Comment on Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes by George Evans.
@Professor Kent: After explaining that an evolutionary scientist, coming across a code, normally assumes there is a code maker; but when he comes across a code in DNA, suddenly assumes there isn’t a code maker; David Read asks Professor Kent:
“Why is it okay for mainstream science to twist facts to fit its theories but not for creationist to construe and interpret the data of nature in accordance with revealed truth?”
To which Professor Kent, leaving off the context, replied:
“It’s not okay. I haven’t defended it. Extremists on both sides are wrong.”
Kent makes it sound like David is referring to some wild extreme twisting, when he is simply referring to the basic tenets of evolution, which we all know Kent does defend.
Professor Kent, can you explain this discrepancy?
George Evans Also Commented
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Nic Samojluk: You keep saying, “This could be accomplished through a friendly divorce.”
But I don’t want to divorce her. I want to cure her.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: Paul, those two tablets of stone written on by the finger of God are very brittle, as Moses found out.
So God wrote it again: “In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them…”
If life has been here over 6,000 years, someone’s lying.
Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: In this case the Torah is the evidence. Before we get to criticizing the Pentateuch, we should consider it’s provenance. It is not a document that we dug up in some foreign land. It has been in the continuous possession of the original “family”. And this lays in the dust the charge that it is an old document written in a dead language also.
So what does the document say? It says that sometime during the event known as the Exodus, Moses, the leader of the group, chiseled out two tablets of stone, and God wrote on them. Shortly thereafter Moses apparently recorded the inscription, and we have it in Exodus chapter 20.
Modern scholarship is a flash in the pan by comparison. For us, at this end of history to question this story’s veracity be we gentile or even Jew, is ludicrous.
Recent Comments by George Evans
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: Well, I think you are a little younger than I am so you are closer to the time when you took P-Chem than I am, so I could be mistaken, simply.
However, I seem to remember vague discussions of things like degrees of freedom and order in association with entropy. And I don’t ever remember talking about “apparent” order in class.
In the divided box illustration, the 2LoT says the molecules will tend to equalize in either side. As you often say, there is a statistical possibility that all the molecules in one side could at one point in time find themselves on trajectories headed for the hole and all arrive on the other side. But that occurrence would indeed violate the 2LoT.
If you arrange all the molecules on one side before you close the system, then the 2LoT says they will rapidly equalize. Likewise the law says that if they start out equalized they won’t organize into one side. Maybe you have been listening to evolutionary biologists too much. Open your P-Chem book again.
If the box divider is attached to a piston shaft, we could calculate the work necessary to organize all the molecules on one side by measuring the force necessary to push the divider and multiplying by the distance moved. All that mechanical energy is transferred to the molecules by way of the collisions with the moving wall. But that heat energy will dissipate if we let the molecules cool back to their starting energies.
Now, there is no heat gradient across the hole and the only thing there is to drive molecules through the hole is a natural tendency to decreased order. That tendency is a manifestation of the 2LoT and in this case it has EVERYTHING to do with order.
On the topic of informational entropy, what I meant to say was that it is not defined well mathematically because we haven’t found a way to quantify it.
A molecule of mRNA that is random can be translated into a protein just like a designed molecule of mRNA, but the first protein will be useful while the second probably won’t. We haven’t figured out how to mathematically define what is in the second mRNA that we are conceptually calling information.
Maybe an economist could help.
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: You wrote, “Therefore, there is plenty of thermodynamic potential to drive whatever kind of activity one wishes to imagine on this planet.”
The sun provides an endless supply of energy but it cannot impose order. Sunlight is incoherent. The only mechanism for imposing order is natural selection. The environment is the designer, and there is not much information in an environment, especially one without organisms in it already.
Something interesting to consider in the theory of functional islands is “changes in the water level.” A predator might have an effect. That gives the environment more information for selection. Would that lower the local water level? Maybe reveal an isthmus here and there?
Bringing the Real World to Genesis: Why Evolution is an Idea that Won’t Die—IV [A Review]
@pauluc: I only have one abstract, in bone metabolism in early 1980’s.
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: But a closed system can be as big as the universe or as small as the molecules in a reaction, man, will you please get your P-Chem book out.
We can posit that a box is constructed around the Earth and Sun. Just like magic, evolution is now required to happen in a closed system. This closed system nonsense is a gradualist trick. It’s along the same lines as splitting off abiogenesis.
Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: “Let me tell you, a lot of physicists still do not really understand the 2LoT – that it really isn’t about informational entropy, but thermodynamic entropy alone.”
The problem is that we don’t know how to define what you are calling informational entropy. If we could, then it could be included, in the 2LoT.
Asimov was conceptually correct. Another name for the 2LoT is the “Arrow of Time.” It is seen when a recording of an event is played in reverse. If you watch a cue ball break shot, there is nothing in the other laws of physics that precludes that shot happening exactly in reverse with the cue ball being ejected toward the other end of the table. Only the 2LoT can tell us the movie is going backward.
I maintain that the ToE violates the comprehensive 2LoT.