Thermodynamics
David Berlinski
Dr. Wadkins sent me this by e-mail; I am sure that he meant his
criticisms to be widely appreciated. My response follows.
Well, we could start with your hideously erroneous claim that
life/evolution violates the 2nd Law of thermodynamics, or
were you just being coy and "insinuating" that it does,
without actually stating that it does? My own take was that
you've read too much creationist bullshit, and have begun
to parrot it without knowing what it is you're talking about.
Later, we'll deal with your other hideously erroneous claims.
I have to go get the full article, since all that was posted
here were a few selections. However, I seriously doubt if
you have any scientific reasons to doubt "Darwin's theory",
which I'm assuming you mean to be modern evolutionary theory.
I just hope to Christ you don't start spouting Duane Gish.
This'll be over before it begins.
Randy M. Wadkins, Ph.D.
Dear Dr. Wadkins:
As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics; I am familiar
with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
(For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
shines on the living and on the dead alike; only the former is
capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
forms. Whence the complexity? The question has a precise, although
possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on
the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
information to make the existence of living creatures probable? The
answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are
uninteresting because unsupported. The question I have just asked is
not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in
another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
"the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
Yockney may both be consulted. Finally, let me add that the entire
discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
morphology or biochemistry. The definition of complexity offered by
Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in
ways it would be embarrassing to document. The general question of
the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
David Berlinski
hamilton
>David Berlinski wrote:
> Dear Dr. Wadkins:
> blah, blah, blah ... The sun, after all,
> shines on the living and on the dead alike; only the former is
> capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
> forms. Whence the complexity?
There is this new scientific field called biochemistry. You may have
heard about it.
> ["information" flapdoodle deleted] ...the logician Hao Wang remarked
> that in his opinion, ^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^
> "the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
> physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
> random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
> unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
> components."
You mean, like separation into the troposphere, stratosphere, etc?
Or spearation of water molecules to form droplets? (I always
suspected that this was purely by chance, and that the weatherman
was just guessing if it would rain!)
> Finally, let me add that the entire
> discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
> collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
> complexity.
I love it when people then argue that increases in complexity
are unlikely when the concept is not "adequately measurable"
It probably won't be very long until I see such an "argument"...
> [more flapdoodle deleted] The general question of
> the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
> physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
> clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
> settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
> fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
> compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
I see nothing about information or complexity in my textbooks dealing
with thermodynamics. Just a bunch of rot about the flow of energy
in chemical reactions. We *can* tell if evolution is compatible with
the principles of thermodynamics, that is, are the biochemical
reactions allowed or forbidden.
>
> I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
Wheee!
>
> David Berlinski
Tracy P. Hamilton
Dept. of Chemistry, UAB
Thomas Scharle
(Posted and emailed. If your newsreader does not receive this,
please feel free to quote it.)
David Berlinski (Berl...@msn.com) wrote:
...
: Yockney may both be consulted. Finally, let me add that the entire
: discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
: collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
: complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
...
Indeed. One can only wonder why you started the discussion.
From your article in Commentary:
"Although biologists are unanimous in arguing that evolution has
no goal, fixed from the first, it remains true nonetheless that
living creatures have organized themselves into ever more elaborate
and flexible structures. If their complexity is increasing, the
entropy that surrounds them is decreasing. Whatever the universe-
as-a-whole may be doing -- time fusing incomprehensibly with space,
the great stars exploding indignantly -- _biologically_ things have
gone from bad to _better_, the show organized, or so it would seem,
as a counterexample to the prevailing winds of fate."
Not only have you brought up complexity, but also, "elaborate and
flexible structures" and the "winds of fate", and "bad to better" as
a biological concept.
Perhaps the discussion would be advanced if you could give us
some idea of what this passage is supposed to mean. As you assure
us that this article was meant to be scientific, I'd also like to
know about the scientific meanings of some of the terms invoked in
this passage:
"Things fall apart. Energy, like talent, tends to squander
itself. Liquids go from hot to lukewarm. And so does love.
Disorder and despair overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our
rooms and our lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go
from bad to worse. And overall, they go _only_ from bad to worse.
--
Tom Scharle scha...@nd.edu "standard disclaimer"
S. LaBonne
In article <00002182...@msn.com>,
David Berlinski <Berl...@msn.com> wrote:
>I hope you will be exhilirated by my answer.
I know I am. You fully lived up to my expectations for the sort of
ignorant, hand-waving, name-dropping bullshit I thought you'd produce.
Lesson 1: The second law of thermodynamics is an equilibrium law. (I
wonder if you can even state it accurately? Hint: as a law of
_classical thermodynamics_, it has nothing to do with "complexity" or
"order".) Life, on the other hand, operates far from equilibrium. So
far from there being any uncertainty as to whether the Second Law
"permits" life, the real uncertainty is whether the Second Law even
has any _relevance_ to life.
I am a mere molecular biologist. We have on this group people
_professionally_ involved with thermodynamics and statistical
mechanics, and I will leave it to them to deliver your subsequent
lessons. If you continue in this vein, it won't be pretty.
--
Opinions are mine alone; I never met a university with opinions!
Steve LaBonne ********************* (labo...@cnsunix.albany.edu)
"It can never be satisfied, the mind, never." - Wallace Stevens
Michael Gonzalez
David Berlinski wrote:
[I do not have access to the original _Commentary_ article, so I can
only address what you discuss in your post. I'd like to echo the
request that you post the text to your article for those of us who
haven't been able to read it.]
> Dr. Wadkins sent me this by e-mail; I am sure that he meant his
> criticisms to be widely appreciated. My response follows.
---<clipped e-mail from Randy M. Wadkins, Ph.D.>---
> Dear Dr. Wadkins:
> As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
> having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
> evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
> or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics; I am familiar
> with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
> (For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
> my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
> argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
> shines on the living and on the dead alike; only the former is
> capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
> forms.
This sentence seems to beg the question. If we start with the assertion
that "only [the living] is capable expeditiously of organizing itself
into ever more complex forms," then the question is already answered.
(I infer from this sentence that you are discussing abiogenesis
rather than biological evolution, here, but that isn't made completely
clear in your post. I would suggest that you make a clearer distinction
in your discussion between abiogenesis leading up to the first cell and
biological evolution -after- the first cell has come into existence by
whatever means. If you would argue that the two phenomena should -not-
be treated differently, by all means support your argument.)
> Whence the complexity? The question has a precise, although
> possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on
> the information latent in living creatures,
A lower bound on the information in material we call "living" may exist
and still not be telling here, if "information latent in living creatures"
is merely the "higher" end of a -continuum- of "information latent in
molecular arrangements." That is, there may be a lower bound on the
information latent in living creatures," but unless you can show that
there is an _unbridgeable_ gap between information latent in the simplest
possible living creatures and information latent in nonliving material,
the existence of such a lower bound is not an argument against abiogenesis.
I would argue that the existence of viruses, prions, and other arrangements
of material not considered "living" at least indicates that such a gap is
not immediately evident.
> do the laws of physics,
> taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
> information to make the existence of living creatures probable? The
> answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are
> uninteresting because unsupported. The question I have just asked is
> not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in
> another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
> conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
> "the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
> physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
> random distribution of the elementary particles and the field,
But no one says that life was formed from molecules that just happened
to come together from a random distribution.
The theories of abiogenesis with which I am familiar do not start with
anything near a random distribution of the ingredients of life, but
rather with a concentration of the relevant (CHON etc.) molecules in
certain localized environments.
What is more, the molecules, constrained by just those laws of
physics/quantum mechanics that form the basis of the chemistry of these
molecules, can react only in certain ways. That is, the very laws of
physics of which Drs. Feynmann and Goedel speak restrict the ways in
which the relevant molecules may combine. Therefore, "random" is not
at all a good description of how these molecules interact.
The complexity of the whole operation is exaggerated if it is not
recognized that those same chemical laws may allow the formation of
life from non-life to occur in stages. If we say that to achieve a
particular molecular structure requires 256 randomly-distributed
atoms/ions to come together, we might consider it unlikely. But if
we say that the structure's formation requires 4 non-randomly-distributed
"large" molecules to react, if those "large" molecules can be formed
by the combination of 4 non-randomly-distributed "smaller" molecules,
and if those "smaller" molecules, of 8 atoms each, can be formed through
the reaction between non-randomly-distributed raw materials, then the
formation of that structure becomes much more probable.
What is more, certain surfaces such as zinc and clay specifically promote
those reactions hypothesized as leading to the formation of living
organisms, reducing "randomness" even further.
Now it is true that no one has proven that the molecules involved -will-
tend to form the precursors of life, but scientists are experimentally
testing these ideas as we speak. (Anyone interested in a Discover magazine
article on one example of this kind of research can read "First Cell" at
http://www.enews.com/magazines/discover/magtxt/110195-7.html,
recently mentioned on this newsgroup. I'd bet that Edey and Johanson's
_Blueprints_ or Margulis and Sagan's _What is Life_, would have some
information on such research as well as pointers to the relevant scientific
literature.)
> is as
> unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
> components."
Goedel's analogy quoted here again begs the question. I could just as
easily say "....is as likely as the separation by chance of a random
mixture of oil and water molecules into its separate components."
We don't know what resemblance the chemistry of "life" molecules has,
if any, to the molecular subjects of either analogy.
> The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
> provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
> exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
> Yockney may both be consulted. Finally, let me add that the entire
> discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
> collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
> complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
> Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
> complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
> of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
> elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
> morphology or biochemistry. The definition of complexity offered by
> Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in
> ways it would be embarrassing to document. The general question of
> the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
> physics remains, to my mind, wide open;
The relationship between the laws of physics and biological complexity
may be critical with regard to abiogenesis, but once an initial cell
is formed, it is not at all obvious that the laws of physics are nearly
as important a limit on the future development of a population
of self-replicating organisms (except of course insofar as the laws
of physics limit what can exist or what can be evolved -into-; ie, no
large creatures with wheels, no metallic endoskeletons, etc.)
> indeed, it is not entirely
> clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
> settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
> fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
> compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
You may indeed be right in saying that we lack certain conceptual tools
needed to fully understand how, if at all, evolution fits in with the
laws of physics and possible laws of complexity.
Evolution -is-, however, compatible with the vast preponderance of the
physical evidence from the fields of geology, paleontology, comparative
anatomy, comparative embryology, genetics, bichemistry, and biogeography,
not to mention zoology, botany, and population biology. (Much of this is
covered in the t.o. FAQs at http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/origins/faqs.html
I've also found the above-mentioned _Blueprints_ to be a useful
introduction to the evidence for evolution.)
