Granville Sewell has a video up on YouTube:
Mark Chu-Carroll has a take-down of the argument here, but I’d be interested to know what the ID proponents who post here make of it. It seems to me so self-evidently wrong, that I’d expect ID proponents to be rather keen to point out the errors, but it gets a shout-out at UD.
The reason it seems to me so evidently wrong is nothing to do with intelligent systems versus non-intelligent systems, but that quite simply, biological organisms do not violate the second law of thermodynamics, which states, as Flanders and Swann ineradicably taught me: you can’t pass heat from a cooler to a hotter:
In order for biological organisms to develop, reproduce, populate an environment, and evolve, they must utilise energy. And they do. Plants store sunlight energy as sugar, and then use that to grow and reproduce. Animals eat plants – or other animals, in order to gain energy, and grow and reproduce. As a result, the heat is dissipated, the universe as a whole gets slightly cooler (though there might be temporary local rises, as when I tried to climb a little mountain in Anglesey yesterday), and will continue to do so, as far as we know, until the whole universe is a uniform temperature and no heat can pass from one region to another.
So the apparent argument that biological organisms violate the second law of thermodynamics, therefore intelligent design, is based on a completely false premise. They don’t. There may be be perfectly good arguments for an ID but biological organisms violating the 2LoT isn’t one of them. Do any of our ID-supporting members disagree with this? If so, can you say why?
The boast at UD of 2000 views is after Sandwalk and perhaps other blogs advertised the existence of this piece of folly.
I guess I’m curious about what ID proponents make of it. It always annoys me when people make a bad argument for something I happen to think there are good arguments for, and this argument has nothing to do with CSI or Irreducible Complexity, or even The Ontological Argument for God.
It’s just fallacious physics!
This paper is so bad that I have often entertained the suspicion that it is basically a taunt. The intention would be to drag a few scientists into a debate from which ID/creationists can leverage “respectability” and get a free ride on some scientist’s coattails.
This is one of the hackneyed techniques of getting attention that Morris and Gish used in their attempts to get attention back in the 1970s and 80s.
They have had nearly 50 years to get it right; yet they drag out the same old misconceptions over and over after they have been dormant for a period of time. Apparently ID/creationists are operating on a presumed forgetfulness in the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation.
I also suspect that there is not one follower of ID/creationism that can read or dissect this paper. In that regard it is the sam as Abel’s stuff.
Well his paper here, is quite “mathy”, but that video is really straightforward, and by the same token, straightforwardly wrong!
Obviously a tornado will wreck a house, but that doesn’t mean that re-building houses after a tornado violates the second law. Or if it did, you’d think that Newton would have noticed!
And we are still waiting on the positive evidence that blind and undirected chemical processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter- or construct any new, useful and functional protein complex.
For all of this “blah, blah, blah”, you guys still lack supporting data.
Strange that you never consider that.
The sure way to demonstrate that we are wrong is to demonstrate that you are right as the way to our design inference is through your position- directly through, as mandated by Newton’s First rule and the explanatory filter.
Yes agencies can rebuild- that is pretty much the point.
For those who haven’t read the comments on Mark Chu-Carroll’s blog, Mike Elzinga’s description of entropy in both classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is the most concise, clear, and complete summary I’ve seen. I wish it had been at the beginning of every one of my thermo textbooks.
His concept test is also excellent. No one who can’t pass it should feel themselves qualified to discuss the topic even casually.
No, the point is Granville Sewell’s claim that by doing so they violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They don’t. They have to consume energy to do the building and they are less than 100% efficient at using it. He is simply, and obviously, wrong.
Sewell’s paper discussed in the video (the one that almost made it to Applied Mathematics Letters) can be found here. We can discuss the paper, which is not too technical. It’s mathy bits are there just for show.
It would be fun if Sewell himself showed up here. Would Elizabeth or Joe like to invite him?
I will have to look into that but I doubt you are correct as ID is the answer to the law.
Elizabeth- The whole point of ID is that agencies can get around the law by rebuilding
What agents get around the 2nd law? Not humans for sure. They create massive amounts of entropy as living organisms.
oleg- my explanation was in the post you responded to.
Humans can and do rebuild- humans can and do maintain equipment that would break-down if they didn’t.
But what makes you think they “get around the law” at all? The law does not state that you cannot rebuild unless you are an “agency”. It says nothing at all about whether you can “rebuild or not”. It merely says that you can’t do it without any breakfast!
I don’t doubt that humans can rebuild what is destroyed by a hurricane. However, they do not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics in the process of doing so. That was my point.
