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Author | Topic: Thermodynamics and The Universe | |||||||||||||||||||||||
ringo Member (Idle past 434 days) Posts: 20940 From: frozen wasteland Joined: |
nemesis_juggernaut writes: The formation of crystals (or snowflakes, as I've heard it argued at times) is a simple chemical reaction in accordance to physical laws that do not in any sense, evolve and certainly could not be compared to genetics. Why couldn't they be compared? Water molecules "arrange themselves" in a crystal in accordance to physical laws. DNA molecules "arrange themselves" and metabolic molecules "arrange themselves" in accordance to physical laws. What's the difference?
However, if creationists say that anything using energy must need some sort of converter, I obviously would agree that. There is no external "converter" necessary. The "converter" is the molecules themselves, and the physical laws according to which they "arrange themselves". Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation. Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
nemesis_juggernaut writes: I don't believe that 2LoT refutes evolution, per say. I'm saying very simply that things never organize themselves. When scientists attempt to put thermodynamics into lay terms they describe entropy as a measure of disorder. While this isn't exactly wrong, it is almost always misunderstood by laypeople. This explanation gives laypeople the sense that neatening up the living room or cleaning up after dinner reduces entropy when this is definitely not the case. That's not the kind of order that entropy measures. Entropy is a measure of a system's potential to do work, and you gave a correct example yourself in an earlier post when you mentioned heat transfer. A steam engine is the clearest example of a heat engine because it uses the heat from steam to do work. Wikipedia describes a heat engine as exploiting the temperature gradient between a hot "source" and a cold "sink" to convert heat energy to mechanical work. A steam engine increases the entropy, the disorder if you prefer, of a system, but as you can see it isn't the kind of disorder you see around the house. When you add heat to a mixture of chemicals it can cause chemical reactions to take place, and in some cases that can result in energy being stored in chemical bonds. The heat did work to create those bonds, and the newly formed chemicals have lower entropy than the original chemicals. They are less disordered now, more organized. Again, this isn't the kind of organization you'll see around the house, but that's what reduced entropy means. So it does not take an energy converter to increase organization and reduce entropy. Where chemical reactions are involved and the right chemicals are present, all it takes is the addition of energy. This is why Miller was able to create complex organic molecules in his experiment, molecules that were more organized with less entropy than the original constituents he began with. This is why we often find complex organic molecules in meteorites.
Secondly, the bike didn't design itself. It took people not only to design the bike, but to manufacture it, and to ship it. It then was required for somebody to assemble based on the schematics provided by another intelligent mind. The bike in no way organized itself, which Berra clearly wants us to believe about natural systems. It's an analogy, a device for explaining something unfamiliar by reference to something familiar. There isn't an analogy in the world that can't be stretched to far. This analogy is not addressing anything related to design. It's attempting to explain the principle of entropy. He could as easily have used the example of sea shells on a beach that you gather and place into order by size and color. Or if you prefer an example with no people at all, imagine a gravel bed during an earthquake. The shaking ground will order the gravel by size with the largest pieces on top and the smallest on the bottom.
I would never say that evolution "violates" 2LoT, because nothing does. However, if creationists say that anything using energy must need some sort of converter, I obviously would agree that. If I've explained this all properly, you now understand why converters are not necessary to use energy to do work. --Percy
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
quote: The quote from my post does not mention two laws of thermodynamics either. It refers to a common misunderstanding which affects both sides. Creationists often fail to recognice that local entropy can decrease, evolutionists often say that an open system is not subject to 2LoT. Both sides are wrong.
quote: Sometimes things do organise themselves, given energy inputs. Dawkins refers to the way that wave action sorts sand and pebbles on a beach, for instance. Evolution DOES make use of existing mechanisms - the reproductive mechanisms of life. There are other aspects of course, but when discussing how phenotypes are produced that is the relevant one. Reproduction is a prerequisite for evolution, thus there is simply no issue that evolution relies on mechanisms that do not exist.
