So what is Entropy?
To follow in the tradition of Maimonides. Entropy is NOT a tendency to disorder! I need to thank Joe Felsenstein for directing me to Frank L. Lambert’s insights on a previous thread probably best left alone. Here is a great site to elucidate Lambert’s insights:
http://entropysite.oxy.edu/
What about Evolution? Can complex systems arise naturally and spontaneously into higher tiers of complexity and order and opportunity—according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics— and all without divine intervention commonly described as Intelligent Design or Irreducible Complexity?
Sean Carroll has much to offer on this question:
Participants should refrain from arc-reflex boiler-plate diatribes echoing previously held opinion and first examine what Carroll has to say. Failure to do so will merit cyber-smack downs.
Uhmmm… you really should pay attention to some of my older posts
You would realize that often as not, I have more in common with your POV than John’s
Mind you, I remain in John’s debt as he has taught me much as his responses have always been direct and to the point
I will concede you have been more forthcoming of late, and I appreciate that
Pax
Easy, we just don’t talk in terms of cause and effect. It’s that simple.
You seem to think that science would stop if every discussion, hypothesis, objectives, experimental design, etc, could not possibly start without a prayer to Aristotle and a recitation about Aristotelian causes, like some kind of credo.
Edit: Sorry. Maybe I should ask how you imagine that’s done. How you imagine things going, rather than make that remark. In any event, if you have more questions, if I haven’t been clear enough, then what about leaving this discussion for later? For some thread that’s more appropriate for it? That would give you time to try and understand the ideas I tried to convey to you.
Good night everybody (yes, you too Mung).
Good night
When you return, I would like to share some Insights from Chasidus where time’s arrow can run backwards
😉
Or to hear some mystics tell it
No one has yet formulated a simple evolutionary model that has both energy flows for which entropy can be calculated, and increases in adaptation and in the energy content of the model biosphere, for which measures of information can be calculated. I think that this will be done, but there is at the moment no law that shows that when entropy of the system increases, a certain “amount” of evolution must have occurred.
Of course we do have every reason to believe that when the energy embodies in organisms increases, that there is no overall violation of the Second Law. (Granville Sewell argues that in doing this bookkeeping we are getting this result by adding in totally irrelevant processes. He is very wrong about that as the processes that need to be taken into account are the very flows of energy from the sun or from geochemicals that go into the organisms and enable them to survive and reproduce. Sewell more recently has quietly abandoned his argument that the Second Law makes evolution possible, and seems now to be talking about some other Law.)
What was her definition of the second law and entropy?
Nonsense.
Entropy,
To top tier companies the improvement process is critical and discovering the root cause to problems is the most efficient way to make progress. Companies that compete globally are not competitive without a solid methodical continuous improvement program that utilizes the scientific method at its core.
The scientists and engineers that you interface with may not talk about cause and effect but I would guess they are using its principles to make progress and validate new hypotheses.
You’re incorrect.
Show me a recent statement where he explicitly says that evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics, rather than some other second-law-like principle.
I blame Laplace!
Too bad he didn’t get to find out about Heisenberg’s principle.
*(As quoted by Sean Carroll in From Eternity to Here)
phoodoo,
So, after a post where God was not even mentioned, but instead was about the cryptic teleology underpinning evolutionist writing, your defence of the ‘Dunning-Kruger’ soundbite is apparently that 5 billion people, some of them evolutionists and some not, are experts in the field of ‘believing-in-God’, and I, who never even mentioned God either, am not. Chortle. Dunning-Kruger about Dunning-Kruger. How meta.
Mung,
Actually, yes. Entropy is all about the extent of departure from equilibrium. It does not stop being about that at equilibrium. Your essentially content-free comment notwithstanding.
Haha, Dunning-Kruger! Gotcha! Like totally!!
BTW: Anyone who uses the phrase Dunning-Kruger is a fucking moron. And anyone who thinks they are being clever saying Dunning-Kruger is too dam stupid to even qualify as a moron.
stcordova,
You yourself seem to be making the mistake of confusing informatic and energetic approaches that you elsewhere berate (other) Creationists for. You regard a string of left-handed acids as less likely than a racemic string. This is Shannon, not Gibbs. The peptide bond is the same in all cases. All a D acid is, is an L acid with a hydrogen where the L has a side chain, and a side chain where the L acid has hydrogen. All that you need to effect that is some kind of filter – one through which only acids with hydrogen at a specified position can pass. It does not have to be a ‘thermodynamic filter’, and it is not usefully analogised to a random coin-tossing machine.
