The Second Law fallacy

Yes, we have established a basis to claim that evolution violating the Entropy Law is false. A theory can't violate the law, only physical mechanisms can and all of the physical mechansism used in the theory of evolution have been observed so they cannot violate the laws (unless the laws are wrong).

Unless you can name a physical mechanism involved in the theory of evolution that violates the law, the claim that evolution violates the law is false.

You can't dodge, duck, or ignore this. The argument is faulty at its core.

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You need to reread the OP more closely. I very clearly said that entropy is a measure of a very specific kind of order.

You've shown no such thing. What you've done is post a rehash of the same fallacious arguments that I addressed quite thoroughly and succinctly in the OP. There's a lot of material packed into it, so again I suggest that you reread it and spend a lot of time thinking about it.

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The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you....For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink..."
As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him...
John, Ch. 6

Note that the statement in wilkepedia says “As temperature goes to absolute 0, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.” It doesn’t say what that constant is, right?

The energy present in the system is contained in both the free heat energy (what we’d measure as temperature), the chemical energy, and the atomic energy contained in the molecules of the substance. In thermodynamic discussions it’s assumed that the chemical and atomic energy can be neglected unless one is specifically dealing with reacting systems. Reacting and radioactive systems are more complex to analyze but the basic rules are the same.

If an atom solidifying onto a crystal doesn’t get into the correct position, then some of the heat of fusion of that atom is not released to the environment. If an otherwise perfect crystal is brought to absolute zero, its entropy is not exactly zero because there is some amount of heat energy still locked up and available to do work.

So it would have been better for me to have said something like “at absolute zero, a perfect crystal of an inert, non-radioactive substance has zero entropy”. I’ll paste this discussion into my document file, thanks for asking.

I’m not sure what it is you mean by “ordered”.

Imagine an isolated system of two identical chemically inert perfect crystals, one at absolute zero and the other at 100 Kelvin. The mass at absolute zero contains no thermal energy available to do work, and so its intensive entropy is zero. The mass that is at the higher temperature does contain thermal energy that is capable of doing work, and so its intensive entropy is at some positive value.

The masses are brought into thermal contact, and heat flows from the hot mass to the cold mass until they are in thermal equilibrium at 50 Kelvin. At the end of this process the hot mass has lost some ability to do work with the heat energy contained in it, and so it has a lower intensive entropy than it did at the start. The cold mass has gained some ability to do work, and so it has a greater intensive entropy than it did at the start.

To calcuate the extensive entropy (the total entropy) generated by this process, divide the energy gained by each mass by the average temperature of that mass, then add those results together: (-1 Joule / average temp of the hot mass) + (+1 Joule / average temp of the cold mass ) = (-1 Joule / 75 Kelvin) + (+1 Joule / 25 Kelvin) = 0.02666 Joule/Kelvin.

Since this is an isolated system, there can be no further heat flow and thus no more generation of entropy: the entropy of the system is now the greatest it can possibly be. Conversely, at the beginning of the experiment all of the heat energy was contained in one of the masses: the energy in the system could not possibly be more able to do work, and thus the entropy of the system was the least it could possibly be.


There are at least two problems with this statement.

First, there is no definition of what is meant by “order”. As I explained in the OP, entropy can be understood as a description of the “order” of a system only under a specific and limited definition of the word “order”.

Second, even when using the correct definition of “order”, that’s not at all what the Second Law means. Go back to the OP and read the actual statements.

Here’s a simple system that will not move from order to disorder when left alone: two bodies at different temperatures, perfectly insulated from each other and from any surroundings. No heat can flow between them, so over an infinite period of time there will be no change in the entropy of either body, nor in that of the system as a whole.

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The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you....For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink..."
As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him...
John, Ch. 6

I don't think this question was really answered, so I'll post it one more time.

At a minimum? So, is an energy source not even needed? Is this saying, that ordered systems, can exist without the need for heat?

Are u sure your definition for entropy is correct?
Doesn't that contradict what you've said entropy is?

Look:

Originally Posted by chilehed

At absolute zero, a perfect crystal has zero entropy.

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Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is praise worthy--think of these things.

