localized entropy decreases occur all the timeare you seriously suggesting that snowflakes don’t really form?

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"Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially nonrandom."
--Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

On what basis do you conclude that Shakespeare represents a more ordered atomic state than an ape? That's not at all obvious to me, nor to anyone familiar with the subject.

Thank you for your interesting comment.
Of course I do agree that snowflakes do form but where do they form? I’m no meteorologist but it is my understanding that for snowflakes to form requires a confluence of several conditions being met.
Snowflakes form on a planet where there is liquid water and an atmosphere that can facilitate evaporation, condensation and precipitation. Such a planet would be a rare oasis of temperate moderation in this universe which would seem to largely consist of large expanses of almost empty space at temperatures below minus 250 degrees centigrade punctuated by stars at temperatures of millions of degrees. Such a planet would be where we might be more likely to find that most rare and precious treasure we call life.
Snowflakes do fall and there are people on this planet who can marvel at their beauty and symmetry. There are children who can make snowmen, have snowball fights and go sledging.
Snowflakes might form on planets such as ours which cling on to remnants of prior order but for how long?
As I’m sure you are aware, eventually when our sun begins to run out of fuel it will expand and all our snowflakes will melt. Perhaps long before that our species will have become extinct or changed beyond recognition.
Perhaps there are planets out in space which once bore beings like us. -As time passes and new planets are discovered it is seemingly becoming increasingly likely that our planet is not unique in the history of the universe in at one time harbouring intelligent life. Perhaps they too once had snowflakes and young ones who could play and gaze into their night sky in innocent wonder and question whether there might be other similar planets out there (or out here). I know I am being hypothetical and speculative but I hope that if you bear with me it might become clear that I might not be indulging in a pointless flight of fantasy but am actually addressing your point about low entropy states.
Could it be that there were once other planets like ours where there was once intelligent life. Perhaps like us they would have had intelligence but not wisdom. Perhaps like us they would have had consciousness but without enough conscience or compassion to stop them destroying each other and their environment. Perhaps their planet is now lifeless and resembles planets like venus in our own solar system. What might have become of them?
Through intelligence without wisdom foresight or compassion we have succeeded in developing technology to puncture the ozone layer, many would argue that we have already begun to witness disastrous effects of a man made greenhouse effect. Certainly 60 years ago the fruits of our deadly, ignorant, narrow intelligence fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It would seem when you look at man’s inhumanity to man and consider how billions endure starvation, disease and war as a result of it that perhaps we will become extinct one day or selective pressures might make us evolve or devolve into a species that isn’t clever enough to find a way to destroy itself . Perhaps we might one day resemble even more closely the apes that we now keep in zoos.
Perhaps it is not inevitable. Perhaps we are more than a random molecular soup and also more than just puppets of a directive, creator god following his whims to be created for his own gratification and need to be praised. Perhaps we have free will?
If there were such a thing as free will then there might be something other than neuro-chemical reactions and thermodynamics to determine our behaviour. Free will is the hallmark of true sentience. Consciousness of itself has no mass, no extent in space and no boundaries in time. Schrodinger, the great quantum theorist in his book entitled what is life? suggested that perhaps the reason that we can perceive that we can exercise free will is because we actually do. Consciousness collapses the wave equation.
Perhaps if we do have free will then it might be that some of the wisest people who have lived might be people like Siddhartha Gautama (usually known as Buddha), Yeshua of Nazareth and Mahatma Gandhi who taught us about non-violence and compassion for our fellow human beings. Perhaps we might be able to learn the lessons they taught and, if Schrodinger was right perhaps there is a way of existence or life that is free from moths, rust, thieves who break in and steal and all the other artefacts of a degenerative universe. Perhaps there is some clue to this in the image on the Turin shroud which recent evidence suggests may be far older than the original carbon dating suggested.
- Andrew

"The adverse effect of most injuries to the cerebral cortex is sufficient to falsify....[Prof. Lorber's findings]"
I am very surprised that you would say that. It seems to me out of keeping with the spirit of dispassionate scientific enquiry that I would have expected from you. Surely one verified exception should be enough to make us challenge or question what we had formerly believed to be received wisdom. When an atomic clock was taken on board a plane and returned to land showing a different time to the clocks on the ground no-one said that the time dilation effect was disproved by all the other clocks saying the same time.
Isn't it after all surely the exception that proves the rule?
- Andrew

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. Everything breaks down from order into chaos given time unless subjected to an ordering influence (such as you tidying your house).

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You have a basic misunderstanding of thermodynamics, and part of it is revealed here. When your house spontaneouslly gets messy, it is obeying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. When you tidy your house, you are also obeying the 2LOT, otherwise you couldn't do it. When an organism grows old, dies and decays, it is obeying the 2LOT. When an organism is born, grows and becomes more complex, it is also obeying the 2LOT. The 2LOT by itself simply does not tell you whether a particular system is going to get more or less complex or more or less ordered. So it cannot tell you whether evolving biological systems are going to get more complex or less.We know that organisms reproduce themselves, and we know that their DNA changes as they do so, so the process of reproduction and mutation cannot violate the 2LOT. We know that some mutations are detrimental to an organism in its particular environment and that some of them are beneficial, so the process of differential reproduction (i.e. natural selection) cannot violate the 2LOT. Those two steps are all that there is to adaptive evolution. So what is it about evolution that violates the 2LOT?

