@Sean Pitman: Well, I think you are a little younger …

Comment on Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University by George Evans.

@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.

George Evans Also Commented

Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman: From the wiki article on conformational entropy, “It can be shown that the variation of configuration entropy of thermodynamic systems (e.g., ideal gas, and other systems with a vast number of internal degrees of freedom) in thermodynamic processes is EQUIVALENT to the variation of the macroscopic entropy defined as dS = δQ/T, where δQ is the heat exchanged between the system and the surrounding media, and T is temperature. Therefore configuration entropy IS THE SAME AS macroscopic entropy.”


Louie Bishop Testifies, Again, about His Experience at La Sierra University
@Sean Pitman:You almost persuadeth me. But please look at this paper. I think we may be on the brink of a breakthrough in the understanding of entropy.

http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~rbaron/TPC_11_2006.pdf


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?


Recent Comments by George Evans

Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: You wrote, “In the Adventist tradition I am not dualist and accept that our brains are simply part of the natural world. They are not the repository of the soul or an antennae for the supernatural world but are highly complex elaborations of the invertebrates head ganglion.”

I didn’t realize we had this tradition. Now that I think about it, you seem to be voicing an idea I call neo-deism. I have used the term anti-pantheism in Adventist circles for obvious reasons. As a people we got so afraid of pantheism that we bolted to the other side of the road, and apparently developed a new tradition when I wasn’t looking.

This is very interesting. Until now I hadn’t understood the nexus of anti-pantheism opening the door for theistic evolution. Thank you, Paul.


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: A bee is not an extrinsic agent. Bees are not artistic.


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Sean Pitman: From Merriam-Webster:

1. a : something created by humans usually for a practical purpose; especially : an object remaining from a particular period
b : something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual


Gary Gilbert, Spectrum, and Pseudogenes
@Pauluc: I think you are the only scientist that defines a beehive as an artifact.


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.