It therefore makes sense to provisionally accept the theory of evolution,
since it is the existing explanation that best accords with the physical
evidence. It follows that we should teach in our science classes that
best existing scientific explanation.
In fact, that is exactly what science always does - provisionally accept
well-supported explanations until another explanation is devised that
explains a) everything that the old explanation covered -and- b) something
that the old explanation could not explain (or did not explain as
completely).
It is possible, for example, that today's synthesis may eventually be
replaced by a synthesis of itself with chaos/complexity theory. Such a
new theory may come to be accepted by scientists as the best existing
scientific explanation for the history of life on earth; if so, it
should then be the theory taught in our science classes.
> I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
>
> David Berlinski
Some other material on thermodynamics may be found in the talk.origins
FAQ at http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/thermo.html
Some other material on abiogenesis may be found at these locations:
t.o FAQ at http://earth.ics.uci.edu:8080/faqs/faq-abiogenesis.html
http://biotech.chem.indiana.edu/pages/abio.html
----------------
Michael Gonzalez http://dodo.crown.net/~mpg/index.htm
mgon...@newscorp.com m...@dodo.crown.net
Opinions expressed are my own and do not represent Newscorp's views.
Randy M. Wadkins
In article <00002182...@msn.com>
Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
> Dear Dr. Wadkins:
> As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
> having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
> evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
> or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics;
I am responding to the following quotation from your paper...
> It is the second law of thermodynamics that holds
> dominion over the temporal organization of the universe,
> and what the law has to say we find verified by ordinary
> experience at every turn. Things fall apart. Energy,
> like talent, tends to squander itself. Liquids go from
> hot to lukewarm. And so does love. Disorder and despair
> overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our rooms and our
> lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go from
> bad to worse. And overall, they go _only_ from bad to
> worse.
> ...
> But if things fall apart, they also come together.
> _Life_ appears to offer at least a temporary rebuke to
> the second law of thermodynamics. ...
> An act of intelligence is required to bring even a
> thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life
> be any different?
> page 22
>
My initial response is what I would now call Randy's rule of
thumb:
>>If you think life, now or ever, violates the 2nd law of
>>thermodynamics, then you are a fucking idiot.
As an application of the above rule of thumb, let's take a
look at your post for me...
> I am familiar
> with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
> (For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
> my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
> argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
> shines on the living and on the dead alike;
Erroneous notion no. 1: sunlight and heat from the sun cannot cause
"ordering" in non-living ("dead") systems.
Simple refutation: place a pan of salt water in sunlight and observe
the results.
> only the former is
> capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
> forms. Whence the complexity?
Erroneous notion no. 2: Complexity of life has a connection to
theromodynamics of complicated systems.
The author has extrapolated the Boltzmann statistical mechanics
picture of a system, in which we have defined meaning for "order"
and "disorder", to complex systems that have no defined "order".
The whole concept of equating entropy with disorder in macroscopic
systems is a fool's game.
> The question has a precise, although
> possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on
> the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
> taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
> information to make the existence of living creatures probable?
Erroneous notion no. 3: statistical mechanical entropy and/or
thermodynamic entropy and entropy obtained from information theory
are the same thing.
To quote from Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory",
Dover, 1980, p. 24:
"Several physicists and mathematicians have been anxious to show
that [information] theory and its entropy are extremely important in
connection with statistical mechanics. This is still a confused
and confusing matter. The confusion is sometimes aggravated when
more than one meaning of _information_ creeps into the discussion.
Thus, _information_ is sometimes associated with the idea of
_knowledge_ through its popular use rather than with _uncertainty_
and the resolution of uncertainty, as it is in [information] theory"
The good Dr. Berlinski has made precisely this mistake, and it
is no wonder he cannot separate information theory from the
2nd law of thermodynamics. Not only do we have no lower bound
on the "information" latent in living organisms we have no
definition of "information" in living organisms at all.
>The
> answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are
> uninteresting because unsupported.
The correct answer is "nonsequitur". You are misapplying the theory.
> The question I have just asked is
> not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in
> another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
> conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
> "the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
> physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
> random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
> unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
> components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
> provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
> exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
> Yockney may both be consulted.
Erroneous notion No. 4: evolution is a random process.
Amazing. You quote these people as some attempt to disqualify
evolution, and yet you seem to have no comprehension why this
doesn't do so. Let me state that no scientist will argue with
the above quote by Goedel. It is completely improbable that
a human body would arise from random distributions. I will
say that for all practical purposes, it is completely impossible.
Fortunately for us, nature has a non-random method of creating
humans from precursors. It is called "evolution". The statments
made in the above paragraphs have nothing whatsoever to do
with evolution.
> Finally, let me add that the entire
> discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
> collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
> complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
> Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
> complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
> of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
> elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
> morphology or biochemistry.
At least you recognize this. As I indicated earlier, notions of
"complexity", "order", and "disorder" lack definition in
macroscopic systems.
> The definition of complexity offered by
> Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in
> ways it would be embarrassing to document.
I am unfamiliar with Dawkins' definitions, so I cannot comment
on this matter.
> The general question of
> the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
> physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
> clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
> settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
> fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
> compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
>
Erroneous notion No. 5: the laws of physics do not apply to living
systems.
My suggestion would be take a course on biochemistry to convince
yourself that chemicals incorporated into "living" systems behave
exactly as they do in "non-living" systems. The matter composing
living systems is identical to that in dead matter. It plays
by precisely the same rules. Living things, past and present,
do not and did not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, nor any
other physical law. Your statement that "the relationship
between biological complexity and the laws of physics remains,
to my mind, wide open" is comically funny, especially in light
of the many confused ideas you have about evolution, biology,
and thermodynamics.
> I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
>
> David Berlinski
Not as much as you'd think. Your notions are as confused as any-
thing I've seen from the ICR, and exemplify the creationist
stereotype of someone babbling nonsense about things they don't
understand, to be swallowed whole by the easily mislead and gullible.
That you were given a podium in a national magazine to make erroneous
statements is yet another example of the decay of scientific literacy
in the U.S.
I would urge you to stick with mathematics, professor, as you seem
to know little about science and nothing about evolution.
And you know what? We still didn't get to the part where I point
out why a thimble is different from a living organism.
--Randy M. Wadkins, Ph.D.
Michael Gonzalez
Michael Gonzalez wrote:
---<clip>---
> The complexity of the whole operation is exaggerated if it is not
> recognized that those same chemical laws may allow the formation of
> life from non-life to occur in stages. If we say that to achieve a
> particular molecular structure requires 256 randomly-distributed
I of course meant 128 here :) 4 * 4 * 8
> atoms/ions to come together, we might consider it unlikely. But if
> we say that the structure's formation requires 4 non-randomly-distributed
> "large" molecules to react, if those "large" molecules can be formed
> by the combination of 4 non-randomly-distributed "smaller" molecules,
> and if those "smaller" molecules, of 8 atoms each, can be formed through
> the reaction between non-randomly-distributed raw materials, then the
> formation of that structure becomes much more probable.
Martin Gelfand
>criticisms to be widely appreciated. My response follows.
>Dear Dr. Wadkins:
>As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
>having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
>evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
>(For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
>my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
>argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
>the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
>taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
>another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
>conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
>"the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
>physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
>random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
>unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
>components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
>provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
>exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
>collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
>complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
>Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
>complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
>of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
>elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
>physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
>clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
>settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
>fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
>compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
>
>
>David Berlinski
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: BoseEinstein Condensation
Summary:
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References: <4h0ljo$e...@news2.acs.oakland.edu> <4h14rk$4...@soap.news.pipex.net> <4h5012$3...@madeline.INS.CWRU.Edu>
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In article <4h5012$3...@madeline.INS.CWRU.Edu> jj...@po.cwru.edu writes:
>In article <4h14rk$4...@soap.news.pipex.net>,
>Steven Carr <ca...@dial.pipex.com> wrote:
>>on Wed, 28 Feb 1996 16:27:20 GMT, Sple...@digital-diversions.com ()
>>wrote :
>>
>>Is this Beryllium a new state of matter or is it just a variation on
>>Helium superfluidity?
>
>Actually, the Colorado group used Rubidium not Beryllium. Apparently
>any of the period I metals will work (Na,K,Rb,...) but the more massive
>the atom, the easier it is to cool it. Laser cooling is limited by
>momentum transfers (elastic collisions) on the scale of the photon
>momentum which translates into a kinetic energy in the atoms, which
>goes as 1/m. Thus, the larger m is, the farther you can go with the
>easy-to-use lasers.
>
>The "new" state is a macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensate that you read
>about in any statistical mechanics text. It is different from helium
>superfluidity, but I've never quite gotten a clear idea why [something
>to do with how a superfluid occurs within a background of
>non-superfluid helium as a 2-component mixture of liquids where this
>really is a collection of atoms in the ground state?]
In liquid helium interparticle interactions are extremely significant
whereas in the "condensed" rubidium vapor the density is very very low
and interatomic interactions are almost negligible. So there are
important differences in the details between the two systems, even
if both involve macroscopic occupation of a single "quantum state".
>
>What I've never heard a clear explanation of, though, is why Rubidium
>is a boson and not a fermion (1 valence electron, odd number of protons
>each of which should give non-zero spin, but for some reason that is
>completely beyond me, don't seem to.) Anyone know why atoms of the
>alkali metals are considered bosons?
>
Consider the change in the phase of the two-atom wavefunction as
one rubidium atom is carried fully around another. There is a
factor of -1 coming from the odd number of electrons, and another
factor of -1 coming from the
Newsgroups: sci.math
Subject: Re: Shucks, a mistake...but why am I still smiling?
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In article <4i7ofv$j...@dfw-ixnews6.ix.netcom.com> James Harris <jste...@ix.netcom.com> writes:
>
>So what does this mean in the real world? Well, for one thing, a large
>diamond (I've heard that diamonds are FCC) should float higher than a
>smaller one because it would be slightly less dense. I guess it would be
>an extremely small difference, but it's nice to make real world
>predictions.
>
>It also means that basically nothing in the real world has the density of
>74%. Have you ever seen a rhomboid shaped diamond?
Nothing against your mathematics, Mr. Harris, but diamond is not
an fcc packing of carbon. There are, however, many fcc elemental
solid phases (looking at a periodic table I see all the noble gases
except He; Al, Ca, Ni, Cu, Sr, Rh, Pd, Ag, Ir, Pt, Au, Pb, Ac, Ce,
Yb, and Th).
