Comment on Are LSU professors breaking the 8th commandment? by Sean Pitman M.D..

BobRyan: All living systems require the existence of biochemical reactions in order to “live”.

2. All of those chemical reactions exhibit the principle of increased entropy even without adding in “the sun” to each of the balanced chemical equations.

That’s just it… All chemical reactions do not exhibit the principle of increased thermodynamic entropy on a local level. For example, when photosynthesis occurs, the energy of the Sun is used to reduce the thermodynamic entropy of molecules so as to give them more, not less, stored chemical energy to use later to drive metabolic activity. This reduction of entropy on a local level does not necessarily come at a local thermodynamic entropy cost to the local system (though it does come at a thermodynamic entropy cost to the overall Sun-Earth system).

You may argue that when the energy is released from these molecules, then the entropy of the local system increases. While that is true, these molecules are recycled again and again with a cyclic pattern of increasing and decreasing thermodynamic entropy. The cycle itself is driven by the Sun’s energy. In other words, the cycle of living things is not a closed system.

Because of this, certain kinds of life can theoretically continue as long as the Sun shines. There is no violation of the laws of physics in this concept…

3. All transfer of energy is less than 100% efficient – (even in a living cell) – thus the Gibb’s energy increases with each one – regardless of where you are in our Galaxy when the chemical reaction takes place.

It doesn’t matter if the energy transfer is less than 100% efficient since the Sun provides more than enough extra energy to make up the difference when it comes to the energy needed to keep the processes of certain kinds of life going indefinitely… as long as the Sun shines…

4. Entropy can also be seen at the net total amount of energy in the system itself instead of “energy transfer by energy transfer increases in entropy” and when total system energy is being measured — you get the same result “including the sun” because the aggregate of all your localized increases in entropy plus all the suns localized increases in entropy — turns out to still be an “increase in entropy”.

The local increase in entropy can be decreased, locally, by using the energy from the Sun. Don’t you see that? I have the power to deliberately reduce the entropy of a local system by specifically directing the power of the Sun which is stored in my body. I can actively move the gas molecules of a two-box system to only one box, thereby reducing the entropy of that local system. I can then remove the separation between the two boxes, allowing the potential energy of the system to pass from one box to the other. I can then use this directional movement of molecules to do “useful work”. While it is true that this system increases its local entropy as the molecules move from one box to the other, toward equilibrium, and toward maximum local entropy for this closed system. It is also true that I can again reduce the entropy of this system by again invoking the energy from the Sun that has been put at my disposal…

Do you not understand that this is how living systems work? – reducing and increasing local entropy all powered by the Sun?

My point is simply that evolutionists observe their “massive decrease in entropy” problem at the local level for their “molecule to human mind story telling” and then “imagine” that they are solving it – by “appealing to the sun.”

They are solving it by appealing to the Sun. There is plenty of thermodynamic energy given off by the Sun to drive the thermodynamic energy demands of evolutionary progress – plenty of raw energy. The problem isn’t a limited supply of thermodynamic energy to do the work. The problem is with the informational complexity needed to transform the raw energy into the specific changes needed to increase functional informational complexity. That’s the problem with the ToE. It is an informational problem, not a problem with the 2ndLOTD…

Recall – that if the cell has no biochem reactions taking place — it is at equilibrium — it is dead.

It is not dead because of a lack of available thermodynamic energy, but because of a lack of functional informational complexity. It isn’t that it ran out of thermodynamic potential and then died. It is that it lost its original level of informational complexity which enabled it to use the available thermodynamic potential that it dies.

It is like the two-box system described above. If I have a fan between the boxes that will spin as the gas molecules pass from one box to the other, this fan is “alive” and will move as long as its fan blades are properly arranged to take advantage of the moving gas molecules – or until the gas molecules reach equilibrium between the two boxes.

So, there are two ways for the fan to “die” or no longer work. One way is for the thermodynamic potential to reach maximum entropy. The other way is for the fan blades to break or become disoriented.

The cell that dies did not die because of a lack of thermodynamic energy. There is abundant energy all around it. It died because it lost its ability to convert this energy to run its own metabolic needs. In other words, its little “fan blades” broke, so to speak, so that it can no longer take advantage of the thermodynamic potential that is still all around it, but out of reach due to a lack of necessary information or structural order within itself (order which is based on functional information).

This might seem like a subtle difference, but it is an important concept to grasp when trying to understand thermodynamic entropy…

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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