Springtime is approaching. The 2LoT truthers are flocking at Uncommon Descent, hoping to find mates so that they can pass their second law inanity on to the next generation. Until yesterday, I was observing their bizarre mating rituals up close. Now I have been banned (again) from the nesting site, for pointing out a particularly ugly and infertile egg laid by kairosfocus.
Many others have been banned from the site as well, but we can still observe the spectacle through our high-powered binoculars. At this distance, our laughter will not disturb the awkward courtship rituals, as the participants preen and flaunt their ignorance in front of potential mates.
Hence this thread. Feel free to post your observations regarding the current 2LoT goings-on at UD and the perennial misuse of the 2LoT by IDers in general.
Isn’t it interesting that designed objects do not appear “automatically” on earth, not without human or other animal designers actually manufacturing such items? A designer might actually make rationally-designed objects.
So an entirely different phenomenon, life, is claimed to be designed, in spite of the fact that hereditary constraints are what we see in life, not design flexibility and portability known in real designs. Oddly, these hereditary constraints indicate “microevolution” but not “macroevolution” because… Well, we never get a meaningful explanation for why one works and the other doesn’t, likely because it makes no sense to make such a “distinction” (notably, the line is never distinct from one creationists/IDist to another).
In the end, this is what is drastically wrong with Sewell’s line of argument, not the hopeless muddling of 2LoT. Designed objects popping up magically wouldn’t automatically indicate that design has anything to do with wild-type life, but at least it would provide a candidate phenomenon that could have affected evolution.
Yet that still wouldn’t explain why bat, bird, and pterosaur wings have no homologies with respect to flight adaptation, while having considerable homologies not relating to flight. Such sorts of adaptations are entailed by evolutionary processes, and not only are not entailed by design, but are actually contrary to any fair expectations from an intelligent being. Byers at least treated that issue equitably, by claiming that flight adaptation was a “minor change” apparently happening after the flood, but of course it’s really the sort of major evolutionary changes that nearly all IDists/creationists chalk up to The Designer.
Glen Davidson
HeKS,
Thank you for responding to my points in detail. It will take me a day or so to respond properly.
Perhaps what Keiths doesn’t appreciate is the dishonesty involved in a bait and switch argument.
Here’s how I read your interpretation of Sewell:
1. Sewell trots out 2LOT because it’s well established and mathy, and Sewell is a competent mathematician.
2. Sewell proceed to argue that if the second law has been violated, it must have been by a designer, since natural processes can’t violate 2LOT. Bonus points for recognizing that humans and space aliens are part of the natural world and can’t violate 2LOT.
3. Having established a desirable product that’s all sciency and mathy, we get the product switch. Call it the squirrel. 2LOT is a good product, but that’s not really what you want. I have something even better. It’s even more fundamental than 2LOT. I call it XLOT. It’s really super powerful. This is what you want, and it doesn’t even require any math. You just look at it and it does all the work for you.
Bait and switch is dishonest.Especially when the product actually delivered is crap.
OMagain,
The difference is that KF hasn’t caught HeKS in any mistakes. HeKS will never forgive me for correcting his.
HeKS,
I see you’re still avoiding my question:
HeKS,
The reason for your fear is obvious.
If you admit to agreeing with this true statement…
…then you are admitting that Sewell does in fact believe that the second law has been violated on earth — which is obvious anyway.
If you deny that statement, then you’ll be asked to justify your denial.
You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Petrushka,
I have no idea how you came by the belief that what you just said represents my interpretation of Sewell’s argument.
Sewell does not argue that if the second law has been violated it must have been by a designer. Sewell does not argue that 2LOT has actually, really, truly, in fact been violated at all. Keith’s belief that Sewell truly claims it has stems from Keith’s own deficient reading of isolated sentences that he has interpreted without concern for the basic context and structure of Sewell’s entire argument.
Sewell only concludes that certain naturalistic explanations (i.e. explanations that invoke only natural processes) for particular events in history would seem to require that the underlying principle behind 2LOT be violated if those explanations are actually true. But Sewell himself does not think those explanations are true, and therefore he does not personally think that 2LOT (or the underlying principle behind it) had to actually be violated in the origin and development of life on earth.
