Evolution Simplified

You may "believe" this, but you would be wrong. I concur that natural ecosystems, and even the biosphere as a whole, can in some ways be said to be degrading. However, this degradation has nothing to do with evolution or natural selection whether at the microscopic or macroscopic levels. Almost all of the degradation we see can be attributed to anthropogenic effects. Beyond those effects (and I'm not sure we can get past them in reality as it stands now), the biosphere is in a perpetual state of dynamic disequilibrium. The one constant in nature is change - i.e., evolution. Natural populations without anthropogenic effects (or at least minimal effects) have been observed to be in a continual state of flux due to changing biotic and abiotic factors. Strangely enough for your assertion here, this state of flux creates more opportunities than loss. Absent humans, the constant environmental change - the ever-changing selection pressures operating on variable populations - provides multiple "new" niches for portions of those populations to inhabit, ultimately increasing, not decreasing, biodiversity.To say that everything is going to "hell in a handbasket" is to completely misunderstand what is actually occurring in nature. Well, without humans to muck it up and short-circuit the natural processes, of course.edited to clarify really lousy grammar.This message has been edited by Quetzal, 05-04-2006 11:32 AM

This solar system has nothing but destruction and death to look forward to. The sun will die and our source of workable energy will be gone. Without this source of workable energy plants will not have any energy to put towards growing, without plants other animals will have no source of energy to put towards growing and the whole thing grinds to an unceremonious halt.This will happen, the second law tells us it will. The energy that the sun gives off will not turn around and go back to the sun, it will spread throughout the universe.However, whilst we have an abundance of workable energy coming to earth from the sun, we can put that energy to work (by definition) to have flowers grow, have animals grow and have those plants and animals create offspring.These offspring will probably have some mutations. And here is the kicker - thermodynamics does not 'know' which mutations are beneficial to the resultant embryonic development->adult and which ones are harmful (and of course which ones do nothing of note.That is to say, the mutations are effectively thermodynamically equal. At no point during the process of mutation does any event happen that does not result in a net increase of entropy in the universe. Entropy is constantly increasing, but this does not mean that life is degrading per se, it means the universe is.Actually, the 'message' that the original replicators passed to their descendents has been hopelessly corrupted. It just happens that the corruptions that have happened to the original message have meant that the body that is built is better at competing within the environment it finds itself in than the first replicators.This is the major issue that creationist's have to own up to with the thermodynamics argument. Despite it being a mathematically based science (engineering) they have been unable to show which process purported to occur by evolution are forbidden by thermodynamics. It should be fairly straightforward to do, if it were a good criticism, but it isn't. You'll often find creationists resort to using words rather than numbers. A classic sign of equivocation. Maths is harder to equivocate in - and when it is done, anyone who knows what they are talking about can explain exactly the error, and provide a corrected version.You are right that creationist's mention it for a good reason. It sounds damn impressive to people who've never studied thermodynamics, and its easy to word the rhetoric in a way that seems to show evolution as being falsified. However, as I said, thermodynamics isn't a semantics issue, its a numbers one. Just like the law of gravity is not 'what goes up must come down' and thus we cannot ever leave the solar system without being dragged back to earth. The thermodynamics argument is as convincing as this parody of gravity - when looked at for what it is, its just that it is less easy to understand.

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As you can tell, the thermodynamic argument is a thread unto itself, so its probably wise to not take it any further in this thread. If you want, I'd be happy to participate further in a thread all about thermodynamics, or you could look through all the other countless threads out there dedicated to it.Oh, and incidentally, panspermia.org is probably not completely objective. One random site that seems entirely impartial to the debate is this site which defines the second law in explicit terms as this:

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It is impossible to extract an amount of heat Q_H from a hot reservoir and use it all to do work W . Some amount of heat Q_C must be exhausted to a cold reservoir. This precludes a perfect heat engine

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It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object.

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In any cyclic process the entropy will either increase or remain the same.