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Surely one verified exception should be enough to make us challenge or question what we had formerly believed to be received wisdom. When an atomic clock was taken on board a plane and returned to land showing a different time to the clocks on the ground no-one said that the time dilation effect was disproved by all the other clocks saying the same time.
Isn't it after all surely the exception that proves the rule?

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One verified exception should be enough to challenge our understanding of how brains can and do work. You weren't asking about human brain function in general, however: you were asking about the evolution of brain function. For that question, the exception may not be important at all. If 5% of people can develop successfully with much of their cerebral cortex missing but 95% can't (as seems to be the case from your references to hydrocephalic individuals), then having a complete brain is a massive evolutionary advantage.

With all due respect what gave you the impression that i thought that tidying one's house disobeys the second law? I certainly never claimed that. Of course the process of tidying one's house produces more disorder than order in the universe as a whole(obvious examples being disordered heat energy released by vacuum cleaners and also the equalisation of pressures as the vacuum is filled). Those who know me and know what an untidy person i can be will perhaps see the irony of my statement.
Nevertheless, i maintain that tidying one's house could be an ordering influence on the house without directly disobeying the second law.
I have never claimed that evolution violates the second law or denied that adaptive evolution takes place. I am merely questioning the direction of that evolution and examining what i believe to be clues which were elaborated on in more detail by Kerner in his book that perhaps the direction of that adaptive change might be such that our species might evolve into one with less functional brain capacity and that perhaps this has already happened to some extent.

I provided no details because the fallacy of most of the human brain being unused has already been addressed in this thread, but not yet responded to. See Message 7. Replication being essential, subsequent research has not supported Lorder's claims, for example see Exploding the 10% Myth.Returning to thermodynamics, 2LOT is a thermal and chemical law. Entropy addresses the thermal and chemical characteristics of a system. There are also potential and kinetic energy considerations, but for simplicity I'll ignore them for now.The disorder of entropy is often confused with the disorder of our daily lives. People imagine that a messy room has higher entropy than a clean room, and therefore conclude that the tendency of rooms to become disordered is a thermodynamic process. It isn't.Thermodynamically, there is no difference between an ordered deck of cards still in the original box and the same cards scattered randomly across the floor. That's because thermodynamics deals with thermal and chemical considerations. Thermodynamically, a five of diamonds sitting neatly in the deck between the four and the six is no different than when it is lying on the floor under the sofa's endtable.Your own example of a neglected house rotting and rusting and collapsing is not an obvious example of increasing entropy. The situation surpasses the possibility of analysis to such an overwhelming extent as to probably forever remain an open question. For example, rotting is a complex organic process involving living organisms, and whether it represents increasing or decreasing entropy is unknown.I hope Kerner is simply being very general in his terminology when he says 2LOT means that everything in the universe is running down. Though wrong, it could be argued that this approach is justified when first introducing the topic to laypeople unfamiliar with thermodynamics. But Kerner's subsequent thermodynamic arguments indicate that this is his actual understanding of 2LOT, and that he believes it applies to macro-level definitions of disorder. His view is contradicted by much in everyday life, with seeds growing into plants, water freezing into a neatly orderly crystaline structure, and people building almost anything.Except perhaps for freezing water, these processes are too complex for thermodynamic analysis, but they do provide convenient and helpful analogies to 2LOT, as long as one realizes they are only analogies. For example, yet another simple way of defining 2LOT (I provided two other definitions in a previous message) is that the entropy of a system can never decrease unless work is added to the system. If we use a messy room as an analogy, then if one adds work to the messy and disordered room (let's say we tell junior to clean his room or forfeit his allowance) then by working on the room it can be returned to a state of order.But another reminder. It's important to keep in mind that in reality the entropy of a messy room versus a neat room is unknown and that this is only an analogy. The closest I can come on the spur of the moment to a macro situation that is amenable to thermodynamic analysis is a bicycle pump with the air outlet stoppered. If we define our system as the air chamber within the pump, then pushing the plunger adds work to the system by compressing the gas, thereby decreasing entropy. Some of the work can be returned by removing your hands from the pump handle, whereby the handle will rise in order to relieve the pressure (remember, the air outlet is stoppered). But not all of the work can be returned - that's why one of the euphemistic expressions of 2LOT says that not only is there no such thing as a free lunch (no perpetual motion machines), you can't even break even.The bottom line is that we've never found any chemical or physical process in either life or evolution that violates any thermodynamic law, and no such processes are postulated or believed necessary. Thermodynamic arguments that evolution isn't possible are based upon a misunderstanding of thermodynamics.--Percy

Your defense of Kerner, who appears to misunderstand 2LOT, is what gives rise to this misimpression. I'm just going from memory, but I believe Homo erectus is the only human ancestor we know of that had a larger average brain capacity. If we *are* descended from Homo erectus, which seems likely, then it *is* a very interesting question to consider. But whatever the reasons, thermodynamics in the sense of Kerner's "everything is running down" was definitely not a factor.--Percy