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: [Classic] Phase transitions
Summary:
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In article <4j6mgq$6...@charity.ucr.edu> jdo...@math.ucr.edu (james dolan) writes:
>jonathan stott writes:
>
>-In article <4ivotl$p...@charity.ucr.edu>,
>-james dolan <jdo...@math.ucr.edu> wrote:
>->
>->why couldn't you have "continuous symmetry-breaking"?
>->
>-
>-Because once you break it, it is no longer a symetry?
>
>
>not "it", "them". my question was: why can't you have a continuous
>family of smaller and smaller symmetry groups, continuously broken
>down over time? (notice this probably requires the initial symmetry
>group to be infinite-dimensional.)
>
Does there actually exist such a chain of subgroups?
Newsgroups: rec.food.drink.beer
Subject: Re: Boulder, Colorado microbrew site.
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In article <4jchol$6...@alterdial.UU.NET> spa...@dataware.com writes:
>I have developed a new site about Boulder County microbreweries. The site is new and therefor is still under construction. It
>will be growing for the next couple of weeks. Please check it out and let me know what you think. The URL is
>http://www.wateringhole.com/microbrews/
>
>Thanks,
>Sid Payne
>
>
New Belgium Brewing Company
Fort Collins, Colorado
(address listed in the telephone book is 350 Linden St, 80524,
but I think they moved recently, phone number listed is 970-221-0524)
Newsgroups: rec.backcountry
Subject: Re: Rocky Mt. NP
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In article <4je7j6$k...@news.bu.edu> hark...@bio.bu.edu (Daniel Harkness) writes:
>Hi All, does one think that Rocky Mt NP is going to be "packed" in the
>middle of July? I've taken a cursory glance at a cruddy map of the park and
>it seems that there is a lot of space... Also, any suggestions on some
>trails for day hikes and maybe an overnighter... Does one need a backcountry
>permit?
>
>Thanks for any and all responses,
>Dan Harkness
>
The areas around the principal trailheads will be very crowded on weekends.
The deeper you go into the backcountry the fewer people you will find:
but you may still run across an unexpectedly large number of people
along the Divide (I'm thinking specifically about Flattop Mountain).
I've seen dozens of people in an area inaccessible by maintained trail,
above Lake Ypsilon. One can certainly find solitude in RMNP,
but you can understand why I'd rather not broadcast the information...
Backcountry permits are required for overnight stays; camping is
restricted to designated sites or cross-country zones.
Enjoy!
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: CALL YOURSELFS PHYSICIST, BUT YOU DON'T KNOW NOTHING !
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In article <7902LKAvn$uxE...@sthbrum.demon.co.uk> Keith Stein <sth...@sthbrum.demon.co.uk> writes:
>How can anyone call themselves a physicists, if they can't even
>
> ANSWER ABIAN'S SIMPLE QUESTION ?
>
>Alexander Abian has been desparately trying to get an answer to his
>delightfully simple question about length contraction. You must have
>seen the thread 'WHAT WOULD LORENTZ SAY ?'. So why no one answer eh!
>
> Alexander Abian writes:-
>>
>>A carriage moves over an unexposed film F with a uniform velocity v.
>>There are two small holes a' and b' at the bottom of the carriage and an
>>electric flash bulb M midway between a' and b'.
>>After a while M gives a flash and two dots a and b appear on the
>>exposed film F.
>>
>> ---|--a'---M--- b'--|---------> v
>>
>> ----------------a-----b------------------------- stationary film F
>>
>>Again after a while the carriage is stopped and brought back and a' and
>>a are aligned. What would the position of b' w.r.t b be ?
>
>The only answer Mr. Alexander Abian got was from me;
>(AND WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT LENGTH CONTRACTIONS ANYWAY ?)
>
> i am not prepared to speculate about 'What Lorentz Would Say', but
> i would be prepared to speculate that in reality:-
>
> ab = a'b'.
>
>
And you would be wrong. In fact ab > a'b'
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Thermodynamics
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In article <00002182...@msn.com> Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
>Dr. Wadkins sent me this by e-mail; I am sure that he meant his
>criticisms to be widely appreciated. My response follows.
>
>
>Well, we could start with your hideously erroneous claim that
>life/evolution violates the 2nd Law of thermodynamics, or
>were you just being coy and "insinuating" that it does,
>without actually stating that it does? My own take was that
>you've read too much creationist bullshit, and have begun
>to parrot it without knowing what it is you're talking about.
>
>Later, we'll deal with your other hideously erroneous claims.
>I have to go get the full article, since all that was posted
>here were a few selections. However, I seriously doubt if
>you have any scientific reasons to doubt "Darwin's theory",
>which I'm assuming you mean to be modern evolutionary theory.
>
>I just hope to Christ you don't start spouting Duane Gish.
>This'll be over before it begins.
>
>Randy M. Wadkins, Ph.D.
>
>Dear Dr. Wadkins:
>As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
>having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
>evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
>or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics; I am familiar
>with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
>(For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
>my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
>argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
>shines on the living and on the dead alike; only the former is
>capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
>forms. Whence the complexity? The question has a precise, although
>possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on
>the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
>taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
>information to make the existence of living creatures probable? The
>answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are
>uninteresting because unsupported. The question I have just asked is
>not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in
>another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
>conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
>"the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
>physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
>random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
>unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
>components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
>provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
>exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
>Yockney may both be consulted. Finally, let me add that the entire
>discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
>collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
>complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
>Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
>complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
>of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
>elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
>morphology or biochemistry. The definition of complexity offered by
>Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in
>ways it would be embarrassing to document. The general question of
>the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
>physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
>clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
>settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
>fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
>compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
>
>I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
>
>David Berlinski
Welcome to talk.origins, Mr. Berlinski. I hope that you
will soon be exhiliarated by the level of discussion here.
Because it is considered by some to be bad form to state
ones credentials in net.discussions (since ones posts are
supposed to speak for themselves) I think you should be
advised that many of the regular posters are experts in
various subfields of physics, chemistry, biology, paleontology,
as well as being generally well-informed on broad range
of issues that have frequently arisen in discussions in
this forum. I am only a lurker, but because my area
of expertise is condensed matter/statistical physics I
can't resist throwing in my own $0.02 in response to your
post.
The principal reason I found your post to be annoying
rather than exhilirating is that you seem to be deliberately
confusing two very different issues. One is the second
law of thermodynamics, and the other is the "complexity"
of driven systems.
The second law of thermodynamics states, as you well know,
that any spontaneous process in a closed system cannot
lead to a decrease in its entropy; and the entropy can only
be defined for systems which are in equilibrium.
On relevant time scales (the lifetime, for an
organism; the age of the earth, for the biosphere as a
whole) living systems are _not_ closed; and in any case
no living system as a whole is "in equilibrium".
Therefore the second law of thermodynamics and thermodynamics
more generally has nothing useful to say about the course of
evolution. What the second law does suggest is that
an organism cannot live indefinitely in a closed box,
unable to rid itself of waste products or to eat or to
breath: something we all recognize to be true, but
hardly surprising or of any relevance to issues of
evolution (or development at the organismal level, for
that matter).
What physical constraints are there for _driven_ systems,
such as the biosphere and the organisms therein? That
is a fascinating question, but (as you observe) at this
point in time there are very few answers, in general.
The exception is for systems _near_ equilibrium; but
like thermodynamics the theory of linear response
has little or nothing to contribute to discussions about
evolution of life. And even very simple systems,
when strongly driven for short periods of time, can
do some remarkable things. (How do the Brazil nuts
know to come to the top, when you shake a can of
mixed nuts: just one of many examples of spatial
and/or temporal organization in simple driven systems.)
In summary, there is no reason to suspect that the
modern theory of evolution is inconsistent with
the physical principles of thermodynamics or
statistical mechanics, and there is an enormous quantity
of evidence (biochemical, paleontological, etc) in support
of it. Regarding that evidence, I'll let the experts
speak. Or maybe you could read the talk.origins FAQs?
Martin Gelfand
Dept of Physics, Colorado State University
PS: If you have specific references to Feynman, Thompson
or Yockney that you alluded to I'd appreciate the chance
to look them up. The Godel quote either reflects
stunning naivete or was taken out of context:
the "initial condition" for life, the state of the earth
and sun some billions of years ago, was hardly a random
distribution of particles and fields.
Randy M. Wadkins
In article <00002182...@msn.com>
Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
> Dear Dr. Wadkins:
> As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
> having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
> evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
> or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics;
I am responding to the following quotation from your paper...
> I am familiar
> with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
> (For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
> my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
> argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
> shines on the living and on the dead alike;
Erroneous notion no. 1: sunlight and heat from the sun cannot cause
"ordering" in non-living ("dead") systems.
Simple refutation: place a pan of salt water in sunlight and observe
the results.
> only the former is
> capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex
> forms. Whence the complexity?
Erroneous notion no. 2: Complexity of life has a connection to
theromodynamics of complicated systems.
The author has extrapolated the Boltzmann statistical mechanics
picture of a system, in which we have defined meaning for "order"
and "disorder", to complex systems that have no defined "order".
The whole concept of equating entropy with disorder in macroscopic
systems is a fool's game.
> The question has a precise, although
> possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on
> the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
> taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of
> information to make the existence of living creatures probable?
Erroneous notion no. 3: statistical mechanical entropy and/or
thermodynamic entropy and entropy obtained from information theory
are the same thing.
To quote from Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory",
Dover, 1980, p. 24:
"Several physicists and mathematicians have been anxious to show
that [information] theory and its entropy are extremely important in
connection with statistical mechanics. This is still a confused
and confusing matter. The confusion is sometimes aggravated when
more than one meaning of _information_ creeps into the discussion.
Thus, _information_ is sometimes associated with the idea of
_knowledge_ through its popular use rather than with _uncertainty_
and the resolution of uncertainty, as it is in [information] theory"
The good Dr. Berlinski has made precisely this mistake, and it
is no wonder he cannot separate information theory from the
2nd law of thermodynamics. Not only do we have no lower bound
on the "information" latent in living organisms we have no
definition of "information" in living organisms at all.
>The
> answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are
> uninteresting because unsupported.
The correct answer is "nonsequitur". You are misapplying the theory.
> The question I have just asked is
> not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in
> another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in
> conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion,
> "the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of
> physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a
> random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as
> unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its
> components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel
> provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
> exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert
> Yockney may both be consulted.
Erroneous notion No. 4: evolution is a random process.
Amazing. You quote these people as some attempt to disqualify
evolution, and yet you seem to have no comprehension why this
doesn't do so. Let me state that no scientist will argue with
the above quote by Goedel. It is completely improbable that
a human body would arise from random distributions. I will
say that for all practical purposes, it is completely impossible.
Fortunately for us, nature has a non-random method of creating
humans from precursors. It is called "evolution". The statments
made in the above paragraphs have nothing whatsoever to do
with evolution.