quote: No, IC is based on a simplistic misrepresentation of evolution. It's a simple and elegane idea - and one that can be illustrated quite nicely (Behe's mousetrap). But ultimately it relies on the idea that evolution simply adds parts - it rarely if ever subtracts parts or changes parts/ Decades before Behe, Mueller recognised that evolution would tend to remove unnecessary parts and predicted that evoltuion would produce IC systems.
quote: I don't see that complex chemical reactions cannot be compared with simpler chemicla reactions. Genetics and developments all boils down to chemistry in the end.
quote: That's a misrepresentation of Berra's point. You certainly can't honestly claim he said that on the basis of the quote. Berra's point is that energy inputs permit localised entropy decreases - which is as far as you can go with 2LoT. Anything beyond that is outside of 2LoT territory.
quote: So all you've got to do is to prove that photosynthesis is designed. If you can't show that then your assertion fails.
quote:It's a good example of the detail you were asking for. You want even more than that. Why you want it when Berra's short answer deals with the 2LoT aspects is somethign you have yet to explain. quote: You may not say it, but other creationists do. The issue of "converters' is not a 2LoT issue - and it isn't much of a problem either. "Converters" are ubiquitous - even atoms may act as converters (e.g. spectral emission lines).
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Hyroglyphx Inactive Member |
You're quite right, Nem... crystals do not make a good analogy to biological organisation. Instead, consider the evolution of stars. You will soon realise that self-organisation is very common in the Universe without anything more magical than gravitation and hydrogen. Can nucleofission of hydrogen and helium create all the heavier elements? Do we know that with certainty? Secondly, we have witnessed many star deaths. We have seen them burned out, whether its in real time, or whether it burned out a thousand years ago and the light has finally reached our eyes. This is consistent with entropy. But have we ever witnessed a stellar birth? Do we know that stars can organize themselves, or is it conjecture? "He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
nemesis_juggernaut writes: Can nucleofission of hydrogen and helium create all the heavier elements? I think you mean nuclear fusion. The elements created in the big bang were mostly hydrogen and helium, a little lithium, and I believe a very tiny amount of beryllium, though I could be mistaken about that. All other elements in the universe were cooked up in the furnaces in the centers of stars. This was all worked out by astrophysicists back in the 1930's, Fred Hoyle most prominent among them. The correspondence between observation and theory is extremely close.
But have we ever witnessed a stellar birth? Do we know that stars can organize themselves, or is it conjecture? We see star formation in many places in the universe: Stellar Nurseries There really can't be any reasonable doubts about stellar birth. Even if by some unlucky happenstance no stellar nurseries were observable from earth, we'd still know they would have to exist since there is nothing to prevent the force of gravity from condensing gas clouds into great spherical bundles where eventually the great compressive forces at the center would ignite the engines of fusion. If we consider a gas cloud in isolation which then condenses into a star, the entropy of the system increases, but quite clearly parts of this system are decreasing in entropy, which would be the portion of the star whose elements are fused into more and more complex elements. --Percy
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Son Goku Inactive Member |
nemesis_juggernaut writes:
Yes, spectroscopy, which can penetrate into their upper mantle shows that they do. Plus you've the fact fusion reactors do this generically. Can nucleofission of hydrogen and helium create all the heavier elements? Do we know that with certainty?If stars couldn't form the heavier elements, everything we know about the weak force would be wrong. (And CERN shows that probably isn't the case) nemesis_juggernaut writes:
Yeah, all the way back since the 80s. We've even seen the stellar core ignite. I think Hubble's observations between 1994-1996 are particularly good for this. Although I'm no expert. But have we ever witnessed a stellar birth? Also when you have a collapsed star versus the hydrogen cloud that formed it, the star has a much, much larger entropy value than the cloud. This is probably the clearest example of why entropy isn't disorder.I can explain if further clarification is required.
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