Yes, of course they can. But they do not violate the 2LoT when they do.
I’ve invited Dr Sewell, although obviously I made it clear that I myself consider his argument and conclusions obviously wrong! But I also said, which is true, that I’d be delighted and honoured if he’d stop by. That’s what this place is for – respectful discourse.
*stares hard at Joe*
Exactly- I never said we violate it- we get around it.
What would violate the law is if our houses were rebuilt without agency involvement.
Do you know what entropy and the second law are?
What is it that you think “agencies” are “getting around?” This has no meaning in physics.
That’s an unorthodox statement of the 2nd law. Can you show that it is equivalent to either Kelvin’s or Clausius’s statement?
Mike, we can do things with nature that nature, operating freely cannot do.
Well anytime you want to demonstrate nature, operating freely building houses, I will take it back
Can we please have this thread NOT be all about Joe G?
ETA: moved some OT posts to Guano. If you want to discuss them further, feel free to do so in the Penguin Colony.
Cheers
Lizzie
I thought the Sewell video was wonderfully ironic.
He uses a tornado to tell the story. Yet a tornado is a region of lower entropy than the surrounding environment, yet formed by entirely natural processes.
Sewell’s argument, if valid, would prove that a tornado could not form by itself and could only have resulted from an intelligent tornado designer.
My point about agencies is that humans can and do maintain equipment- we can prevent rust or do something about it when it appears- we counter the effects of entropy.
Energy in living systems rolls down a gradient of potential energy largely carried by electrons, and this gradient is closely analogous to gradients of electical potential, or a gravitational incline. You can only stay level or go down unless you add energy. But you can release energy by going down.
The whole system is like a giant game of Mousetrap – energetic electrons are fed in at the top (energised by sunlight or present in molecules already at a higher chemical potential than the next link in the chain). Then they are passed down an electron transport chain, and the free energy released as they ‘roll’ pumps protons against an electrochemical gradient – a tiny pumped storage scheme. The gradient is one of both charge and concentration (hence electrochemical). The energy is stored in the disequilibrium of both these quantities across a membrane, and can be released by allowing the protons to fall back down, utilising the energy to make ATP.
This ATP goes everywhere in the cell (not least to be used as one of the building blocks of RNA or, deoxygenated, of DNA). Wherever energy is required, ATP (or one of the other nucleic acid monomers) is there to supply it. You want to make glucose? You need energy – carbon dioxide and water are already at the bottom of the energy gradient, and you need to put some in to make the chemical bonds of glucose from these units. In doing so, part of the ATP energy is stored as chemical energy in the bonds of the glucose. This can be released on demand and passed down another electron transport chain, again to pump protons and generate (a bit less) ATP.
Plants lock in solar energy by turning carbon dioxide and water into complex compounds, cattle come along and eat them, using the stored plant energy to drive their own lives, we eat the cattle, and ultimately, carbon dioxide and water are regenerated. And throughout this system, the initial solar energy captured by the plants is falling down a gradient of potential, from transport chain to proton gradient to ATP bond energy to glucose bond energy to cow to 2nd proton gradient to ATP again to ‘cow-stuff” to us to 3rd proton gradient … All 2LoT means for Life is that we can never go UP the ‘mousetrap’ gradient without the input of energy.
We can use the released energy to alphabetise our cd’s (create order), but we can also carry buckets of water uphill to drive a small turbine, or crank an old-style gramophone, or walk, or make love, or replicate DNA, or translate DNA into protein. There is no free lunch – we cannot hook a giraffe up to the mains and use it to generate energy unless we feed it.
I know that is your point, Joe, and no-one is disputing that humans maintain equipment. All we dispute is the idea that by doing so we violate the second law of thermodynamics. We don’t increase entropy when we polish our cars. We might get rid of some rust, but in so doing we increase the entropy of the sausage we ate for breakfast. As Allan puts so beautifully 🙂
Who says we violate the law by doing so?
Is it your interpretation?
Well, that’s what Granville Sewell seems to be saying. And we are disagreeing.
He seems to be saying: look, life violates the 2LoT, therefore we need to look at life differently from the rest of nature. Here he is, in Mark C-C’s transcription:
Then he ends up:
No, it doesn’t, because evolution – and living things whether evolving or not – do not violate the 2LoT.
In other words, however mysterious life may be, there’s nothing mysterious about its thermodynamics. It obeys the 2LoT like everything else.
I’ll put these up here for quick reference in case they are needed.
These are the basic methods for computing entropy.