> Finally, let me add that the entire
> discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a
> collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological
> complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and
> Schutz allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the
> complexity and diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is,
> of course, quite different from the sense of complexity invoked
> elsewhere in the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative
> morphology or biochemistry.
At least you recognize this. As I indicated earlier, notions of
"complexity", "order", and "disorder" lack definition in
macroscopic systems.
> The definition of complexity offered by
> Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in
> ways it would be embarrassing to document.
I am unfamiliar with Dawkins' definitions, so I cannot comment
on this matter.
> The general question of
> the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
> physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
> clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
> settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
> fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
> compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
>
Erroneous notion No. 5: the laws of physics do not apply to living
systems.
My suggestion would be take a course on biochemistry to convince
yourself that chemicals incorporated into "living" systems behave
exactly as they do in "non-living" systems. The matter composing
living systems is identical to that in dead matter. It plays
by precisely the same rules. Living things, past and present,
do not and did not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, nor any
other physical law. Your statement that "the relationship
between biological complexity and the laws of physics remains,
to my mind, wide open" is comically funny, especially in light
of the many confused ideas you have about evolution, biology,
and thermodynamics.
> I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
>
> David Berlinski
Not as much as you'd think. Your notions are as confused as any-
Matthew P Wiener
In article <00002182...@msn.com>, Berlinski@msn (David Berlinski) writes:
>In this regard, Richard Thompson and Hubert Yockney may both be consulted.
We on t.o are familiar with both of these clowns. The former had an
amazing group personality disciple hawking his book (put out by some
obscure eastern religions publisher that no one's library carries).
Yockey showed up briefly, in standard hit-and-run I'm-right-you're-wrong
style that we are very familiar with. Like you, he was utterly clueless
regarding "information" and its relationship with physics.
--
-Matthew P Wiener (wee...@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
Matthew P Wiener
In article <4pk4mt$n...@news.nd.edu>, scharle@joplin (Thomas Scharle) writes:
[quoting Berlinksi:]
> "Things fall apart. Energy, like talent, tends to squander
>itself. Liquids go from hot to lukewarm. And so does love.
>Disorder and despair overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our
>rooms and our lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go
>from bad to worse. And overall, they go _only_ from bad to worse.
Sounds like my office. Somebody seeing the arrangement of books and
papers and food and comics and other items might conclude that my
office is _alive_, in fact. It's that bad.
Perhaps the scientific content of the above Berlinski passage is that
he was force fed scrambled eggs as a child.
Randy M. Wadkins
*************************************************************
David Berlinski's e-mail to me as a rebuttal. Since he stated
he would discuss each point in talk.origins, I feel it is
not outside the bounds of netiquette to post it here.
--Randy
**************************************************************
I will respond to each point made, but only once.
----------
From: Randy M. Wadkins
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 1996 10:53 AM
To: David Berlinski
Subject: RE: Commentary:" I love psuedoscience" -Reply
In article <00002182...@msn.com>
Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
> Dear Dr. Wadkins:
> As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without > having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and > evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life > or evolution violates the second
law of thermodynamics;
I am responding to the following quotation from your paper...
> It is the second law of thermodynamics that holds > dominion over the temporal organization of the universe, > and what the law has to say we find verified by ordinary > experience at every turn. Things fall apart.
Energy, > like talent, tends to squander itself. Liquids go
from > hot to lukewarm. And so does love. Disorder and despair
> overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our rooms and our >
lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go from >
bad to worse. And overall, they go _only_ from bad to > worse.
> ...
> But if things fall apart, they also come together.
> _Life_ appears to offer at least a temporary rebuke to
> the second law of thermodynamics. ...
> An act of intelligence is required to bring even a
> thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life
> be any different?
> page 22
>
My initial response is what I would now call Randy's rule of thumb:
>>If you think life, now or ever, violates the 2nd law of >>thermodynamics, then you are a fucking idiot.
Not an argument: simply the expression of vulgar pique.
As an application of the above rule of thumb, let's take a look at
your post for me...
> I am familiar > with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
> (For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
> my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
> argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all, > shines on the living and on the dead alike;
Erroneous notion no. 1: sunlight and heat from the sun cannot cause
"ordering" in non-living ("dead") systems.
Simple refutation: place a pan of salt water in sunlight and observe
the results.
You are rebutting a point I did not make. I argued only that living
creatures have a form of organization not found elsewhere. Considering
the properties of life, the point is obviously true. There are, of
course, characteristic forms of organization present in the inorganic
world. Almost always, these reflect strong symmetry constraints.
> only the former is > capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever more complex > forms. Whence the complexity?
Erroneous notion no. 2: Complexity of life has a connection to
theromodynamics of complicated systems.
The author has extrapolated the Boltzmann statistical mechanics picture
of a system, in which we have defined meaning for "order" and
"disorder", to complex systems that have no defined "order". The
whole concept of equating entropy with disorder in macroscopic systems
is a fool's game.
1 Boltzmann's law is a law of thermodynamics; it may be derived from
statistical mechanical considerations.
2 You are right to observe that these inferences are characteristically
shady; but after all, it is the biologists who are concerned to
maintain that there is no conflict between evolution and
thermodynamics. If the identification of entropy with disorder in
macroscopic systems is a fool's game, then the issue whether
biological systems violate the laws of thermodynamics is formally
undecidable. We cannot know. Needless to say, no physicist would accept
such strictures. After all, a dilute gas whose particles move in
accord with Newtonian principles (elastic reflection at the boundary),
is a macroscopic system from a thermodynamic point of view: properties
such as pressure, volume and temperature are macroscopic properties
of the gas. And in such systems, entropy does provide a suitable
measure of approximation to order. If E is a bounded container and N
represents the number of particles in a gas, is the system that
results more or less ordered when every one of the N particles
occupies a region of E half again as large as the whole? The answer is
obvious. It goes without saying that the relationship between entropy
and order may be clarified, as in Landau's theory of phase
transitions, where a thermodynamic system is described by a single
order parameter. Under Landau's theory, the relationship between
entropy and order is then derived, and not assumed.
> The question has a precise, although > possibly misleading formulation: Given some plausible lower bound on > the information latent in living creatures, do the laws of physics,
> taken under plausible initial conditions, specify enough by way of > information to make the existence of living creatures probable?
Erroneous notion no. 3: statistical mechanical entropy and/or
thermodynamic entropy and entropy obtained from information theory are
the same thing.
To quote from Pierce's "An Introduction to Information Theory", Dover,
1980, p. 24:
"Several physicists and mathematicians have been anxious to show that
[information] theory and its entropy are extremely important in
connection with statistical mechanics. This is still a confused and
confusing matter. The confusion is sometimes aggravated when more than
one meaning of _information_ creeps into the discussion.
Thus, _information_ is sometimes associated with the idea of
_knowledge_ through its popular use rather than with _uncertainty_ and
the resolution of uncertainty, as it is in [information] theory"
The good Dr. Berlinski has made precisely this mistake, and it is no
wonder he cannot separate information theory from the
2nd law of thermodynamics. Not only do we have no lower bound on the
"information" latent in living organisms we have no definition of
"information" in living organisms at all.
The sense of information to which I appeal is Shannon's. The formal
identification of Boltzmann's measure of entropy and Shannon's
definition of information is a mathematical matter, not one subject to
dispute. To argue that we have no definition (or measure) of
information in living organisms is disingenuous. Biologists regularly
compute the information capacity of the mammalian nervous system, or
the information resident in various genomes, using precisely the
measure of information introduced by Shannon. Details are widely
available. Whether this is an adequate measure of information is
entirely another story. I am sympathetic to objections on this score,
having made them myself.
>The > answers: sure, you bet, must be, I know it is so, I must observe, are > uninteresting because unsupported.
The correct answer is "nonsequitur". You are misapplying the theory.
Incoherent, I am afraid.
> The question I have just asked is > not my own: in one formulation it is due to Richard Feynmann; in > another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel, who in > conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his opinion, > "te
formation within geological times of a human body by the laws of >
physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a >
random distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is as >
unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its >
components." The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel >
provided no argument for his assertion; but quantitative estimates do
> exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and
Hubert > Yockney may both be consulted.
Erroneous notion No. 4: evolution is a random process.
The words random and deterministic have a relatively clear technical
meaning. A process governing the behavior of a system is
deterministic if given fixed initial conditions, a description of the
process is sufficient uniquely to specify the future course of the
system. This is not entirely precise; outside of mathematics and
logic, what is? But the definition is precise enough to indicate what
should have been obvious: a process contingent upon a series of
stochastic events cannot in the nature of things be deterministic. No
doubt, there are deterministic consequences that follow from random
events in the theory of evolution. Who would doubt it? Winning the
lottery also has deterministic consquences for the winners; and yet no
one conversant with the requisite concepts would ever suggest that
lotteries comprise a deterministic series. The very thought is absurd.
Amazing. You quote these people as some attempt to disqualify
evolution, and yet you seem to have no comprehension why this doesn't
do so. Let me state that no scientist will argue with the above quote
by Goedel. It is completely improbable that a human body would arise
from random distributions. I will say that for all practical purposes,
it is completely impossible.
Fortunately for us, nature has a non-random method of creating humans
from precursors. It is called "evolution". The statments made in the
above paragraphs have nothing whatsoever to do with evolution.
This argument is doubly confused. I do not agree that evolution is a
non-random method of doing anything; Darwin's theory is inherently
stochastic.
But say for the sake of argument that the theory is, in fact,
deterministic -- represented, perhaps, by deterministic equations upon
which noise has been superimposed. Goedel's query would yet remain
pertinent. The character of the theory of evolution is an irrelevance.
This is a logical point. Goedel asked whether, given a random
distribution of particles, together with a specification of the
quantum field, the emergence of a human body would be likely, whether
by random or deterministic means. The randomness to which Goedel
appeals is an initial generic state of the system. (Generic, as in the
complement is of measure 0). It is not clear why even if you believe
the theory of evolution to be deterministic you imagine you have
answered Goedel's question. Plastic is produced by a deterministic
process; but no one supposes that the appearance of plastic is likely
under an initial generic state of the quantum field. If you believe,
as you say, "it is completely improbable that a human body would arise
from random distributions," then you have formally expressed your
doubts about any scheme of evolution whatsoever.
The argument is elementary: Premiss 1 (Goedel). The most likely initial
state of the quantum field is a random distribution (this is the
meaning of 'the most likely'; the distribution is understood to be
prior to the emergence of life). Premiss 2 (Your own, in your own
words): "It is completely improbable that a human body would arise
from random distributions." Conclusion (by modus ponens when
formalized): It is completely improbable that a human body would
arise. Note that the conclusion is insensitive to the character of any
theory of evolution whatsoever.
