THE END OF EVOLUTION?

Maybe I've lost the thread of the discussion and am misinterpreting what you're trying to say, but information theory and 2LOT have much in common. The tendency of noise to interfere with communication is not that much different conceptually from the distribution of energy tending to even out over time.--Percy

Right. I can tell that Lucy doesn't understand that it doesn't matter whether you use a thermodynamic or informational approach to the problem, the answer is the same. There are no thermodynamic or informational constraints rendering it impossible for local aggregations of energy or information.Matter obeys physical laws, and people or other intelligences, being made of matter, must obey these laws, too. The presence of intelligence cannot overcome the physical laws governing our universe.--Percy

I didn't claim to know your mind. I can only go by what you post to this forum, and on that basis it is apparent that you don't understand most of what others are posting. What you say next is a case in point: My post said that all matter must obey the laws of our universe, and the fact that some of this matter possesses intelligence cannot overcome those laws. Your response is a non sequitur.--Percy

"We're not there yet?" That's an answer?No one can force you to make sense or to respond meaningfully. What we are seeing here is you becoming increasingly obscure and ambiguous as your unfamiliarity with the subject matter becomes more obvious.As near as I can make out, the arguments you're offering here are your best attempt to reproduce standard creationist positions that you don't really understand but that you trust to be correct. Your trust is misplaced. Keep in mind that if there were really any thermodynamic problems in evolutionary theory the chemists and physicists would long ago have called it to the attention of biologists.The requirement of Biblical inerrancy blinds creationists to the real evidence because evidence is accepted or rejected on the basis of its consistency with literally interpreted Biblical accounts instead of with the real world. Scientific theories describe the real world, not Bible myths, so as long as Biblical inerrancy is given the highest priority then creationists are doomed to continue pushing ideas that are contradicted by the real world.Anyway, this is a plea for you to begin trying to build an understanding of the topic so that you can start making sense and begin engaging the discussion.--Percy

I think you meant 2LoT. As already explained, being imbued with intelligence does not make it possible to violate the natural laws of our universe, including 2LoT. That you are even asking this question makes clear how mistaken is your understanding of 2LoT, leading to the next comment you addressed to me: My comment was about why creationists like yourself have so much trouble getting science right, in this case 2LoT.The topic of this thread had shifted slightly from 2LoT to how poorly you understand it. The discussion can't really move forward while you're in denial and being evasive about this.There are many different ways to describe 2LoT, but one that has much direct application to the real world is that the entropy of 2LoT is a measure of the ability of a system to do work. The lower the entropy, the greater the ability of the system to do work.For example, say you have a gallon of gasoline in one container, and in another you have the all the exhaust from a car that traveled as far as it could on a gallon of gasoline. Which container possesses the greater ability to do work? The container of gasoline, right? Therefore the container of gasoline possesses much lower entropy than the container of exhaust gases.These are the kinds of questions that 2LoT can help you answer, and the answers have nothing to do with intelligence, at least not beyond the simple fact that creatures with intelligence are as bound by the laws of thermodynamics as everything else in the universe. Right, so I understand that you haven't gotten to your point yet, but your point will have no value if it's based upon an improper understanding of 2LoT. First understand 2LoT, then try to make your point.--Percy

The the first law of thermodynamics is also known as the law of conservation of energy. It states that energy can be transformed from one form to another, but it can't be created or destroyed.When you burn gasoline in your car, some of the energy goes into the motion of the car. Some of it is dissipated as heat. Some of it is dissipated as noise. Some of it is dissipated as rattles and squeaks. And some of it goes out the exhaust. The sum of all this energy must equal the energy of the original gasoline, and it does, just as the first law of thermodynamics requires. But the exhaust is only one small component of all that energy, and is much less than the energy of the original gasoline.So since the capacity of the exhaust gases to do work is much less than the original gasoline, the entropy of the gasoline has to have been much less. The energy content of the exhaust gases *must* be less than the original fuel, otherwise we'd just recycle the exhaust gases back into the engine and never need to stop at a gas station again. Wrong again, and for the same reason. That energy can't flow around in an infinite circle is what 2LoT is all about. It's why there's no such thing as perpetual motion machines. Are you getting these ideas from somewhere in particular? If so, could you provide a link? I can't tell if this is nonsense or a garbled explanation from somewhere else.--Percy