And Keith goes right on being a legend in his own mind.
And the jokes keep rolling.
That “God creates an uncompensated local entropy decrease” is not part of Sewell’s argument, Keith.
Why do you seem completely oblivious to fact that when he disagrees with what he calls the “compensation argument” he is not arguing that entropy decreases go uncompensated, whether they are brought about by God or anything else? As I already told you in response to the very post you claimed I ignored, that is simply not what his argument is about.
Trying to talk to you is truly a waste of time.
HeKS,
You’re still avoiding my question.
I’m asking whether you agree with the following:
Everyone, including you, knows why I’m asking this.
All eyes are on you.
There are no underlying principles behind 2LOT. There are no theotetical underpinnings at all. It is not derived from any principle. It is simply a formalization of observation.
Since there is no theory of 2LOT, one cannot extend it or extract any derived principles from it. Certainly not CLOT or XLOT.
petrushka,
Why do you say that? Are you aware of the close connection between statistical mechanics and the 2LoT?
Wikipedia states that 2LOT is an axiom. I’m willing to have that corrected.
ETA
I can’t copy on my tablet, but Wiki describes 2LOT as an empirical finding that serves as an axiom in theories of thermodynamics. If I didn’t express this properly, I apologise.
The 2LoT’s origins are empirical, but it can be derived from statistical mechanics.
I’m not yet convinced that this is an explanatory theory. For one thing, there is no arrow of time. If the mechanics work equally well going to the past or the future, then the aspect of 2LOT that Sewell thinks imoprtant is just an axiom based on observation.
But the mechanics don’t work equally well going to the past or the future. Entropy is only going to increase, so you can’t reverse time–at least it seems not.
Some have proposed that it’s entropy that ensures time’s arrow, since a lot of other occurrences (ballistic motions, say) do seem to work equally well in either direction of time, while entropy seems not able to reverse.
Glen Davidson
I can’t say I’ve been following this he-said, she-said exchange, but your description here doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. You say that only certain naturalistic explanations violate a law. But explanations can’t violate laws of physics; only physical processes can. Is your claim that Sewell thinks non-naturalistic processes can . . . do what, exactly? Presumably this principle (the one that’s kind of like but isn’t the 2LOT) forbid certain events from occurring, or does it only forbid events if they happen naturally? I find this whole thing bewilderingly unlike any physics I ever learned.
Entropy as the arrow of time is the thing that is axiomatic. It is not required by statistical mechanics. Entropy is not derived from theory. It is assumed. That’s what I read, anyway.
Laws are not explanatory.
Steve Schaffner:
That’s the key issue, and it’s why HeKS keeps avoiding my question:
If HeKS disagrees, then he’s in trouble, because the second law doesn’t have an “unless guided” or “unless supernaturally caused” clause. It doesn’t distinguish between “guided” and “unguided” processes.
So HeKS can’t sensibly disagree. On the other hand, If he agrees, he’s also in trouble, because then he’s conceding that the presence of guidance — even divine guidance — does not magically transform a second law violation into a non-violation.
In that case a violation remains a violation even if God is behind it. Sewell knows this, which is why he chose the wording he did in the five quotes I provided — saying that the second law has been violated, not that it would have been violated if natural processes were responsible.
Sewell thinks that the second law was violated on earth, and that God was responsible. HeKS got it wrong, though I doubt that he’ll ever admit that or retract his false accusations of dishonesty.
petrushka,
Well, if you’re talking about the 2LoT, it’s a law, not a theory. If you’re talking about statistical mechanics, then rest assured — it’s enormously successful as an explanatory theory.
But it seems that what you’re really talking about is the fact that the second law can’t be derived from statistical mechanics alone. A boundary condition must be applied, which comes from the observation that entropy was low in the past.
I’m not sure why you think a single boundary assumption is problematic, though. The Standard Model of particle physics is enormously successful, but it contains about 20 independent parameters whose values must be determined by observation.