I repeat: this is your argument, not mine. And a diagnostic word. In
fashioning this argument you have quite obviously confused the generic
initial state of the field with the random mechanism of evolution
itself.
> Finally, let me add that the entire > discussion suffers from a characteristic conceptual weakness: we -- a > collective we -- lack for an adequate measure of biological > complexity. The sense of complexity to which Axel, Feigelson and > Schutz
allude in their Cell paper of 1976 ("Analysis of the > complexity and
diversity of mRNA from chicken liver and oviduct") is, > of course,
quite different from the sense of complexity invoked > elsewhere in
the biological sciences -- in studies of comparative > morphology or
biochemistry.
At least you recognize this. As I indicated earlier, notions of
"complexity", "order", and "disorder" lack definition in macroscopic
systems.
Yes, I agree; but I think you underestimate the extent to which the
whole of biology, even its strongest departments (molecular biology,
biochemistry), are infected with poorly understood concepts which we
do not understand but cannot abandon.
> The definition of complexity offered by > Dawkins, which is intended to cover a great many cases, is flawed in > ways it would be embarrassing to document.
I am unfamiliar with Dawkins' definitions, so I cannot comment on this
matter.
> The general question of > the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of > physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely > clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to > settle it. But, of
course, if we do not know this, it follows a > fortiori that we do not
quite know that the course of evolution is > compatible with the
principles of thermodynamics. >
Erroneous notion No. 5: the laws of physics do not apply to living
systems.
Of course the laws of physics apply to living systems. Who on earth
would doubt it? Whether the laws of physics explain all that is
interesting about living systems is another matter entirely; and
whether the laws of physics explain the existence of living systems is
a still further question. The laws of physics and chemistry explain
the properties of aspirin, but not its existence.
My suggestion would be take a course on biochemistry to convince
yourself that chemicals incorporated into "living" systems behave
exactly as they do in "non-living" systems. The matter composing
living systems is identical to that in dead matter. It plays by
precisely the same rules. Living things, past and present, do not and
did not violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, nor any other physical
law. Your statement that "the relationship between biological
complexity and the laws of physics remains, to my mind, wide open" is
comically funny, especially in light of the many confused ideas you
have about evolution, biology, and thermodynamics.
The matter in my book plays by quite the same rules as the matter in my
desk; nonetheless, the laws of physics are inadequate to explain the
meaning of common English words.
> I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
> > David Berlinski
Not as much as you'd think. Your notions are as confused as any- thing
I've seen from the ICR, and exemplify the creationist stereotype of
someone babbling nonsense about things they don't understand, to be
swallowed whole by the easily mislead and gullible.
That you were given a podium in a national magazine to make erroneous
statements is yet another example of the decay of scientific literacy
in the U.S.
I would urge you to stick with mathematics, professor, as you seem to
know little about science and nothing about evolution.
And you know what? We still didn't get to the part where I point out
why a thimble is different from a living organism.
--Randy M. Wadkins, Ph.D.
Nice try. May I point out that sarcasm really is not in your line?
Martin Gelfand
APOLOGIES: I COULD NOT CANCEL MY LAST POSTING
THAT HAD LOTS OF EXTRANEOUS JUNK ATTACHED! HERE
IS THE CORRECT VERSION...
In article <4pkcdk$1f...@lamar.ColoState.EDU> gel...@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Martin Gelfand) writes:
>In article <00002182...@msn.com> Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
>Dr. Wadkins sent me this by e-mail; I am sure that he meant his
>criticisms to be widely appreciated. My response follows.
> [deleted...]
>Dear Dr. Wadkins:
Brett J. Vickers
In article <4pkfko$a...@netnews.upenn.edu>,
Matthew P Wiener <wee...@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu> wrote:
>In article <00002182...@msn.com>, Berlinski@msn (David Berlinski) writes:
>
>amazing group personality disciple hawking his book (put out by some
>obscure eastern religions publisher that no one's library carries).
Don't forget Thompson's appearance on NBC's recent tribute to science,
"The Mysterious Origins of Man". He appeared on that show with such
scientific luminaries as "Dr." Carl Baugh, curator of the Glen Rose
Texas Creation Evidences Museum and impenitent promoter of
contemporary human and dinosaur tracks; Richard Milton, creationist-
cum-bad-science-writing-hack who visited talk.origins about a year ago
and made an utter fool out of himself by claiming that evolution
predicts crocodiles should share more genes with snakes than chickens;
and Don Patton, a creationist "geologist" degreed by Australia's
prestigious Queensland Christian University, an unaccredited and
campus-free institution of higher learning. Oh, and don't forget
Charlton "I am the NRA" Heston, otherwise known as the parter of red
seas and wearer of silly skirts in technicolor gladiator flicks.
Richard Thompson shares illustrious company.
--
Brett J. Vickers bvic...@ics.uci.edu
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~bvickers/
Tim Thompson
In article <00002182...@msn.com>, Berl...@msn.com
(David Berlinski) writes:
> The general question of
> the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
> physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
> clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
> settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
> fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
> compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
All this says to me is that evolution may (or may not) someday be
found to violate some law of physics that has yet to be discovered,
invented, or formulated. This does not seem like a very exciting
thing to say, at least from my perspective. Maybe someday some new
law of physics will be found to replace general relativity, but
that hardly sounds like news either.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Timothy J. Thompson, Timothy.J...@jpl.nasa.gov
California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer.
Atmospheric Corrections Team - Scientific Programmer.
George Acton
t...@uzon.jpl.nasa.gov (Tim Thompson) wrote:
>In article <00002182...@msn.com>, Berl...@msn.com
>(David Berlinski) writes:
>
>> The general question of the relationship between biological
>> complexity and the laws of physics remains, to my mind, wide
>
> All this says to me is that evolution may (or may not) someday be
>found to violate some law of physics that has yet to be discovered,
>invented, or formulated.
Yeah, well, um. Someday we may resurrect Vitalism and someday we
may revide the luminiferous aether too. In the meantime they're
the province of wannabe visionaries and academic whores. So
what else is new?
George Acton
----------------
Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and
reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge
ladled out daily in high schools.
-New York Times editorial, 1921
Wade Hines
Berl...@msn.com (David Berlinski) writes:
>Dear Dr. Wadkins:
>As I understand your e-mail, you propose to rebut my article without
>having read it in full. It is an interesting standard of argument and
>evidence to which you thus appeal. In fact, I did not claim that life
>or evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics; I am familiar
>with the standard argument and familiar again with thermodynamics.
>(For an informal account of Boltzmann's equation, you might consult
>my own book, Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck). I would
>argue that the standard accounts are incomplete. The sun, after all,
<<<< much snippage >>>
>ways it would be embarrassing to document. The general question of
>the relationship between biological complexity and the laws of
>physics remains, to my mind, wide open; indeed, it is not entirely
>clear that we are in possession of the conceptual tools needed to
>settle it. But, of course, if we do not know this, it follows a
>fortiori that we do not quite know that the course of evolution is
>compatible with the principles of thermodynamics.
>I know you will be exhilarated by my answer.
I am amazed at your obfuscation. One can easily create twisted and
convex ramblings to suggest that little is know but how about the simple
facts.
Life and its biochemical components are fairly well documented. The
whole of the process, is in energetic and entropic respect, the sum
of its parts in the proper stoiciometry.
Using your cartoon to light shinning on something that is alive or dead
is quite illustrative. Light can shine on my dog all it wans with little
distinguishable effect from shining on a piece of road kill.
Likewise, if I cut a leaf off a tree and shine the same sunlight on it
and one still on the tree, the same reactions take place --- for a while.
There really is no excuse for any neo-vitalism. Again, the detailed
chemical reactions are known.
If one looks at the mechanistic process of evolution, mutations must
occur, some animals must die and others live. There is no entropic
barrior to be had.
Again, using your examples, the occurance of any exact species, person
or event of any sort is unquestionably unfathomably remote. But it is
a clear and childish mistake to suppose that evolution had a specific
target in mind. That level of anthropic fallacy is unfortunetely nearly
as common as it is wrong.
Judging by your post, you have a moderate understanding of the math
behind simple probabilities encountered in examples of information
theory. What is unfortuneately apparent as well is that you fail to
grasp the application of simple math to real problems and instead
fall for complex renderings of simple topics.
--Wade
Randy M. Wadkins
BEGIN PART TWO:
DB:
>> If the identification of entropy with disorder in > macroscopic systems is a fool's
game,
>then the issue whether > biological systems violate the laws of thermodynamics is
formally
>> undecidable.
>
RMW:
>No, it bloody is not. Thermodynamics and the 2nd Law can be measured
calorimetrically,
>without any need whatsoever to invoke statistical models. Believe it or not, entropy was
>understood long before statistical mechanics appeared, and some days I wish it was still
>taught independently of Stat. Mech., so these kinds of notions wouldn't crop up. dS >=
>dq/T. Nothing about "order" or "disorder" in there at all.
>
DB:
> 1) If you wish to commit yourself to a version of physics that was current in the
>1830s, that is, of course, your prerogative, but the interpretation of thermodynamics in
>terms of statistical mechannics by means of a partition function is by now a conceptual
>staple, one that it is pointless to give up or ignore.
>
This claim is obviously made of ignorance. I would suggest you examine
any
scientific paper where entropies for reactions are measured. Stat.
Mech. is not
invoked (save in computer simulation of simple systems) because it
fails to
have any use beyond examination of simple systems. In reality, far
more
entropies are measured than calculated, and the interpretation is quite
often
completely aside from the S.M. picture. Stat. Mech. as a model is
worthless
for complicated systems.
> 2) Biological systems are far from equilibrium; for a time, they exhibit local
>increases in complexity and concomitant decreases in their entropy, as, for example,
when
>a mammalian nervous system arises from a single cell (something never seen in the
>inorganic world and something that on the basis of our experience with physics should
>simply astonish us). The structures responsible for this ability effectively to use energy
>and do work -- what is their origin? Are they specified by the laws of physics? We
simply
>do not know. Your assumption that evolution provides the answer because it must
>provide the answer begs the question.
>
You seem to be implying once again that living systems may not obey the
laws of
physics. The evidence is contrary to this claim. Worse, you are
suggesting that there
is something within the laws of physics that would actually prevent
their formation,
but you do not specify what that something might be. You admire the
complexity
of the mamallian nervous system and argue from personal incredularity
that such
a system could not merely arise from a single cell, yet offer no firm
explanation
why it could not, and further, ignore many simpler organisms with much
simpler
nervous systems which too rise from a single cell.