Shinbits, what is "an energy source not needed" for in your question? I'm not really sure.

Basically the article has shown that the "order" in the 2nd law and the "order" in creationists' statements are two completely different things.

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quoted for truth

okay.

This makes it much simpler.

Just focusing in on what "order" in the 2nd law is, what's the difference between that, and how some creationist view it?

This'll pretty much start to wrap this thread up.

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Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is praise worthy--think of these things.

shinbits,

The key claims of the article you posted are:
-Entropy is a measure of disorder (“order” and “disorder” apparently indicating the presence or absence of patterns).
-Information has thermodynamic entropy.
-There can be local violations of the second law.
-If order is to arise from a disordered system, there must be both information and a mechanism present to direct and convert the energy.

I already dealt with those claims in the OP, and showed that all of them are false. Remember, we’re talking about THERMODYNAMICS, which deals with the movement of heat energy and its ability to do work. “Information” has no heat energy and no temperature, and so by definition cannot have thermodynamic entropy.

The fundamental flaw is that the author doesn’t understand that thermodynamic entropy and information “entropy” are two entirely different things and the only thing they have in common is the name they’ve been given. From a thermodynamic perspective, the entire work sounds like it was written by someone who had eaten quite a bit too much peyote. It’s as if we were having a conversation about radio circuits, and in a discussion of “gain” someone starts to talk about olympic diving and how the body motions required to execute a “gainer” prove that a battery cannot possibly work.

The article is nothing more than the same multiplying of bafflegab that prompted me to write the OP. It contains nothing that I didn’t already address and there’s no real rebuttal to anything I said.

If someone wants to use information theory to disprove evolution, let them have at it – just don’t let them convince you that it has some relationship to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I have a decent grasp of thermodynamic entropy, but since creationists never actually define what it is they mean by "order" it's a bit hard to tell you how they differ. The best I can gather is that they mean patterns, and patterns don't have temperature or heat energy so they can't have "order" in any thermodynamic sense.

Let me expand on what I said in the OP about ice water boiling away. You know that the freezing point of water is 0C (32F), and that at that temperature water can be found in both the liquid and solid phases. If one allows heat to flow out of water at 0C it loses some ability to do work with its heat energy, and so its entropy is lowered even as the entropy of the system as a whole increases. As this happens the water does not become colder but instead freezes, the molecules bonding together in a very spacially ordered pattern (pretty six-sided patterns in snowflakes, right?), and there's no "information" being decoded by a "mechanism" that puts the molecules in the correct locations. The pattern is dictated by the geometry of the molecules themselves, it's built into their nature. This process continues until the water is completely frozen, and only then will the temperature of the water start to drop as more heat is removed. (Here I'm assuming that the heat is removed in a quasi-static manner, that is, it's removed very slowly so that the entire mass remains close to thermal equilibrium during the process.)

The result of this is that the spacial arrangement of the molecules changes from a very "disordered" state to a very "ordered" state, even though the entropy of the system becomes lower and without any mechanism to direct the formation of the spacial "order". (please note my use of quotes).

This alone shows that the author of your article is wrong when he talks about the need for "information" and a "mechanism" if one wants to see "order" arise from "disorder". All one need do is look out the window to find dozens of other examples, some of which I mentioned in the OP.

Hope this helps.

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The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you....For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink..."
As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him...
John, Ch. 6

I answered this in post #23, but perhaps we're still speaking past each other. Did my last reply help?

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The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you....For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink..."
As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him...
John, Ch. 6

Even when I was a creationist I was saying this. Leave the second law out of it! Normally it's the ID side which will take the information-theoretic side of the debate.

Most of the time, creationist "entropy" goes something like this:

Entropy is chaos.
The primordial soup is very chaotic. Therefore it has high entropy.
Modern biodiversity is very ordered. Therefore it has low entropy.
The Second Law says entropy can't increase! Therefore the Second Law says that evolution doesn't work!

And that's about all the formalism they give. Any attempt at mathematizing this "entropy" normally winds up with something more information-theoretic that's far more approapriate to deal with using information math-science methods than with thermodynamics. This whole "Second Law" thing is more of a "radical fringe" within creationism than anything major and central.

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