And, all this Shannon/Gibbs confusion applies only to peptides condensing out of solution, which I think thermodynamically implausible anyway, regardless of the racemic proportion.
phoodoo,
Might I refer you to this comment? Chortle!
Allan Miller,
http://cdn.playbuzz.com/cdn/9f8316db-2ae3-4c66-ad53-9bb197c89b11/1ce60b8c-aba5-404d-93b7-1703da4244d3.jpg
Chirality is something of a red herring anyway. It’s a curious mental model one has that can effect any precise sequence of amino acids along a peptide, but cannot distinguish D from L.
People seem to imagine that the mechanism of condensation must involve some kind of assay on molecular weight, or the stoichiometric composition of the molecules themselves, or the precise value of hydrophobicity or net charge – the kind of thing we might be troubled by, up here in our macro world as we try to probe the micro with gel columns and chemical assays. But ‘down there’, in what needs to be a fairly precise peptide-glueing system to work at all, the task of distinguishing isomers is trivial. If you can distinguish between 2 side chains at a given location, how much more easy must it be to distinguish hydrogen from (a different) side chain at that position?
Tough to talk about evolution, and use the words you really mean. So much easier to say the opposite.
phoodoo,
It wasn’t even about evolution, but about chemical reactions, but writing becomes tedious if one slavishly avoids teleological language. I feel no compulsion to do so just to avoid this lame charge.
Water seeks its own level. Trees compete for light. Initiation complexes recruit cofactors. None of this means that anyone really thinks there is intent in the action.
Can Evolution be possible if Entropy is true; or rather, is Evolution possible because Entropy is true!
It doesn’t matter whether entropy is true or not, or evolution is true or not…It’s all about control and money…
These are some of my favorite quote on the theme:
“The Academy guards, using neo-Darwinism as an inquisitory tool, superimpose a gigantic super-structure of mechanism and hierarchy that protects the throbbing biosphere from being directly sensed by these new scientists — people most in need of sensing it. The dispensers of the funds for scientific research and education and other opportunity makers, herd the best minds and bodies into sterile laboratories and white-walled university cloisters to be catechized with dogmatic nonsense to such an extent that many doctoral graduates in the biological sciences cannot distinguish a nucleic acid solution from a cell suspension, a sedimentary from an igneous rock, a kelp from a cyanobacterium, or rye from ergot.– Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, stating (1997, p. 279):
Or
“More and more, like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, today’s universities and professional societies guard their knowledge. Collusively, the university biology curriculum, the textbook publishers, the National Science Foundation review committees, the Graduate Record examiners, and the various microbiological, evolutionary, and zoological societies map out domains of the known and knowable; they distinguish required from forbidden knowledge, subtly punishing the trespassers with rejection and oblivion; they award the faithful liturgists by granting degrees and dispersing funds and fellowships. Universities and academies, well within the boundaries of given disciplines (biology in my case), determine who is permitted to know and just what it is that he or she may know. Biology, botany, zoology, biochemistry, and microbiology departments within U.S. universities determine access to knowledge about life, dispensing it at high prices in peculiar parcels called credit hours.”
Margulis, L. and D. Sagan (1997): Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
Can one imagine the effect it would have if neo-Darwinism was exposed for what it is and was no longer preached and funded?
A lot of people would be unemployed… a lot of tax-payer money saved…
There is no surprise Darwin’s faithful are defending their god do death…
Why, why should it be tedious to write what you mean to say? Why is it tedious to say the lucky trees get light? To say water is affected by gravity? Its hard?
J-Mac,
Excellent quote! I will be writing a whole OP about this.
phoodoo,
No, it isn’t hard, but I see no reason to tailor my word choice to suit your demands. If I say ‘water finds its own level’, and someone genuinely thinks I intend a strong statement about water’s intent, I can only shrug. If someone pretends that confusion, just to score weedy rhetorical points, I just shrug harder.
Allan Miller,
Is it the same reason evolution authors do it? Because they don’t care what anyone thinks?
phoodoo,
Of course they care. But they also assume a certain basic willingness and/or ability to comprehend in their readers.