DB:
>> We cannot know. Needless to say, no physicist would > accept such strictures. After
>all, a dilute gas whose particles move > in accord with Newtonian principles (elastic
>reflection at the > boundary), is a macroscopic system from a thermodynamic point of >
>view: properties such as pressure, volume and temperature are > macroscopic properties
>of the gas. And in such systems, entropy does > provide a suitable measure of
>approximation to order. If E is a > bounded container and N represents the number of
>particles in a gas, > is the system that results more or less ordered when every one of the
>> N particles occupies a region of E half again as large as the whole? > The answer is
>obvious.
>
RMW:
>Again, you default to simple systems because these are the only ones that fit with the nice
>pictures one gets from statistical mechanics. Here's a simple example from biochemistry
>that illustrates why you are confined to using single gases in containers to equate order
>with entropy:
>
>Phospholipids dissolved in ethanol form a nice solution. When a small aliquot of this
>solution is placed into water, the phospholipids spontaneously form liposomes, or small
>droplets, in the water that have many properties of cell plasma membranes.
>Does the spontaneous formation of these ordered, regular membrane bilayers constitute
>formation of "order" in this system? C'mon, what's your feeling here? We go from a
>suspension of individual lipids to tiny structures. Now, when we measure this formation
>process calorimetrically, we find that the entropy in this system increases.
>
DB:
> Yes, true enough; there are countlessly many similar cases. Consider two
>monomers A and B ligating to form the dimer C; there are forward and reverse reactions.
>In an acqueous environment, hydrolysis is spontaneous, polymerization, unfavored. As
>you know, these opposite tendencies occur in a ratio determined by Boltzman's formula
>(e-deltaG/RT), where delta G measures the free energy change from reactions to
products.
>Elementary thermodynamics. It would be easy to define a hydrolysis parameter of
>complexity H, and argue that while entropy in this system is increasing, so is its
>complexity. But what, may I ask, is the point? If the entropy of a system is increasing,
its
>order overall is decreasing, whatever the interesting local symmetries of the liposomes or
>any other structure, whatever incidental measures of complexity lie at hand. .
>
My point exactly. You look at living things and see complex
structures, and suggest
that they are somehow more ordered (and you also insinutated, without
coming
right out and saying it, that life violates the 2nd LoT, [although I
believe you now
no longer claim this]). As this example points out, "ordered"
structures readily
appear in nature, with many of them found in biological systems. This
"ordering"
is also associated with increased entropy.
RMW:
>In complex systems of molecules, even something as simple as this two-component
>system, the ideas of order and disorder as they pertain to entropy fail, because we can no
>longer picture the states of the particles (molecules) involved.
>
> I do not understand this point.
>
See above paragraph.
>> It goes without saying that the relationship > between entropy and order may be
>clarified, as in Landau's theory of > phase transitions, where a thermodynamic system is
>described by a > single order parameter. Under Landau's theory, the relationship >
>between entropy and order is then derived, and not assumed.
>
>> Phase transitions also imply we have a limited number of states available. All of your
>examples are far too simple to extrapolate to complicated systems such as biological
>molecules, let alone to actual living organisms. This is a common failing of all
creationists
>who attempt to "prove" evolution couldn't have occurred using the 2LoT--extrapolating
>from a limited knowledge base.
>
> If it makes no sense, as you seem to suggest, even to talk of the statistical
>mechanics of very complex systems, it makes no sense to ask whether the principles
>governing such systems are compatible with the laws of statistical mechanics. If the
>principles of zoology do not apply to cheese, it makes no sense to ask whether the rules
>governing cheeses are in accord with the principles of zoology. The question simply
>doesn't arise.
>
Let me go farther than that: statistical mechanics are useless in
discussing biology and
evolution, in all but the simplest, most trivial, examples. If is you
who brought in the
"order from disorder" discussion.
DB:
>> The sense of information to which I appeal is Shannon's. The formal
>
>> identification of Boltzmann's measure of entropy and Shannon's > definition of
>information is a mathematical matter, not one subject
>
>> to dispute.
>
RMW:
>I have no question that the two are related, and have likely been shown to be similar when
>an agreement as to what constitutes "information" is met. As I stated above you have
used
>some ill-defined measure of "information" to wonder whether evolution can occur, and
>have equated this to thermodynamic entropy, which it is not.
>
DB:
> Information is a univocal concept: it admits of one definition; moreover the
>definition is provably unique. The proof may be found, for example, in Khinchine's
>standard text. What is more, the quantity defined by Shannon is formally identical to the
>quantity defined by Boltzmann -- not similar, formally identical, entropy appearing, as a
>categorical concept, one finding expression in thermodynamics, ergodic systems,
>information theory, graph theory, and many other disciplines. It is this notion to which
>everyone in the scientific community -- computer scientists, logicians, mathematical
>biologists, cognitive psychologists, physicists -- appeals. It is the only relevant notion of
>information in existence. There is no ill defined measure of information.
>
RMW:
This is misleading. The computation of information is the same in all
of these
disciplines, but it assumes one can assign a probability to the events
being measured.
The formal connection between Shannon's entropy and Boltzmann's entropy
is
found when the probability of occupation of a state is computed from
Boltzmann's
distribution law. Shannon's entropy can be applied to other systems
that are not
"bound" to physics as is Boltzmann's, but then we have to ask how the
probabilities
are generated, whereas with the Boltzmann probabilities it is
straightforward.
My point remains: unless you define information, or more correctly,
define what
the question is you are asking and what the uncertainty of that
question is, to
inquire about the information content of a system is meaningless.
RMW:
>I can tell you very precisely what the entropy of mixing for two gases is, either from the
>Stat. Mech. viewpoint, or straight from the thermodynamic tables. Can you tell me from
>information theory what the entropy of mixing two pigs is? (see DB's comments below)
>
DB:
> No, of course not, if by mixing you mean physically mashing the animals together.
>But if you mean, given a measure M of information latent in the genome of Pig 1, and
ditto
>for Pig 2, can I determine the information latent in the genome of their offspring, the only
>interesting question, the answer is sure. I am certain that this is something you know;
just
>as I am certain that given M, whatever it may be, you know how actually to compute the
>answer.
>
RMW:
This is precisely what I am pointing out above: what is this measure of
information, M?
Whereas for gases it is precisely defined, for anything else it is
arbitrary.
DB:
>> To argue that we have no definition (or measure) of > information in living organisms
is
>disingenuous. Biologists regularly > compute the information capacity of the mammalian
>nervous system,
>
RMW:
>With no better references than this, I would assume you are referring to the information
>capacity of electronic pulses sent down spinal cords, and the losses they incur upon
>passage. This has nothing to do with entropy and is so limited in its relevance to
evolution
>as to not be worth discussing.
>
DB:
>> or > the information resident in various genomes, using precisely the > measure of
>information introduced by Shannon.
RMW:
>And that's likely a completely different measure of information, based on the probabilities
>of base substitutions in a genome. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with the
2LoT,
>but is more relevant to evolution.
>
DB:
> You are arguing from ignorance. I repeat: one measure of information is in use. It
>is the measure employed when one says that a typical protein molecule in an E-Coli cell
>contains 300log20 bits of information. There is an enormous literature on the application
>of information theory to biology: virtually every issue of the Journal of Theoretical
>Biology carries a relevant article.
>
RMW:
I will concede this point. I am not familiar with the use of
information. However,
it strikes me as odd that the information carried in an electrical
impulse traveling
down a spinal cord can be expressed in terms of the information in a
protein.
I am not sure how to interpret this data.
END PART TWO
Randy M. Wadkins
BEGIN PART THREE
DB:
>> Details are widely > available. Whether this is an adequate measure of information is >
>entirely another story. I am sympathetic to objections on this score, > having made them
>myself.
RMW:> As far as I can tell, they are all different measures of
information, since the
>definitions of what constitutes "information" changes with each experiment. This is
>getting to be like asking a creationist to define a "kind" and watching him squirm. If this
is
>in any way relevant to whether information theory disallows life to evolve,
>I have yet to see you demonstrate this.
>
DB:
> There is a considerable difference between the following two cases: 1) a situation
>in which there is genuine uncertainty about which mathematical measure is appropriate to
a
>given situation; and 2) a situation in which there is a single commanding measure, whose
>range of applicability is uncertain. My remarks pertain only to 2. I do not recognize many
>senses of information. And again, to repeat a point I have made many times: No, I do not
>have an argument designed to show that there is a sense of information that disallows life
>to evolve.
RMW:
Then I am not certain why you brought this up in your initial post.
DB:
> Life would, in any case, provide a counter-example to such a claim. I do not
>know -- repeat, do not know -- whether the laws of physics specify sufficient
information
>to permit the construction of a living creature. But, then again, neither do you. If it
should
>turn out that the laws of physics do not specify sufficient information to specify a living
>creature, what, may I ask, would be the upshot? Nothing disastrous, in my opinion. We
>would have learned something valuable about the nature of reality.
>
RMW:
I am still not certain why you keep asking whether the laws of physics
allow sufficient
information, without defining how one could calculate this information.
What is the
event one wants to measure, and/or the probability you are attempting
to calculate?
Evolution, in any case, is about what happens to the living creature
after it is formed,
not whether it can be formed at all. Evolution is most certainly
allowed by the
laws of physics.
>SB:
>> > > The question I have just asked is > > not my own: in one formulation it is due to
>Richard Feynmann; in > > another, and more provocative formulation, to Kurt Goedel,
>who in
>
>> > conversation with the logician Hao Wang remarked that in his
>> opinion, > > "the formation within geological times of a human body by the laws
>> of > > physics (or any other laws of a similar nature), starting from a > > random
>distribution of the elementary particles and the field, is
>> as > > unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into its > >
components."
>The field in question is the quantum field. Goedel > > provided no argument for his
>assertion; but quantitative estimates
>> do > > exist in the literature. In this regard, Richard Thompson and
>> Hubert > > Yockney may both be consulted. >
>
>RMW:
>> Erroneous notion No. 4: evolution is a random process.
>>
>
>DB:
>> The words random and deterministic have a relatively clear technical > meaning. A
>process governing the behavior of a system is > deterministic if given fixed initial
>conditions, a description of the > process is sufficient uniquely to specify the future
course
>of the > system. This is not entirely precise; outside of mathematics and > logic, what
is?
>But the definition is precise enough to indicate what > should have been obvious: a
>process contingent upon a series of > stochastic events cannot in the nature of things be
>deterministic.
>No > doubt, there are deterministic consequences that follow from random
>
>> events in the theory of evolution. Who would doubt it? Winning the > lottery also has
>deterministic consquences for the winners; and yet
>
>> no one conversant with the requisite concepts would ever suggest that > lotteries
>comprise a deterministic series. The very thought is absurd.
