Entropy and the immutable law of death

Which is not what nemesis_juggernaut said.Edited by Dr Adequate, : Because for all his faults nemesis_juggernaut is not randman.

True, it's not a direct quote. However, IMHO, given the common creationist confusions about the 2LoT and their tendency to report what they've read inaccurately, I think it's what he meant.

Yes, of course it is. No one contends with that, least of all, me. I believe it does because of how axiomatic it is. At present, we simply don't have any way to quantify it. And that is a problem, no doubt. I'm wondering why after all of this time, this law of death has only been played around with by so few scholars. As well, I should probably add that "Logical entropy" is not my definition but someone else's. In fact, I think that kind of is a poor name for it. Life from non-life? Abiogenesis was debunked by Louis Pasteur over a century ago. There was an Italian scientist in the 1700's who was convinced that spontaneous generation after an ad libbed experiment with rotting meat. He reasoned that if he left meat, thoroughly checked beforehand for maggots, that eventually the meat would produce maggots. From this simple experiment he deduced that life came from non-life. Of course, what he didn't realize is that the putrid meat was attracting flies which layed their larvae in the meat. Eventually the larvae grew inside the meat and became full-blown maggots, which gave the appearance that the maggots sort of grew out of the meat.No one has ever demonstrated that life can ever come from non-life. Rocks, sir, are inorganic material, meaning its nonliving. There is no life from non-life in that. If you are now referring to order coming from disorder, I believe you are making a classical error. But, again, I echo the sentiments as before:

"In spite of the important distinction between the two meanings of entropy, the rule as stated above for thermodynamic entropy seems to apply nonetheless to the logical kind: entropy in a closed system can never decrease. And really, there would be nothing mysterious about this law either. It's similar to saying things never organize themselves. (The original meaning of organize is "to furnish with organs.") Only this rule has little to do with thermodynamics.
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It is true that crystals and other regular configurations can be formed by unguided processes. And we are accustomed to saying that these configurations are "organized." But crystals have not been spontaneously "furnished with organs." The correct term for such regular configurations is "ordered." The recipe for a crystal is already present in the solution it grows from ” the crystal lattice is prescribed by the structure of the molecules that compose it. The formation of crystals is the straightforward result of chemical and physical laws that do not evolve and that are, compared to genetic programs, very simple."

-Brig Klyce You may be confusing 'equilibrium' with order coming from disorder, when in reality it is just disorder coming to a state of equilibrium. If entropy is associated with disorder, and entropy of the universe is headed towards maximum entropy, then how does the ordering process of evolution not directly contravene this law? This is the question asked by dissenters of evolution."I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life." -Lord Kelvin“Scientists have often been baffled by the existence of spontaneous order in the universe. The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite, that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder, greater entropy. Yet all around us we see magnificent structures”galaxies, cells, ecosystems, human beings”that have all somehow managed to assemble themselves.” -Steven Strogatz

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias

NJ asks: There is a name for the process that leads to the death of every individual. You have probably heard it mentioned on this forum once or twice. It is called (drum roll) EVOLUTION. In a forever non-changing environment, immortality is no problem. But environments do change, sometimes drastically. Therefore, 'adapt or die' (referring to the population or species) is the order of the day. This is why, for example, that HIV has been so recalcitrant to being cured. We (and our immune systems) keep trying to change its environment, but the little buggers keep evolving too fast to be wiped out. Individual virus die in droves, but the population, and the disease, lives on.Nature always chooses the easiest, simplest way to do things.* The simplest way to arrange for life to adapt to its changing environment is through reproduction with variation, coupled with death. Even this process is far from perfect and if the environment changes too rapidly, entire populations and species will not be able to evolve fast enough to adapt to the changes and will be extinguished. This is why the great cataclysms of the past are referred to as extinction events.So, death is really further evidence for the validity of the theory of evolution.* I know this phrasing anthropomorphizes nature and makes it sound goal directed when natures processes are in fact always mindless and purposeless, simply stumble to the next step, but our languages derive from our evolved propensity to see tigers behind every wind shaken bush, and evil intent behind every happenstance. So I know of no better way to state this without using some very clumsy wording.

NJ asks: There is a name for the process that leads to the death of every individual. You have probably heard it mentioned on this forum once or twice. It is called (drum roll) WRATH OF GOD. Before the fall, there was no death, but god's uncontrolled, irrational anger* at some kid's sneaking a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl resulted in every living thing being cursed with a "Life is hard. And then you die." existence.* I know this phrasing makes god sound mindless and purposeless when we know in fact that his every move is well planned and thought out from the beginning of time. It's just that from our perspective, many of god's actions seem like road rage on steroids.

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Abiogenesis was debunked by Louis Pasteur over a century ago.

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Another creationist fallacy. The ideas that Pasteur was trying to debunk were nothing like modern ideas of abiogenesis.

What I got from reading about his work was the existence of life possessing a "grand asymmetry". Dead things do not have this. Future 1/2 eternity survival is part of it. Darwin's "F" line survivability is asymmetric with respect to the perimeter light cone display in my potential quaternionic re-representation. Is chirality one to one and onto the rotation and revolution places of Earth?I suggested that this is content of the some actual relation between Gladyshevian phenomenological thermodynamics and panbiogeographic track graphs(see claim).I will address the topic directly shortly. About decade ago I cognized that "forms of death" could be related to Fisher's ideas of 'rates of death' and I attempted to get Will Provine interested in the idea. He was not. Edited by Brad McFall, : past tense.