As far as I can tell, in the time of Clausius 2lot was axiomatic, it was not based on more elementary principles. Clausius was the one who coined the notion of entropy. In the modern day, 2LOT can be shown as consequence (a theorem if you will) of other axioms with some assumptions on initial conditions.
In the time of Clausius, the nature of heat was viewed according to the now discredited Caloric heat theory where heat (or entropy) was thought of as some fluid. There are some papers on Caloric heat theory and entropy, like this one:
http://www.physikdidaktik.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication/ejp/Entropy_resurrection.pdf
The paper argues that Carnot’s “caloric” was essentially the same as Clausius’ entropy. It also argues that one of the early conceptions of heat by Black is equivalent to Clausius entropy (where Clausius version of heat is different than Black’s). In this earlier view, entropy can be treated as a substance that obeys a half-conservation law, namely it can be created but never destroyed (which you can see hints at the 2nd law where entropy is being constantly created, but never destroyed in the universe on a net basis).
Now that we know heat is the exchange in internal energy between particles rather that Caloric heat fluids, the 2nd law can be derived from what might be considered more elementary principles under certain conditions.
If the phenomenon of temperature is fundamentally derived from the kinetic energy of the molecules, then it would seem the 2nd law ought to proceed from elementary principles governing the particles rather than the 2nd law being axiomatic.
As far as I can tell the 2nd law can be derived under equilibrium statistical mechanics. It seems an open problem to derive it under non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in a satisfactory way. But that’s getting to material over my head.
Hi Steve,
Welcome to the discussion. I just decided to peak in and saw your question so I’ll try to quickly clarify.
You’re quite right that obviously an explanation can’t violate a law of physics. Of course, a physical process can’t actually violate a law of physics either. Rather, what I was trying to say is that Sewell’s conclusion is that certain naturalistic explanations that have been offered for events in the history of life on Earth, if true, would require that natural processes violated at least one law of physics, and that because of this we know that these explanations are not correct.
Now, when it comes to Sewell’s argument in his articles, what he typically addresses is what he refers to as the “compensation argument”, which he provides a number of examples of from people like Asimov, Dawkins and some others (Bill Nye also used this recently, and examples are really not hard to find). This “compensation argument” that he addresses is the claim that the second law of thermodynamics (or the fundamental principle behind the second law) does not cause any problem for the origin and development of life on Earth because the earth is an open system that receives energy from the sun and because the decrease in entropy associated with these increases in biological order are compensated by an increase in entropy elsewhere in the universe.
The focus on the Earth being an open system stems from the fact that statements of the second law are formulated in relation to isolated systems. Sewell provides three such statements from the textbook Classical and Modern Physics:
1. In an isolated system, thermal entropy cannot decrease.
2. In an isolated system, the direction of spontaneous change is from order to disorder.
3. In an isolated system, the direction of spontaneous change is from an arrangement of lesser probability to an arrangement of greater probability.
Sewell argues, however, that the mere fact that a system is open rather than closed (isolated) does not mean that extremely improbable events become not extremely improbable unless something is imported across the boundary of the system that makes the event not extremely improbable. In the “compensation argument”, what is pointed to as being imported across that boundary is energy from the sun, which is somehow supposed to allow for significant spontaneous decreases in entropy on Earth as long as the entropy is increasing even more somewhere else.
In response to this, Sewell argues that if the second law (or its underlying principle) tells us that certain macroscopically describable events in the origin and development of life would be extremely improbable at the microscopic scale were the Earth an isolated system, one cannot just say that they would stop being extremely improbable simply because the Earth is an open system that receives energy from the sun, unless one is willing to argue that the mere influx of energy from the sun somehow makes those macroscopically describable events not extremely improbable at the microscopic scale, which is an argument that nobody really wants to make. He further argues that the compensation argument could be used equally well to explain why an instance of a tornado turning rubble into houses and cars does not violate the second law (in its more generalized statements, such as #3 from Classical and Modern Physics).
Sewell’s 2013 article in Bio-Complexity, titled Entropy and Evolution, explains his argument in pretty clear terms.