RMW:
>> Evolution is not deterministic. Nor is it random. It is chaotic, in that at any point the
>initial conditions may be known, but as the process progresses it may become
>unpredictable, just like the weather.
>
DB:
> This is a deeply embarrassing assertion. Chaos is not the explanation for every
>intellectual shambles; it is a mathematical concept, one that makes sense in the context of
>dynamical systems theory, and nowhere else. No one has written down the equations of
>evolution; and you have given neither of us the slightest reason to suspect that if they
were
>written down they would prove chaotic. In addition, your definition of chaos is absurd,
>turning an ordinary exponential equation into a chaotic system.
What exponential equation is that? As far as I can tell, there is no
ordinary
exponential equation that describes evolution. If there were, all
those poor
folks working on genetic algorithms should have had the problem solved
years ago.
Let me explain what I mean, although there are many on t.o who have a
better grasp of this, and can provide you with more details. I think
we
can agree that the weather is a chaotic process, and it is a dynamical
system.
I am basing this point on (sp? don't have a copy with me at the moment)
Gleick's _Chaos_, where weather patterns are considered a good example
of
chaotic behavior. While I have no formal mathematical proof, I will
assert
that any system that is function of a chaotic system must also be
chaotic.
There may be exceptions to this, but it seem logical, in general to
assert this.
The weather is an extremely important contributor to evolution. This
can
be seen most readily in Wiener's _The Beak of the Finch_, where the
changing
weather patterns dictate what species is successful and reproduces.
Although
this is a gross simplification of evolution and natural selection, I
think it
does support my statment that evolution is inherently chaotic, because
it
is, after all, a dynamic system.
DB:
> A chaotic system whose
>initial conditions could be fixed precisely is entirely predictible. Are you under the
>impression that if we could determine precisely the initial conditions obtaining in a
>biological population the entire course of evolution would be determined?
RMW:
Actually, I am under the impression that that is why we cannot predict
the
weather: because down to the Heisenberg level, we can never precisely
determine the initial conditions.
DB:
> In a sense, since
>the genome is ultimately discrete, there is no reason we cannot do this. But of course
>neither you nor anyone else is prepared to accept this strong determinitic conclusion:
>evolution depends, and depends inherently, on stochastic events.
>
DB:
> Do you really want to involve yourself in discussions of homoclinic points, strange
>attractors and the like?. No, no, back off from this. In this way lies madness. You have
>many interesting points to make, but in this, you are clearly out of your depth.
>
RMW:
There's no point in arguing math theory. I concede that you are far
more
knowledgeable about such things. I do not think one needs to go so
deeply
into the subject to comprehend how it works. However, there are some
excellent theoretical biologists on t.o who may take you up on this.
I will not, however. You are correct: this is not my area of
expertise.
>RMW:
>> Amazing. You quote these people as some attempt to disqualify > evolution, and yet
>you seem to have no comprehension why this
>> doesn't do so. Let me state that no scientist will argue with
>> the above quote by Goedel. It is completely improbable that
>> a human body would arise from random distributions. I will
>> say that for all practical purposes, it is completely impossible.
>> Fortunately for us, nature has a non-random method of creating
>> humans from precursors. It is called "evolution". The statments
>> made in the above paragraphs have nothing whatsoever to do > with evolution.
DB:>> > This argument is doubly confused. I do not agree that
evolution is a > non-
random
>method of doing anything; Darwin's theory is inherently > stochastic.
>
RMW:
>It is stochastic, and is also non-random. Each step in the pathway is not independent of
the
>one before. You seem greatly confused about this. An algorithm demonstrating this
>process can be found in Dawkins' "The Blind Watchmaker", or in "Computer Simulation
>in
>Biology" (Keen & Spain, 1992, pp. 316-318, Simulation of Natural
>Selection by Random Processes). There are also various other simulations out there (the
>commercial "Sim Life" for one), that effectively demonstrate the processes of mutation
and
>natural selection.
>
DB:
> The words in question are random mutations: that is, random, as in a series of
>statistically independent events, or random, as in zero correlation between events. The
last
>issue of the American Mathematics Monthly has an informative discussion. Do read it.
>This issue, I must say without rancour, falls below the threshold of seriousness. You
>simply cannot invoke a theory committed to random variation and natural selection and
>then argue as if the word 'random' failed to mean what everyone understands it to mean.
>
[snip of Geodel's theorem/philosophy. While it is interesting, beyond
my original
comments, I do not see how this is connected in any way to evolution.]
DB:
>Please do not embarrass us both by affirming that you know the answer; you do not. The
>question is wide open.
>
RMW:
Granted, I do not know. Why are you using this point to argue against
evolution?
>
DB:
>> Plastic is produced by a > deterministic process; but no one supposes that the
appearance
>of > plastic is likely under an initial generic state of the quantum > field. If you believe,
as
>you say, "it is completely improbable that > a human body would arise from random
>distributions," then you have > formally expressed your doubts about any scheme of
>evolution > whatsoever.
>> The argument is elementary: Premiss 1 (Goedel). The most likely > initial state of the
>quantum field is a random distribution (this is > the meaning of 'the most likely'; the
>distribution is understood to
>
>> be prior to the emergence of life). Premiss 2 (Your own, in your own > words): "It is
>completely improbable that a human body would arise > from random distributions."
>Conclusion (by modus ponens when > formalized): It is completely improbable that a
>human body would > arise. Note that the conclusion is insensitive to the character of >
>any theory of evolution whatsoever.
RMW:
>> My dear sir, you are drifting off the deep end. Let me try this one more time: if
>evolution were random, it would be, for all practical purposes, impossible for a human
>being to pop into existence.
>This is what all calculations would tell you. However, evolution is non- random. The
>second step in the stochastic path is dependent on the first, which in turn was never
random
>to begin with. Let me put it another way: it doesn't matter what the odds are for life to
>originate from nothing; it only had to happen once.
>
DB:
> 1 To say that 'the second step in the stochastic path is dependent on the first' is
>simply a contradiction in terms. Let me remind you of the definition of a stochastic
>process: a collection of random variables X(t), where T is an index set and where there
>exists a random variable x(t) for each t in T. I beg you to acquaint yourself with the
>relevant technical concepts before invoking them. Worried as you are about pseudo-
>science, how can you justify your utterly contemptuous attitude toward matters of
>elementary precision?
>
> 2 You may wish to insist that the events in evolution are not independent; but the
>theory you invoke to explain this is not Darwin's, and you have given us no idea what it
>might be.
>
RMW:
You are very correct, here and above, that I have somewhat misused the
term
"stochastic". The problem is that evolution is superimposed upon a
stochastic
process, in the following manner: The initial steps of evolution, the
generation
of changes in the genetic code, are initially random. (In reality,
they are not
completely random, because we know that certain base sequences are more
easily targeted by mutating agents and so forth, but for a simple
picture it suffices
to say that they are random.) From this collection of random changes,
one change,
or a population of changes, is selected via natural selection. This
selection is
not random, but is the selection which allows that subpopulation to
have some
environmental advantage over the others--the others may die off, or may
simply
continue to exist as is. This selection is also inherently chaotic,
owing to the
processes of natural selection, so at this point in the game, trying to
calculate
any "probability of evolution" is impossible, given that we cannot know
neither
the initial state, nor the equations that govern it. The population
selected from
the original pool is not known.
We now move to the second step of our "walk", but note that all the
other
initial members of the population have been removed from consideration.
Once again, there is a random change in this population. A fraction is
then
selected by non-random means, and this population moves on to the
next "step". The stochastic portion of the walk is mutation. The non-
random portion of the walk is natural selection. It is this
combination of
the two that results in evolution of a population. Again, I refer you
the
the Keen & Spain simulations, or the BIOMORPH simulation described
by A.K. Dewdney in _The Magic Machine_, Chapter 5. In these
simulations,
natural selection is determined by us, and is consequently limited in
scope.
I am quite certain that I have made some errors in the above, but in
essence I believe it is correct.
>DB:
>>> Yes, I agree; but I think you underestimate the extent to which the
>>
>>> whole of biology, even its strongest departments (molecular biology, >
biochemistry),
>>are infected with poorly understood concepts which we > do not understand but cannot
>>abandon.
RMW:
>>> I will let my friends in biology deal with you on this one.
>>But just so you know my feelings: baloney.
>>
DB:
>I know your feelings: you have made them clear from the beginning; the relevant question
pertains to you reasons, and these you have not given.
>
RMW:
I think my reasons are crystal clear: you continue to criticize biology
and/or evolution
without providing any rationale for this; "infected with poorly
understood concepts
which we do not understand but cannot abandon" is a pretty vague
criticism, and
in my experience, is false.
You seem also to miss much of what evolution successfully explains, and
as yet
have not presented any evidence that contradicts evolution, nor even
casts doubt on
it. You have also not postulated any counter theory. If you intend to
promote
creationism, then I would argue that that notion has long since been
disproven.
>RMW: > Erroneous notion No. 5: the laws of physics do not apply to living> systems.>
>
>DB: > Of course the laws of physics apply to living systems. Who on earth> would doubt
it? Whether the laws of physics explain all that is > interesting about
living systems is
another matter entirely; and > whether the laws of physics explain the
existence of living
systems> is a still further question. The laws of physics and chemistry
> explain the
properties of aspirin, but not its existence.
RMW:>The laws of physics explain the existence of living systems quite
well. They do
not explain the "why" of
> life, but that isnot their job. And, as a chemist, I'd be happy to explain howaspirin came
into existence, as well as why.
>
DB:
>>1) That the laws of physics explain the existence of life quite well is simply an assertion;
the argument remains in the far distance;
>
Do you have any evidence that contradicts my assertion? If so, you
have not
presented it.
>2) The why of life has never been an issue in this discussion; why bring it up?
>
Because of your comments concerning "all that is interesting in living
systems".
>3) I know that you can provide an explanation for the existence of aspirin: are you under
the impression I consider it a miracle? The explanation will point to a
sequence of designed
chemical transformations that no one would expect might appear
spontaneously in nature.
Without human artifice and design, there is no aspirin (or
superconductivity, for that
matter).
>
RMW: This is back to your thimble argument, and is bad analogy on your
part.
All life does not appear spontaneously either, as the theory of
evolution points out.
DB:> have no objections if you wish to bash creationists: Chacun a son
gout, as the French
say; but if you mean seriously to comment on my piece in Commentary,
you had better
attend to what I said, not what you imagine I said.
RMW: You are correct. I have not read your complete text, but will
attempt to do
so. I am sure there are other points to be made. In this exchange, as
far as I
can tell, you have not provided one single reason why evolution did not
occur,
or any reason that casts doubt on evolution.