For example, you were able to work out all by yourself what I mean by ‘water seeks its own level’. Without help, you were able to translate the statement into non-teleological terms, so don’t need me to pander. Even while you try to undermine this use of language, you show that your confusion over it is manufactured.
Allan Miller,
Evolutionists don’t write about water much.
Besides “Water seeks its own level” is a metaphor about class society. One wonders why you would use this metaphor.
phoodoo,
Ah, so now you suddenly misunderstand me after all? Hey ho.
So, what we can expect in the future after this little side-bar is that I will continue to use whatever language I feel like to express myself, and phoodoo will keep pounding his nail. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Now, back to scheduled programming …
Rather than the metaphor “ banging your head against a brick wall” ? I wondered that too.
Let me rephrase: To top tier companies the improvement process is critical and discovering the reasons for their problems is the most efficient way to make progress.
See? The word “cause” is not necessary. We can explain things without using those words. You might complain that “cause” is still implied. Maybe. But by being free of the shackles of that framework, I don’t care about the kind of things I might find. Whether it’s a continuum pattern, a probability distribution, a feedback loop, or anything where the labels “cause/effect” would be more problematic than helpful. You might then complain that we could call the feedback loop a cause composed of causes and effects that become one and the other from one time to the next. Then you’d be making my very point: that the concepts can be made into anything and thus can quickly become meaningless. More of an exercise of stubbornness than of understanding.
Sure. However, the scientific method is not “you shall use a cause/effect conceptual framework for everything you do.”
Cause/effect is a conceptual framework, not a principle. We could insist and force everything, every phenomenon, every pattern, every whatever you want, even every uncertainty, into a cause/effect wording. My point is that we don’t need to think in those terms to understand anything. A pattern of development can be artificially cut into timeframes and each preceding bit be called a cause and the following an effect, but that would be too cumbersome. Better to call it a pattern, and better to understand when things can be better conceptualized as a continuum, than as instances of cause/effect. A feedback mechanism might be described as causes and effects exchanging their “roles” from one moment to the next, I prefer to just call it a feedback mechanism, because trying to fit it into a cause/effect conceptual framework is not necessary to approach and understand any of it.
We have to understand that our conceptual frameworks are just that, conceptual frameworks. When we want to understand something, we are better off without the shackles of having to conform to unjustifiable expectations, such as framing everything as cause/effect. I’m never expected to work under a single conceptual framework. I’m just expected to produce results, to produce knowledge, to produce answers.
Better now?
I suggest you try and digest what I tried to explain before answering.
Exactly.
Excellent idea. I think such an OP would provide an excellent occasion to rethink the raison d’etre of TSZ
Creationism has evolved becoming far sloppier and slimier than its previous sophist incarnations
ID was deemed a rewrite of Creationism-Lite requiring a new approach for the “Wedge Strategy”
We are now witnessing “Teach the Controversy” and TSZ is enabling the promulgation of falsehood
There is no more controversy: just as there is no more controversy about the Heliocentric THEORY of our solar system
TSZ is in some dim obtuse minds and in other shaper more nefarious minds; confirming there indeed exists a controversy where none exists
TSZ is becoming an obstacle to clear thinking and good social policy
I agree : another OP is needed
Neo-Darwinism is exposed for what it is all the time at Universities. It’s an attempt at gathering everything that was understood and/or known about the evolutionary process, at the time when it was proposed.
Neo-Darwinism is neither preached nor funded. It’s just part of the history of evolutionary theory.
I doubt it. We expose neo-Darwinism quite a bit for what it is. Nobody has lost their jobs because of that yet.
I’d bet you’re smart enough to understand that the “neo” just before “Darwinism” means that it is not just about Darwin, let alone as some kind of god. If Darwin was some kind of god, it would be a sacrilege to talk about any “neo.” There would be no need for modifications and improvements in the overall theory of evolution. No need to try and find problems in it. We would just recite a credo and be done with it. Instead the very Modern Synthesis, for example, described problems and identified areas in need of more work at the time.
Lynn Margulis is one of those great scientists worth knowing about. I read her book (with her son) “What is life,” which is an excellent read. She championed the idea of endosymbiosis. She’s complaining for very good reasons, but not about the scientific status of evolution, but about social tendencies mixed up with how hard it is to change paradigms.