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What's a cyclic process? A cyclic process is a thermodynamic process which begins from and finishes at the same thermostatic state.There is a nice diagram to explain here. Just to give you an idea why talking about 'winding down' and 'degrading' and 'destruction' and 'death' is a load of rhetoric gobbledygook if it is not supported with some numbers.Take care.This message has been edited by Modulous, Thu, 04-May-2006 06:10 PM

But evolution isn't a system. I get that living individuals are systems, yes. And, indeed, living individuals are born and then they decay and die.But populations don't work that way, because they're not thermodynamic systems. They don't use energy; they're just groups of individuals. The group itself is not a thermodynamic system, so to say that the group evolves does not violate thermodynamics, because populations of living organisms are changing and advancing with a net increase of entropy in every individual over its lifetime.The fact is, even when old men father children, those children are not themselves geriatrics, but are young, fresh individuals. Every time an organism reproduces the "entropy clock" is reset. It is moot, because the history of living things on Earth is not a thermodynamic system, even though individual living things are. But since individuals don't evolve, evolution hardly violates the Second Law.

How do you know that the (thermodynamic -entropic) environment ITSELF (thermostat etc evcref by BSM) has not changed?You said,

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that have happened to the original message have meant that the body that is built is better at competing within the environment it finds itself in than the first replicators

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(italics added). Is not whatever anyone can ever guess what a "replicator" environment is or was was or is, is it not "thermodynamic"?Why would not Gladyshev's thermostat, apply as the non-extra factor here? macrothermodynamics make it possible to elucidate the causes of ... system under study) because it is located in the thermostat of a higher hierarchic level ...
see also
http://www.endeav.org/evolut/hierar/hierar.htm
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http://www.endeav.org/persons/gladysh.htm

I do not think that these are independent. I think
Gould’s p505(”Structure of Evolutionary Theory’), “I prefer to view the history of the Synthesis under a different rubric and terminology developed by historian of science Will Provine and by myself - namely, (1) restriction followed by (2) hardening, with the first process viewed as largely admirable, the second as mostly dubious” continues a simple independence of events, I hold are not.It is my thesis to proof that this view is illegit. The cause of this expansion of Will’s notion of “constriction” conceptually resulted from a faulty notion of the causality among levels of organization and levels of selection in the late 20th century infusion of philosophy into biology, generally accrued to Gould that the relations ARE NOT one of potential. Instead Gould feltp 680 “Each hierarchical level differs from all others in substantial and interesting ways, both in the style and frequency of patterns of change and causal modes”The advance of Wolfram’s new science experimentally is directed in a way against this notion of allometric factorability (of Gould) as there can be rule base choices with fractal structures across units of extrapolation (over many orders of magnitude). It is the thesis that this approach of experminetal philosophy of Wolfram can uncover an underlying continuity across levels that IS one of potential but has been missed because the physics of this kind of continula motion in a discontinuous space is not well worked out. Furthermore I will show that theoretical population genetics has failed to expand in to the sturucture that Gould calls for renaming to which a new population approach based on fusing the continuity of hieratrichal thermodynamic differential equations through econometric approaches to Wright’s path analysis (Shipley) in the temporal regions of Croizat’s hierarchically adaptable method of Panbiogeography (via graphs and higher order vertice sets) accounted for in Cantor’s series of real number groupings provides a potential function in the sense of Lebesuque’s collections which falsifies the conceptual advance Gould propounded by continued deductive application of the four-figure subtility WITHIN a given bioloigically causal hierarchy. This will forwarn against Wolfram’s programme in biology and provide a deductive basis for determining if genetic life originated in one or more places. Othogonality is captured in algebra where geometry was only formely marshelled. The possibility of a rich “tapestry” of cross level individuations remains but is bound to a definite topology that catastrophe theory describes. The full failure to appreciate this has been the failure to return Wittgenstien back to Mach and answer Faraday’s question without restricting it to a field theory or some thought of Helmhotlz.Thus I do find that contrary Gould one might purse an orbital evolutionary theory. I don’t mind going down in history following this direction. What will be quite spectacular is if I am correct and there is a general failure of rear-guard evolutionism recognized as well by creationists and a tragic one that prevented me from gainig a hearing in the normal way. Gould said,

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Bateson presents an even more striking contrast in later passages of the same book, when he develops an image of a great , if undoable, thought experiment - the perfectly controlled account of evolution under uniform conditions, unbuffeted by any of the Darwianian externalities that make real results so untidy and unpredicatable; “No one disputes that the adaptation of organisms to their surroundings is one of the greatest problems of nature, but it is not the primary problem of descent. Moreover, until the normal and undisturbed course of descent under uniform conditions is ascertained with some exactness, it is useless to attempt a survey of the consequences of external interference” (1913, p187).

