@Sean Pitman: You wrote, “Therefore, there is plenty of thermodynamic …

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

@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?

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: 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.


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.