Endosymbiosis was challenged when first proposed because it was a huge departure from what was available at the time. It’s natural that the first reaction would be of skepticism and strong push back. It was talking about a huge step in an evolutionary event, and, surely, if scientists had to change their minds about evolutionary rhythms and events, and etc, they needed much more convincing. But this is natural. We cannot just accept any new proposal without making sure that it has enough merits to forget a prior paradigm. Guess who won? Lynn won. Why? Because the evidence for endosymbiosis was strong enough, that’s why. Evolutionary paradigms had to adjust to this new kinds of events. That’s how science progresses. The impact was so strong that endosymbiosis is part of introductory textbooks of biology. I cannot expect that something that big would be accepted without reservations the very first time it was proposed.
So, make what you want of those paragraphs. They don’t mean that scientists worship Darwin as a god, they don’t mean that evolution is taught as a dogma. They just mean that scientists are people too, and that paradigm shifting knowledge needs pretty strong evidence before being accepted and incorporated.
colewd,
I won’t write about this cause/effect thing in this thread any more. I think that now we’re just repeating ourselves. So, I invite you to try and understand the points I made.
I’m just insisting here: exactly, exactly, exactly!
Good question! So what is entropy?
For that matter, what is energy?
That doesn’t even make sense. The further from equilibrium a system is the more entropy it has? The further from equilibrium a system is the less entropy it has?
You are aware, I hope, of cases where entropy does not change. How does that fit in with your view of entropy as extent of departure from equilibrium?
Entropy,
Fair enough
Just one thought to contemplate. Are methods important to science?
Does saying this only once really work? I thought you had to repeat it, like a mantra.
The problem with this claim is that people can look and see for themselves that there is controversy. So it makes them suspicious of someone who claims otherwise. I mean, if there’s no controversy, there’s no need to go around declaring it.
Seriously, when is the last time you passed a Gravity is Real billboard, or seen a The Earth is Not Flat bumper sticker? Wow,. I think I just came up with a business idea. Making signs and bumper stickers declare what everyone knows to be true.
God Exists.
Seems to me methods are a means, not an end. Entropy has been very clear about what the objective of science is, and also that there’s no causation principle on which any method relies. You can now insist on failing to understand as you always do.
Yes I berate them because they are remain in their state of refusal, they can’t even do basic entropy calculations as I have done, yet they bloviate away on stuff they don’t even expend any effort to study (as in doing basic calculations on a cube of ice!).
The Landaur principle can be stripped of its informatics layer and there is raw physics and probability at the root. If 500 fair coins are 50% heads, there isn’t any energy needed to move it toward the natural expectation of 50% heads. If a tornado hits the coins it is likely to leave it at about 50% heads give or take a few standard deviation. In contrast, if the coins start out at 100% heads and a tornado hits it and flips all the coins making them about 50% heads, it will take energy to restore them to 100% heads. I alluded to that fact here and there over the years, but it is a subtle point. One can put an informatics spin on it, but at the root this is basic probability and the obvious need of expending energy to take something far away from an “equilibrium” state of 50% heads.
Landauer estimated the minimum energy is 0.0172 eV at 20 degrees celcius. Obviously it’s going to take a LOT more energy than that to make 500 fair coins 100% from a state of 50% heads. But at the molecular level you have the same issue, and now the 0.0172 eV per particle starts to have some meaning chemically as it is the Gibbs free energy change needed per particle (amino acid).
Whether trivial or not, distinguishing and re-orienting them require at least 0.0172 electron volts per particle at 20 degrees celcius. The energy can be available by a variety of sources, but the problem is the COUPLING mechanism. There is lots of energy in dynamite, but without a coupling mechanism all the dynamite in the world won’t build a skyscraper.
The Gibbs free energy profile of homochiral systems shows it is only in a quasi equilibrium that tends to decay. This is confirmed by experiments showing spontaneous racemization of peptides. The same could be said of so many bio-molecules. The natural direction of chemical systems therefore seems to be toward non-life, not life. Personally, I find such considerations hard to run from.
In chemistry you have reactants and expected products from the reactants under given conditions. It seems to me, whatever pre-biotic soup is suggested for the starting reactants, whatever dynamic environmental conditions, something like complex life isn’t the chemical expectation of the product. You can believe that’s the case, but let’s not pretend there is actually a credible chemical theory. Just ask James Tour or Richard Smalley (Nobel Prize Chemistry).
Your view reminds me of Robert Shapiro’s views, who ironically gave favorable comments to pro-ID chemists like Dean Kenyon:
Mung,
Well, the further the lesser, but yeah. Given that the tendency is for entropy to increase or remain the same (2nd Law).