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I am somehow stunned by this structuralist audacity in branding the functionalist panoply as mere “external interference” - and of imagining a a formalist internal order so set and predictable as planetary orbits, if only we could remove all these pesky environmental influences. The impetus and sine qua non of change for Darwin becomes , for Bateson, a mere disturbance that sullies an otherwise lovely experiment.

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Here are my raw notes on the unique theoretical aspects that need work for the work to go forward

First of all, could you cite some research that supports these figures?Whatever the exact figures are, you base your conclusions on a simple comparison between the harmful mutations and the beneficial ones. Since the percentage of beneficial mutations is lower than the percentage of harmful ones, so you reason, the conclusion must be that life deteriorates.However, the problem with this line of reasoning is that harmful mutations are less likely to be carried over to subsequent generations, per definition. The mutations that make it to subsequent generations tend to be the neutral ones and the beneficial ones. However small the percentage of beneficial mutations, al long as it's non-zero, it will it have an impact on the development of the population, i.e. it will be ever so slightly better adapted to its environment.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Good observation IMHO.Not that you need this link but readers might; LINK

Hello.I am very intrigued by evolution but wouldn't consider myself very knowledgable in the field. About a year ago, I was debating my brother about the plausibility(?) of evolution. He is Christian, and uses some rebuttals brought forth by Creos and IDers', but I wouldn't haste to judge him as part of either camp.Anyway, I essentially "lost" the argument because he has a better understanding of science, and taken more classes in the subject. (Also, I was going through a phase; one in which I artificially gave myself confidence by ridiculing those who didn't agree with my often unsupported, and condescending assertions, etc.)Finally, to the point. He used two statements that I simply couldn't refute due to my want of education. One, the 2nd law of thermodynamics; I believe that has been thoroughly refuted on this thread already. And two, this was the last nail in the coffin, that the universe couldn't be billions of years old because of the overwhelming abundance of hydrogen in the universe.Are these valid criticisms of evolution? Does my brother misunderstand some fundamental concepts of science? Is my post even on topic?Any and all replies are greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time. Abe: "in the universe".This message has been edited by Infixion, 05-05-2006 12:04 PM

I don't get it. Why is that inconsistent with an old universe? It's not like hydrogen has a half-life, or anything.Is he talking about stars all burning it up? That doesn't seem like a reasonable criticism to me. There aren't enough stars. Well, the second one really isn't. Evolution is a theory of biology, not cosmology. So arguments from cosmology don't really apply.Have your brother show up here sometime.

This nearly deserves a thread in the proper spot. Let me find my calculator, and I'll fire one up.

(Note: I am not a cosmologist and I'm going off memory)The abundance of hydrogen is determined by two major things. One is the hydrogen produced as the big bang cooled and the other is the consumption in stars.It is my understanding that the current hydrogen abundance fits very nicely with calculations done on these. The hydrogen abundance is support for the age of the universe not the contrary.Note: this is NOT a biological evolution subject. Biological evolution is NOT cosmology.

I've put a reply to the hydrogen question in Links and Information.

I'm pretty sure that is what he meant. It would help if I had a better grasp on what exactly he said. Moreover, he used our sun as an example. He said if the sun were "truly" as old as it is, it wouldn't have such a great amount of H. It would have, as you said, burned it all up, or at least burned more than it currently has.I didn't know how to respond to that.AbE: fixed quotes. I doubt it. He works full-time and attends school full-time. Furthermore, if he debated with the plethora of posters on this forum, he may very well learn more than what he had bargained for; or erect a wall of obstinacy.Lastly, he does have more knowledge in the field of science than I, but I wouldn't say vast amounts more; most of the science courses he has completed were introductory courses: chemistry, astronomy, and biology, I think.This message has been edited by Infixion, 05-06-2006 07:26 AM

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I'm pretty sure that is what he meant.

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You're not sure what he meant? Whenever anyone makes a strange claim, the first thing I ask is why they think that.-

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Moreover, he used our sun as an example. He said if the sun were "truly" as old as it is, it wouldn't have such a great amount of H.

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From what I understand, the sun's abundance of H/He fit right in with the standard models of solar evolution. The only mystery I know of concerning the sun was the low neutrino flux, but I think that has been resolved now.

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"Religion is the best business to be in. It's the only one where the customers blame themselves for product failure."
-- Ellis Weiner (quoted on the NAiG message board)

Hi Coragyps. Interesting post, and I appreciate your help with this hydrogen concept. I'll fiddle around with it in hopes of obtaining a better understanding of it.