Of course, one can argue over whether or not Sewell is correct (and people here obviously think he is not), but it does little good to argue over his correctness if one is not actually even addressing his actual argument.
I’m off to bed now and have a long weekend full of taxes ahead of me. Yay.
Take care,
HeKS
And HeKS avoids Steve Schaffner’s question for the same reason he keeps avoiding mine.
Steve merely asked:
Steve,
Here’s one final point of clarification before I go that might be helpful. It is specifically this underlying principle (or generalization of the second law to open systems), taken from his Bio-Complexity paper, that Sewell says has been violated IF purely natural processes brought about the order associated with the origin and development of life:
Sewell’s personal position, however, is that this principle has not actually been violated because, on his view, the origin and development of life did not actually happen purely as a result of natural (unintelligent) forces.
HeKS,
You’re making that up. Sewell does not say that it hasn’t been violated. He says exactly the opposite, in the very paper you are quoting:
We now have six quotes in which Sewell says that the second law was violated here on earth, yet HeKS is still denying it!
Keith, how can you possibly fail to understand context so consistently? This is really not hard to understand.
I’ve actually confirmed directly with Sewell that I have been accurately representing his argument and the meaning of his conclusion that you have consistently been taking out of context.
Do you know what HAS HAPPENED on Earth, Keith? Life has originated and developed. That actually HAS HAPPENED. The question is how it happened. Sewell thinks that IF the way that it happened was purely by natural forces then those natural forces violated the generalized statement of the second law as represented in his (3b), which he considers to be the fundamental principle behind applications of the second law. But Sewell doesn’t think that it actually happened that way (i.e. purely by means of natural, unintelligent forces).
So where does the problem lie here, Keith? Sewell wrote multiple papers that you at least quote-minded and that I read in their entirety. I came away from each paper with the very same interpretation of his argument and conclusion, which I considered to be rather obvious on any honest reading by a person with decent reading comprehension. Meanwhile you insisted on a very different interpretation and claimed over and over and over that I was being dishonest and twisting his words while mocking and insulting me in an apparent attempt to feed your inflated self-image. And yet, when I asked Sewell, he confirmed that I had understood the structure of his argument and the meaning of his conclusion correctly. What you confidently claimed was a distortion of his meaning on my part was, in fact, what he meant (as should have been obvious to you).
You’re the weak link here, Keith. You’re the one who has stubbornly misrepresented Sewell’s argument and conclusion over and over, insisting on the accuracy of your rather obviously false reading while attacking me. Are you now going to admit your error and apologize? Or will you instead maybe maintain that Sewell wrote poorly and I just happened to accurately understand his argument and the meaning of his conclusion by some fluke? Or will you maybe just insist that Sewell has suddenly changed his opinion to one that just happens to correspond with my reading of his articles, and so you really were right all along? Or maybe you’ll come up some other completely different excuse to explain away your error while justifying your reprehensible behavior. Who can know with you?
Unbelievable. Six quotes* in which Sewell says that the second law has been violated. Not a single quote in which Sewell says that the second law hasn’t been violated. Yet HeKS is still in denial.
HeKS,
Given the beating that Sewell’s argument has taken, I have no doubt that he would like to rewrite history and undo his mistakes. Do you blame him? Who wants to be known as a second law crackpot? His frustration is tangible:
I think you should invite him here. His views are being criticized, and he has the right to defend himself. He is more than welcome to comment here, as always, and even to post his own OPs. I would love to hear what he has to say, directly and unfiltered through you.
*It’s actually seven quotes now. Here’s another:
We haven’t found such evidence. Therefore, according to Granville, we must postulate a violation to explain the appearance of humans, cars, and computers here.
On top of all that, you still haven’t answered my simple question:
Why won’t you answer, HeKS?
HeKS,
Exactly, and I’m glad you put the emphasis on the words ‘HAS HAPPENED’. Here’s Sewell:
And:
And:
Those sentences mean what they say — and the meaning does not change when you include the context. And they make perfect sense, because a second law violation by God is still a second law violation.