Where are the order/disorder and “information” in that? Creationists need to explain where Clausius’s coining of the word entropy means that everything tends to disorder and decay.
Heat flows from higher temperatures to lower temperatures.
Creationists need to explain this fact. Why does that happen? What is temperature?
This is a little exercise everyone should do to demonstrate to themselves the meaning of entropy tending toward a maximum in an ISOLATED system, provided that the constituents can exchange energy.
I won’t spoil the fun by telling you how to do this little exercise just yet. Some may want to use calculus; others may want to just fiddle with the numbers. Figure it out according to your level of mathematical ability.
Creationists need to explain where the order/disorder and “information” are in this calculation; especially in the light of that specific example with the two-state system.
Creationists also need to learn the significance of
1/T = ∂S/∂E
where E is the total energy of the system.
This is the definition of temperature from statistical mechanics. This expression also holds in classical thermodynamics.
Creationists need to learn that entropy and the second law of thermodynamics are absolutely nothing like what Henry Morris and ID/creationist leaders have told them.
No. Entropy still happens, local decreases are paid for in the bigger system.
I’m not convinced there is even much of a local decrease. If I build a house, I’m not decreasing entropy, I’m just building a house. It doesn’t have more usable thermal energy at the end than the materials did at the beginning. And I certainly have less. I will need my dinner.
Mike Elzinga,
Thanks, Mike.
I never said nor implied entropy doesn’t still happen-
Elizabeth your dogs are running loose again…
OK Elizabeth so it is all your interpretation- thanks, got it
Well, how are you interpreting Granville Sewell’s words? Do you think he is saying that life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics?
Joe, here is the abstract from Granville Sewell’s paper:
(my bold)
Sewell’s confusion has more to do with logic than with physics.
Here is my distillation of his argument:
Sewell’s mistake is to implicitly assume that anything allowed by the SLOT is possible or even likely. But this is ridiculous. The SLOT allows a marble block sitting in the sun to form itself into a sculpture, but there are a lot of other reasons why this won’t ever happen. A phenomenon has to conform to all of the laws of physics in order to be possible.
Sewell is asking more of the SLOT than it can deliver. The SLOT forbids violations of the SLOT, and nothing else.
Sewell’s math in his Equations (1) through (5) is not relevant to anything he argues. The equations have extremely limited validity in thermodynamic systems. They make the assumption that the temperature field (a scalar field) and the heat flux (a vector field) are spatially continuous and spatially differentiable. This is a severe restriction on the kinds of systems he is discussing. This type of calculation is not appropriate for large classes of systems (such as two-state systems, for example). Sewell is borrowing from an engineering application.
And Sewell is simply misusing these equations when he plugs in his “X-entropy” in what amounts to “cooking the books” to argue against his own misconceptions about the second law and “entropy compensation.” There is also no such thing as “entropy compensation,” especially in the way Sewell seems to think of it.
In thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, the flow of matter into and out of a system involves changes in energy because matter interacts with matter. The proper way to deal with this in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is by what is referred to as the chemical potential, which is the amount of energy per particle that is involved in the transfer of particles into and out of the system. In fact, chemists and physicists use this notion in order to actually measure particle interactions. This has absolutely nothing to do with order/disorder.
All of Sewell’s misconceptions are revealed already in his abstract (there is no such thing as “X-order”).
Sewell also elaborates his misconceptions in his caricature of Kenneth Ford’s somewhat sloppy description of the second law. What Ford said is technically correct, but this is not seen the change of order/disorder one observes by running video of a tornado backward or forward.
Ford was using an analogy, and doing it without realizing the conflation it was causing between the order/disorder of debris in a tornado with the backwards flow of energy from low temperature to high temperature without additional energy input. It was a poor analogy.
These types of faux pas were not uncommon in textbooks for non-majors or in popularizations. The physics profession has tried to deal with these well-meaning but confusing analogies as well as with the intensely marketed misconceptions that began with Henry Morris and Duane Gish.
Sewell’s elaborate story of a transition from a barren Earth to a Chicago skyline is also a misrepresentation. The second law was working that entire time, and entropy was increasing. Entropy has nothing to do with order/disorder. But matter interacting with matter and condensing has everything to do with it.
We in physics have moved on; Sewell is attempting to reanimate a zombie.
Just in case that are some who are actually trying to read Sewell’s rejected paper, here are some math explanations.
The del operator, ∇, is a directional derivative when applied to a scalar field and a measure of “outward flow” or “divergence” when applied to a vector field. The equivalence of “divergence” throughout a volume of space and the “outward flow” through the surface enclosing that space is given by the Divergence Theorem. The del operator is defined in Cartesian coordinates as
∇ = i∂/∂x + j∂/∂y + k∂/∂z.