It fits in fine, thanks for asking. I’m not getting what you’re not getting.
stcordova,
Methinks you did not appreciate my point, since your response is not responsive to it. It’s not about coin tossing, nor any analogue thereof. If one can distinguish side chains, positionally – a necessary precondition for specificity – one gets chiral distinction for free.
I don’t know what actual nano-scale chemical system your model refers to, that is blind to side chain positional placement, and yet side-chain-specific beyond that little quirk – when specificity is all about side chains.
Yes of course it is, and I concede (and have said many times) that I do not consider ‘proteins-first’ plausible for that reason, among others. But since it’s ‘really’ about the delta-G of condensation, what on earth do coins have to do with anything?
Many biological molecules are chiral, their statistics (as far as L or D) follow the binomial distribution when the Gibbs free energy decreases as it will tend to do over time. Fair coins are a good illustration of the binomial distribution.
Now, I’m fully aware of chiral amplification experiments, but that is for pools of monomers, not long peptides. The Binomial distribution will eventually prevail for chiral molecules in the polymerized state assuming there are polymers still standing after the ravages of time.
You not only have the delta-G of condensation, but the delta-G associated with maintaining (or creating) homochirality. You’ve given two delta-G’s that are against spontaneous formation of life for a given route (like proteins first, which you have said you rejected anyway).
Now we could express the delta-G problem in terms of delta-S (entropy), but I think I don’t really want to go there. 🙂
So we don’t know exactly what the chemical makeup was or the conditions or exactly what the something was but we do not expect it is possible? Seems to me there are too many unknowns in that equation to have empirically based expectations.
Probably it would be an hypothesis, but I agree if anyone claims to know how life arose on Earth ,it would not be based on our present scientific knowledge . Just curious, do all Nobel winners in chemistry agree on every aspect of chemistry?
stcordova,
That’s just gibberish [eta: OK, less contentiously, irrelevant at best].
To repeat: if amino acid specificity can be achieved, homochirality is obtained for free. There is no meaningful application of delta-G for exclusion of isomers in a biochemical system, certainly not as one that is separable from ‘general specificity’. Amino acids aren’t coins.
Good grief. You really don’t understand Gibbs free energy.
It’s not for free, it is priced into the process that creates amino acid specificity. The proof of that is the negative Gibbs free energy change going from homochiral state to racemic state. What you said is like saying you can get an increase in Gibbs free energy in one reaction for free if it is coupled with another reaction where there is a reduction in Gibbs free energy.
Distinguishable chemicals have an associated entropy of mixing, therefore delta-G applies for exclusion of isomers. I provided a link to a book earlier that agrees with me. You of course can link to a book or reference that agrees with you. That’s only fair.
Contrast with textbook chemistry:
https://chem.libretexts.org/Core/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry/Thermodynamics/Ideal_Systems/Thermodynamics_of_Mixing
Have a nice day. 🙂
stcordova,
So it’s not separate from it! This is actually my point. You will chatter about coins at the drop of a hat, when in fact chirality is irrelevant.
You have a basic (imaginary) system that involves some mechanism of filtration, differential availability or differential competition of one isomer during peptide synthesis. Subsequent to that, you have a tendency to racemisation of that polymer. That’s a completely separate system, joined to the first only because the product of the first is the substrate of the second. You don’t determine the kinetic constraints of one reaction by those on a succeeding one into which the product flows.
The second reaction(s) tell you nothing about the first.
It’s not like saying that, no. It’s like saying that, if you have specificity at the side chain attachment site, or the hydrogen (take your pick) you can distinguish isomers at no extra thermodynamic cost over all other distinctions made at that site.
It doesn’t apply with any more force for isomers than it does for any other molecule in the vicinity of the ‘peptide-glueing system’. The obsession with isomers is a red herring. There are actually 500+ possible amino acids, plus a bunch of unknown solutes in the system you claim to have knowledge of. It’s silly to concentrate on the competition between isomers – alpha acid isomers, yet – ignoring all other molecules in the solution, just because they happen to be difficult for us to distinguish ‘out here’.
stcordova,
Any plausible prebiotic environment is stuffed with molecules of all shapes and sizes. Good luck with calculating the delta-G of this system of unknown constitution. One thing you know for sure though: it’s positive! 😀