I’m not troubled by the arrow of time problem except to point out that Sewell’s claims are untrue. We may recognize the tornado film as running backwards, but there is no deep theoretical principle that requires that. He is wrong on two counts.
petrushka,
Sewell does not take into account that there are a whole heck of a lot more states in which there is destruction after a tornado than there are states in which the houses, cars, and trees are reassembled. That’s how we perceive which direction the movie is running — it arrives in a very unlikely state, where we have aggregated together all the states that consist of a total mess. But each individual mess is just as unlikely as the state which has everything assembled neatly.
I also think it is rather silly that Sewell says in his CLoT (or CLoD) argument that
Leaving aside the huge issue that Sewell’s “second law” is the CLoT rather than the 2LoT, we can say that yes, it is the influx of solar energy (plus the use of chemotrophy) that makes all that probable. Solar energy to enable the organisms to grow and evolve, ultimate into humans who can build spaceships, computers, and the internet.
Sewell makes his “compensation” argument by making it sound as if standard ecological and evolutionary theory has life on Earth growing and evolving using energy from the sun that reaches Neptune. That would, of course, be silly.
But then he switches to talking about energy that does in fact reach Earth, and is in fact used by photosynthetic bacteria, protists, and plants. And he seems to regard that as irrelevant.
HeKS,
One of the core problems with Sewell’s argument, second only to the nonsensical dimensions of his “x-entropies”, is that he’s arguing against a strawman. Taking your summary as an example:
This is the first part of the strawman. No one that I know of argues that energy from the Sun makes improbable events probable. The only points that scientists make in response to creationist second law arguments are:
1) Energy from the Sun demonstrates that Earth is not a closed system, therefore the isolated system formulas for the second law do not apply.
2) Energy from the Sun makes certain chemical reactions possible. Those reactions would not be possible without an energy flux.
The strawman gets more stuffing. There is no generalizable “underlying principle” to the second law. You’ll note that Sewell claims that there is but never provides a description or cites to peer-reviewed sources.
He’s taking the (rather poor) analogy of entropy as disorder and running with it.
It’s an argument no one makes. This is the completed strawman he’s arguing against, which makes his whole paper useless.
The energy flux from the Sun is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the evolution we have observed on the Earth. Physics, chemistry, and biology are also required to understand those observations. Rather than address that, Sewell simply argues “Energy from the Sun isn’t enough, I can’t imagine how it happened, must have been a god.” Stripping away his bogus calculations, it’s a classic argument from incredulity.
Yes, that’s the gist of Sewell’s argument.
Sewell is supposed to be a mathematician. Mathematicians are not supposed to make such monumentally stupid arguments.
What is it about religion that turns brains to mush?
What the 2LoT says, amounts “certain actions require available energy.” The compensation “argument” simply points out that there is available energy if it can be imported from elsewhere.
Sewell has found a violation of some imaginary creationist law.
The very existence of Sewell depends on a long chain of highly improbable events. The probability arguments, which seem to be the core of Dembski’s reasoning, are irrelevant to everything.
The fundamental problem with IDists using the 2nd law arguments is the equivocation of thermodynamic entropy with Biological disorder – the idea being there is more biological disorder with entropy going up. I’ve shown numerous counter example of when this is not true like a frozen dead rat (low thermal entropy) to a warm living rat (higher thermal entropy).
Worse, even in Bill Dembski’s writings, Bill relates specified complexity as an analogy to Bolztman entropy thus, even according to other ID literature it is desirable for entropy to INCREASE in order for specified complexity to increase.
Thus IDist use of 2nd law arguments is wrong on 2 counts: thermal entropy being equivocated with biological disorder, and the notion that entropy must decrease in order for specified complexity to increase.
I became persona non grata for my “heresies” in the ID community regarding 2LOT, but at some point I could not let this continue.
HeKS, you’re worried too much about whether Dr. Sewell is being misrepresented, that’s rather moot if his ideas as of now are scientifically unworkable and conflict severely with the conventions used in textbook thermodynamics as practiced by students of physics, chemistry, and engineering. There are more productive ways to champion ID.
stcordova,
Let’s see them!