Sewell says after his Equation (3) that he obtained his Equation (4) “after doing a (multidimensional) integration by parts.”
Actually it is much more straight-forward if one simply looks at the following:
∇⋅(J/U) = (1/U)∇⋅J + J⋅∇ (1/U).
For those who remember a little calculus, this is reminiscent of the “product rule” for the differentiation of a product.
This then reduces to
∇⋅(J/U) = (1/U)∇⋅J – (1/U^2) J⋅∇U.
Rearranging, we get
(1/U)∇⋅J = (1/U^2) J⋅∇U + ∇⋅(J/U).
This is the substitution made in the integral Sewell calls Equation (3).
Then the Divergence Theorem is used on the second term on the right-hand side of the equation and we end up with his Equation (4).
But, as this all shows, the fields must be continuous and differentiable; and that is a severe restriction to only a few engineering applications.
Sewell is an applied mathematician. He knows how to solve partial differential equations describing heat transfer, but he isn’t well versed in physics. His definition of entropy,
is quite unorthodox. Heat is a form of transfer of energy. Entropy is defined in thermodynamics as a function of the system’s current state. I am not at all certain that his definition of entropy is equivalent to the standard one.
His “X-entropy” is reinvention of the wheel. He defines it as a thermodynamic variable conjugate to concentration (e.g., of carbon). That quantity is actually known to physicists and chemists as the chemical potential μ. Indeed, a nonzero gradient of the chemical potential creates a particle current, J = −K∇μ. It is well known that particles flow from high to low chemical potential.
That, however, has nothing to do with the 2nd law, entropy, and information. Instead, it is a consequence of energy minimization. Sewell is barking up the wrong tree.
This is from Rudolf Clausius in Annalen der Physik und Chemie, Vol. 125, p. 353, 1865, under the title “Ueber verschiedene für de Anwendung bequeme Formen der Hauptgleichungen der mechanischen Wärmetheorie.” (“On Several Convenient Forms of the Fundamental Equations of the Mechanical Theory of Heat.”)
It is also available in A Source Book in Physics, Edited by William Francis Magie, Harvard University Press, 1963, page 234.
(Note: Q represents the quantity of heat, T the absolute temperature, and S will be what Clausius names as entropy)
…….
We obtain the equation
∫dQ/T = S – S0
which, while somewhat differently arranged, is the same as that which was formerly used to determine S.
If we wish to designate S by a proper name we can say of it that it is the transformation content of the body, in the same way that we say of the quantity U that it is the heat and work content of the body.
However, since I think it is better to take the names of such quantities as these, which are important for science, from the ancient languages, so that they can be introduced without change into all the modern languages, I propose to name the magnitude S the entropy of the body, from the Greek word η τροπη, a transformation.
I have intentionally formed the word entropy so as to be as similar as possible to the word energy, since both these quantities, which are to be known by these names, are so nearly related to each other in their physical significance that a certain similarity in their names seemed to me advantageous.
…….
Clausius apparently translates η τροπη from the Greek as Umgestaltung and not Umdrehung. However, this doesn’t matter because he modified the word to entropy for the reasons he indicated.
That’s it, there is nothing about order or disorder anywhere in this coining of the term entropy. It has never been otherwise.
On the other hand, here is Henry Morris’ pseudo-scholarship back in 1973.
…..
The very terms themselves express contradictory concepts. The word “evolution” is of course derived from a Latin word meaning “out-rolling”. The picture is of an outward-progressing spiral, an unrolling from an infinitesimal beginning through ever broadening circles, until finally all reality is embraced within.
“Entropy,” on the other hand, means literally “in-turning.” It is derived from the two Greek words en (meaning “in”) and trope (meaning “turning”). The concept is of something spiraling inward upon itself, exactly the opposite concept to “evolution.” Evolution is change outward and upward, entropy is change inward and downward.
…..
I remain, in the Skeptical Zone, highly skeptical that the 2lot was violated.
😀
Geez the simple way is to just ask him. Why is that so difficult for you?
Joe, pay attention:
LoL! She could have asked him about that in the invitation- duh
And strange that we are still waiting for the evidence that refutes what Sewell said- IOW there is still no evidence taht blind and undirected processes can produce a living organism from non-living matter.
It would be great if he appeared here to discuss the whole thing. The ID fans we have here are not up to the task.
Up to what task? You still don’t have any EVIDENCE to discuss.
But nice to see you have backed away from your initial tard.