All the laws of thermodynamics apply to all systems everywhere, both open and closed. It's just easier to discuss the laws in terms of closed systems because then you don't have to keep track of inputs and outputs.--Percy

You maybe intended to post in moderator mode?--Percy

Because not enough time has passed. Billions of years from now the universe will, as you euphemistically put it, be soup when it experiences heat death because the distribution of energy has become so evenly distributed that no more work can be done. Entropy will have reached the theoretical maximum.--Percy

Again, I can't tell if this is nonsense or just a garbled restatement of something you read somewhere. Can you tell me where you're getting your information from? One less than you seem to think. 2LoT can be expressed in terms of work/energy, or in terms of entropy, or in informational terms (information theory includes a concept analogous to entropy and actually also called entropy). Just as measuring your house in metric instead of English units doesn't change its size, expressing 2LoT in informational terms doesn't change what is physically possible. You don't get one answer using an informational foundation and a different answer using a work/energy foundation.Your task is to explain why you think an information theoretic approach to thermodynamics would give you a different answer than the more traditional expressions of 2LoT. Again, it would be helpful if you could cite a source for your ideas.About something you wrote in another post: there's no such thing as a scientist who doesn't accept the scientific method, just as there's no such thing as a God-fearing atheist.--Percy

Are you saying that your position doesn't come from studying thermodynamics, and it doesn't come from someone else who's studied thermodynamics, it's just what you've cooked up in your own head? That's a nice common sense argument, but it's wrong. As I told you in my previous message, they're just different ways of looking at the same thing. An approach that focuses on the ability of a system to do work is one way, and an information theoretic approach that focuses on the number of states in a system is another. They'll both give you the same answer. The primary difference between the two is that in most real-world circumstances we don't know enough system details to take an information theoretic approach. In Message 108 you said, "I'm a scientist too...We don't use the scientific method. Evidence plays no part in our science."--Percy

You're using an everyday definition of information. For this discussion we have to use the scientific definition of information. This is from Claude Shannon's landmark paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication that founded the field of information theory: In other words, the meaning that is central to your concept of information plays no role in information theory. If you read through the paper you'll see that he also addresses the issue of entropy, which is where the correspondence with 2LOT arises. If you want to talk about information in a scientific sense then this is the type of information you have to talk about.--Percy

Sound is not an electromagnetic phenomenon.--Percy

It is true that a message without meaning is not of much use, but meaning isn't part of information theory. Information theory is the theory of communicating messages. In its simplest form communication is just the transmission of a series of bits, say "01100101", and the technical issues involved in transmitting those bits are completely independent of meaning. Those bits could mean the letter "A" or "The troops will arrive at dawn" or "Yes, I'll marry you," but no matter what the meaning, it has nothing to do with how you transmit those bits. Meaning is independent of information, at least when you're talking scientifically about information theory.That's why when you said in Message 125 that "Data is something an intelligent agent collects. Information is something an intelligent agent imparts," what you were really talking about is meaning, also technically known as semantics. What you really wanted to say was, "Meaning is something an intelligent agent attaches to information."But let's not forget your original claims, which were confused statements involving 2LOT, entropy and information. The reality is that the constraints of 2LOT and information theory can both be expressed in terms of entropy, and there is nothing in either one preventing the creation of new information. It is not exaggerating much to say that googols of bits of information are being created throughout the universe every second.--Percy

While the results have yet to achieve wide acceptance, genetic studies of the pace of human evolution indicate that it began increasing about 10,000 years ago and that we're evolving more rapidly today than ever before.But the creation of a new Homo species, in the sense that one group of people would become unable to breed with another group of people, seems unlikely in the extreme. Speciation only occurs when populations become separated, and the world population is becoming more and more interconnected every day.But the entire world population of Homo Sapiens gradually evolving to the point where we'd be unable to breed with people from, say, 10,000 years before, does not seem beyond the realm of possibility. But since no one from 10,000 years before would still be alive to test this, we'd have to rely on a less-than-conclusive genetic analysis.--Percy