But that doesn’t answer my question. What exactly does this supposed law prohibit, and how do the non-naturalistic processes evade that prohibition? The reason I find your complaint baffling is that the only meaning I can think of for “non-naturalistic” is “doesn’t obey the laws of physics”, but you’re arguing that these processes don’t violate those laws either.
As for Sewell’s actual argument about compensation, it’s scientific nonsense. The energy flux from the sun makes vastly more probable all kinds of chemical reactions that are crucial for life, and that certainly makes the macroscopically describable events of evolution much more probable. It doesn’t tell you whether the macroscopic events (or something like them) are likely to occur or not, but it does mean that nothing in thermodynamics prohibits them. So thermodynamics tells you nothing about the plausibility of evolution except that it isn’t forbidden.
I’m not trying to argue that there is no arrow of time. Just that Sewell’s assertion that there is some deep underlying principle is not correct. We know that time has a direction, but we don’t quite know why. That’s why Wiki calls it an axiom.
We have axioms in plane geometry that seem equally self-evident.
He’s also wrong on the less controversial assertion that, given a direction for entropy, something about it prevents natural processes from producing life and evolution.
HeKS,
If you learn nothing else from this thread, please learn this:
The compensation argument is inseparable from the second law. To deny the compensation argument is to deny the second law.
If the compensation argument were invalid, then photosynthesis would not be possible, and you would not be here.
(Of course I am speaking of the real compensation argument, not Sewell’s ridiculous caricature.)
Keiths, I feel compelled to apply here what I said about believers interpreting scripture.
The overriding consideration in reading scripture (Sewell in this case) is that it cannot be stupid or wrong. If it seems that way, it is simply because we have the contest wrong or are not applying the correct twist.
Contrast this the the current brouhaha over E. O. Wilson.
Wilson is one of the gods of biology. An icon. and he appears to be wrong about kin selection. The battle is fierce and angry. But he is not scripture. People can get angry on both sides, but no one is shooting up publishers or attacking websites.
Creationists frequently argue by quote mining, so they are quick to accuse others of what they do all the time.
petrushka,
Exactly.
We have eight quotes in which Sewell explicitly says that the second law was violated here on earth, and none in which he says that it wasn’t. The meaning of the quotes remains the same when viewed in context.
Yet HeKS tells us that we cannot take those quotes as written, but must mentally rewrite all eight of them to change the meaning from “has happened” to “would have happened”. Why? Because HeKS knows that it’s idiotic to claim that the second law was violated here, and he doesn’t want Sewell to make such a stupid mistake. He mentally rewrites eight quotes because he cannot accept what they are plainly saying.
As you put it, “it cannot be stupid or wrong.” If it is, it must be twisted, even into pretzels if necessary, until it is right.
HeKS and Sewell are textbook examples of how badly religion can pervert thinking.
I think Sewell wants to be read wrong. So I give HeKS the benefit of the doubt.
petrushka,
🙂
HeKS,
An old comment of mine that explains why the compensation argument is inseparable from the second law:
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water (as the publicity slogan for “Jaws 2” said) it’s … ta da! … “niwrad” with another Sewellian argument at UD
here
Zachriel is on the case, but I’m sure some people here will have thoughts.
I refer to it as Sewellage.
Joe,
Those guys are fighting over who gets to wear the dunce cap.
keiths,
It’s a big tent dunce cap…
Nothing noteworthy in niwrad’s post. Just an explanation of why he buys Sewell’s inane argument.
It would save the IDiots a lot of typing if they would just admit what they actually believe:
That everything in ‘creation’ was perfect until adam and eve sinned and from then on everything has been falling apart (becoming more and more degraded/disorganized), and that: Only because ‘creation’ was so perfect in the first place has it lasted this long, and the lord god yahoo intervenes sometimes and keeps some things going in ‘creation’ in spite of the degradation/disorganization because he’s a cuddly, loving guy so it will be a little while before yahoo will destroy ‘creation’ and send 7+ billion more human souls to their appropriate eternal destination (heaven or hell).