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Abiogenesis was debunked by Louis Pasteur over a century ago.

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How is that a "creationist fallacy?" Its absolutely true, whether "creationists" assert it or not. Are you alleging that life comes from non-life, PaulK? If so, I would very much like to see some incontrovertible evidence. Edited by nemesis_juggernaut, : typoEdited by nemesis_juggernaut, : edit to add

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias

I'd like to know where else life could come from? Abiogenesis is the study of the possible ways that life originated on earth - how we went from a pre-biotic world to a biotic one. Pasteur was not studying the origins of life on earth, just the origins of life on rotting stuff (to simplify).

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How is that a "creationist fallacy?" Its absolutely true, whether "creationists" assert it or not.

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It's a creationist fallacy because it's false and because creationists say it.

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Are you alleging that life comes from non-life, PaulK? If so, I would very much like to see some incontrovertible evidence.

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No, I was explaining why the creationist claim was fallacious. Would you like to go back and actually answer my point ? Or will you just retract your false claim about Pasteur ?

Then you would be essentially saying that another word for evolution is natural selection... That's not the case. Evolution is an extremely large topic theory within biology. But natural selection is not evolution, it is simply a part of a puzzle piece that makes up evolution. The law of death, then, can't be persuasively be described as evolution as a sort of catch-all blanket statement. If we were to assert that, then you might as well refer to gravity as evolution too, on the basis that gravity effects creatures subject to evolution, just as natural selection effects creatures subject to evolution.But more importantly, you are missing the greater part of the question. You are giving me reasons for why evolution can use death. It says nothing about why anything should die, and moreover, why nothing on earth can ever defeat death. The point is that all living materials are temporal. What makes this law?

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"It is better to shun the bait, than struggle in the snare." -Ravi Zacharias

So that individuals aren't forced to compete with their progeny. Individuals who are forced to compete with their ancestors for resources are selected against compared to individuals whose ancestors conveniently remove themselves from competition via death.Hence, living cells undergo programmed obsolescence, a process called "apoptosis." Hence, death pre-programmed into our very genetics (telomeres.) It doesn't have anything to do with "entropy" of any kind, and everything to do with natural selection favoring the offspring of those who remove themselves from the population so that they don't steal resources from their progeny.Thermodynamics is relevant to biology - at the biochemical level. And it's known that none of the chemical life processes violate the second law - indeed, the second law makes the chemistry of life possible. Life is not in violation of thermodynamics, it exists as a result of it, as a result of thermodynamics making certain chemical reactions energetically favorable under the right circumstances.The evolution of livings things over time has nothing to do with thermodynamics, because it's not a system. Evolution is a description of what populations of living things do over time, not a description of those populations as some kind of system with input and output. Thermodynamics is irrelevant to the evolution of populations.

Who says nothing on earth can EVER defeat (programmed) death? It's not because nothing has been able thus far, that it could never happen.One of the bigger reasons is that no lifeform thus far ever *cared* about it, such that mindless evolution was the only factor. It could well be that our desire to live longer might enable us to solve the engineering problems. (although because of the very un-human and un-systematic design process of natural selection, it might always remain out of reach because too many factors are intertwined in too much a complex way to ever re-engineer things adequately)

Things need to die because there are finite resources.Nothing we know of has avoided dying so far because such a thing will require a higher level of technology than anything has yet achieved and the random mutation that would do it simply hasn't happened.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Yes, of course it is. No one contends with that, least of all, me.

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In this thread, a distinction was made between thermodynamic entropy (a redundant phrase) and logical entropy (a label given to a concept which is neither axiomatic nor scientific.) I was pointing out that entropy is a thermodnamic quantity, not a logical contruct.

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I believe it does because of how axiomatic it is.

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First of all, "logical entropy" is not axiomatic. In any event, as soon as an axiom is challenged, you cannot rely on its status as an axiom to refute the challenge. You must provide evidence for its validity.

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In fact, I think that kind of is a poor name for it.

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I agree. Whatever you are talking about has nothing to do with entropy.I think other posts have beaten me to the punch about Pasteur's experiments, which would only apply to this discussion if someone were contending that the first lifeforms sprang forth from chicken broth or rotten meat. In fact abiogenesis is the leading scientific theory for the origin of life on earth. Maybe God did just throw us here, but despite a few thousand years of looking, nobody has found any evidence of that happening.I am not confusing equilibrium with order coming from disorder. The systems I referred to are not in equilibrium when considered on large time scales. Random events over time have created ordered structures. A natural rock arch is very different from a crystal lattice. There are not fundamental physical laws which say rocks must form in that structure. Yet there it is, perfectly "created" with enough material in the correct places to support its own immense weight, seemingly violating your "axiom" of "logical entropy"

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If entropy is associated with disorder, and entropy of the universe is headed towards maximum entropy, then how does the ordering process of evolution not directly contravene this law? This is the question asked by dissenters of evolution.

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Entropy is often defined as a measure of disorder. This is a weak definition at best. It is a quantity which must increase in order to satisfy the first law of thermodynamics when heat is isothermally added to an thermal resevoir. Even that definition is at best incomplete. In the universe's march toward maximum entropy, ordered structures will ebb and flow out of existence. We see it all around us. Gas has condensed into stars which have associated into galaxies, which have associated into local groups of galaxies. Nebulae have consensed into solar systems with planets which fall into orbital resonances. There is a great deal of order coming from disorder. None of this violates the 2nd law of Thermodynamics.