Randy M. Wadkins
A multi-part message: Dr. Berlinski informs me that he is
having trouble responding to these posts. I suggest you
E-mail your comments to him:
I also apologize for the spacing in the below. I am trying
to respond to DB's comments that he e-mailed to me, and they
are not formatted correctly for 80 column display.
>I sincerely hope some of this may be interesting; I'll post it to Talk-Origins later in the
>hope that others may profit. I urge you once again to write to Commentary; I will, of
>course, be given rights of rebuttal. You are right to remark that Commentary is not a
>scholarly journal, but then again Darwin's theory is not a scientific theory.
RMW:
>You explicitly state "only the former is capable expeditiously of organizing itself into ever
>more complex forms", which is generally untrue, and depending on one's definition of
>"complex", can be completely false. Otherwise, you are pointing out that living
organisms
>have a _different_ organization than non-living objects, which is not exactly an argument
>against evolution.
>
DB:
> Nonsense. Only living creatures do organize themselves into ever more complex
>forms. Look around you. Is there anything whatsoever in the inorganic world that
behaves
>like a mouse? The matter has nothing to do with definitions. I can define acceleration as a
>monotonically increasing function of time; I have not thereby demonstrated that the
>acceleration of a falling object is variable. I have demonstrated only a capacity to invent a
>silly definition. The fact that living organisms have a unique and poorly understood
>organization may be, or it may not be, an argument against the theory of evolution. It
>depends entirely on how well the theory explains their acquisition of that organization. In
>my view, it does not explain it at all; but this, after all, is the point at issue.
>
I am not suggesting that inorganic compounds behave like a mouse, but
rather that
the notion of organization or complexity being prevented by the 2nd LoT
is an
invalid complaint. In general, the theory of evolution explains quite
well the acquisiton
of changes in organization. I do not feel qualified to argue how
multicellular life
arose from unicellular life (or exactly how unicellular life arose),
but past this point,
evolution does a remarkable job at explaining the transitions in the
forms we see.
Of course, as with any scientific theory applied to a large system, all
the details are
not in.
Before getting into the discussions of entropy again, let me make the
most important
point concerning the connection of the 2LoT to evolution. The 2LoT
applies only
to closed systems, which the Earth is not. The sun provides more than
enough
energy to allow almost any reaction to occur, and certainly provides
enough to
allow biochemical reactions to occur. In this situation, the standard
concepts
of thermodynamics do not necessarily apply, but we may ignore this
aspect to
elaborate on certain key points.
RMW:
>complex systems that have no defined "order". > The whole concept of equating entropy
>with disorder in macroscopic
>> systems is a fool's game.
>>
DB:
> > 1 Boltzmann's law is a law of thermodynamics; it may be derived from >
>statistical mechanical considerations.
RMW:
> Boltzmann's _distribution_ law is a mathematical
>description that can be used to describe thermodynamic states. It is an approximation to
>reality, and the only notion of "order" or "disorder" present in the distribution law are
ones
>that we impose: complete occupation of one energy level may be called "order".
>Boltzmann's distribution law is a useful tool, but as applied to multiple states and
particles,
>it is worthless. Even with limited particles and states, the
>Boltzmann distribution completely fails at low temperatures. In summary, Boltzmann's
>"law" is, in fact, _not_ a law of thermodynamics.
>
>
DB:
> 1) It is Boltzmann's law, but Maxwell's distribution:
No, this is not quite precise. Boltzmann's distribution law is defined
in most references
as: Nj/N = exp(-Ej/kT)/SUM{exp(-E/kT)}
But, to give you credit, there are a few references that refer to this
as the Maxwell-
Boltzmann distribution law. The "law" you are citing:
S = -k ln Z
was derived by Boltzmann, but I have never encountered anyone referring
to this as
Boltzmann's law. So, you will forgive me if I assumed the standard
form of
Boltzmann's law was what you were talking about. In any event, this has
little to do with
evolution.
>
> 2) The use of the concept of order and disorder in statistical mechanics is not only
>natural -- it is inevitable, and seen thus by every competent physicist. As Peterson
remarks
>(in Ergodic Theory, p 227): "The concept of entropy was invented by Claussius in 1854;
>Shannon carried it over to information theory in 1948; and Kolmogorov to ergodic theory
>in 1958. In each case, entropy is a measure of randomness or disorder." Simple sane
>words. Obviously true. And understood by everyone in a position to grasp the relevant
>concepts. As the entropy of a closed system increases, the energy available for work
>decreases. The system becomes progressively disordered. Is the thermodynamic sense of
>order the same concept as the concept of complexity, or one that is different? Different, I
>would argue, but clearly related. Can I give a precise sense of complexity, one that is
>relevant to biological systems? No. Can anyone? No, again.
>
The concept of order and disorder may be natural to statistical
mechanics. It is not,
however, to thermodynamics--and in fact, a stat. mech. picture is
unnecessary, and
apparently unhelpful, when considering anything but the simplest
systems.
As for your assertion that every competant physicist sees order or
disorder, or that
this response is "obviously true", I give you this quote from Claude E.
Shannon
(Scientific American, Sept., 1971, p. 180) concerning information
theory:
"[John] von Neumann told me, 'you should call it entropy for two
reasons. In the
first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical
mechanics under that
name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more
important, no one
knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the
advantage.'"
> 3) What is the relevance of Nernst' Law to this discussion?
>
Nernst's law? Why do you wish to bring that up? It is merely a
particular addition
to the thermodynamics, which are already complicated.
DB:
>> 2 You are right to observe that these inferences are > characteristically shady; but
>after all, it is the biologists who are > concerned to maintain that there is no conflict
>between evolution and > thermodynamics.
>
RMW:
>Ha ha ha ha! Oh, that is rich! Who do you think came up with this lame-brained
"evolution
>violates the 2LoT" nonsense? It was the creationists, all of whom are, without exception,
>the most clueless pack of trolls on the planet. They have, and continue to, make this
>statement as if it were true. Not only do they have no evidence to demonstrate it, it is
>patently false. No biological system, at any time, is allowed to violate the laws of
physics,
>and there is absolutely nothing about life and/or evolution that does so.
>This is covered in every single Biochemistry text on the Earth, and if you'd like, I can
>provide references on energy exchange in the biosphere.
>
DB:
> 1) Every introductory biological textbook, without exception, invokes the claim
>that the principles of evolution and the principles of thermodynamics are consistent: it is a
>staple of the literature. Surely this is something you know. I do believe you when you
>remark that dopey creationist have often said dopey things about thermodynamics; but in
>science, as in other forms of intellectual endeavor, the trick is not to rebut the weakest but
>the strongest arguments.
>
So make an argument. The reason it is stated in every textbook is
because no
living thing has ever been found to violate these laws. What is it
about evolution that
you feel does violate these laws? We know how energy from the sun is
transduced
in photosynthetic life. Why is it that you feel this was different in
the past.
The textbook arguments are rebuttal to those claims that "order cannot
arise from
disorder", which is completely false.
> 2) The claim that no biological system at any time is allowed to violate the laws of
>physics is uninteresting because unclear. There are three possibilities, all things
>considered. The laws of evolution will prove consistent with the principles of physics,
>inconsistent with those principles, or they will prove to be independent of them. Do you
>know which is true? Can you exhibit a model in which the laws of physics and the
>principles of evolution are jointly satisfied?
> The question is rhetorical. I know that you
>cannot.
Let me try this one: since living organisms do not violate the laws of
physics, and
since all life arose from simpler life forms, which (due to fossil
records, etc.) also
do not appear to be have been able to have violated the laws of
physics, then there is
nothing about evolution that would require the laws of physics to be
broken or
discarded.
What, in the above statement, can you show to be false? Why does this
not
qualify for the model that satisfies both the laws of physics and
evolution.
> The question is to a certain extent idle: the theory of evolution is not really a
>theory, merely a collection of remarks;
Not true by a longshot. Which aspect of evolution do you find
un-theory-like?
Its predictions? Its use as an explanatory tool? The fact that no
data has ever
been gathered that contradicts it? Its support by multiple aspects of
science?
This is a bold claim. If you can provide reasons why evolution is not
a
scientific theory, then I urge you post them. Somehow I think you have
none.
You seem to want evolutionary theory to be expressed as an equation,
like
gravity or the wave equations, but this is not the nature of the beast.
These
principles underly evolution, but all theories do not have to be
immediately
derivable from mathematics.
> but, finally, the question is inevitably instructive.
>When standards of satisfaction are spelled out with some precision, issues that seem
>obvious, or even elementary, turn out to be otherwise entirely.
What?
> Why should the
>relationship between the principles of evolution and the laws of physics be less
>complicated than the relationship between the axiom of choice and the principles of set
>theory?
Can't comment on the axiom of choice question, the relationship between
the
laws of physics and evolution are remarkably simple. As stressed above
and
below.
>The vehemence of your convictions expresses a sense only of your dogmatism.
>You have simply underestimated, by orders of magnitude, the relevant conceptual
>problem.
>
There is no conceptual problem at all between assuming a biological
process
obeys the laws of physics, when we have no demonstration that they
might
do otherwise. My convictions are based on this latter observations.
If there
were experimental proof that things were otherwise, then I would revise
my
ideas. To blatently state that we don't know the connection between
physics
and biology is metaphysics at its worst.
END OF PART ONE
Robert Parson
In article <4pno8e$c...@ra.nrl.navy.mil>,
Randy M. Wadkins <rwad...@cbmse.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
>> 1) It is Boltzmann's law, but Maxwell's distribution:
>
>No, this is not quite precise. Boltzmann's distribution law is defined
>in most references
>as: Nj/N = exp(-Ej/kT)/SUM{exp(-E/kT)}
>
>But, to give you credit, there are a few references that refer to this
>as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law.
Maxwell gives the distribution of velocities in a perfect gas. This
is a special case of the Boltzmann distribution, a case where all
of the energy is kinetic energy. Maxwell's distribution predates
statistical mechanics proper; it belongs to the kinetic theory
of perfect gases. (Stat. Mech. doesn't really wean itself from
its origins in kinetic theory until Gibbs. Boltzmann still leans
heavily on gas-kinetic ideas.)
>The concept of order and disorder may be natural to statistical
>mechanics. It is not,
>however, to thermodynamics--and in fact, a stat. mech. picture is
>unnecessary, and
>apparently unhelpful, when considering anything but the simplest
>systems.
I do not agree. Second-order phase transitions and polymer melts
are certainly not "simple systems", nevertheless the statistical
interpretation of entropy is enormously useful in understanding
them. The renormalization group analysis of phase transitions,
is founded upon statistical mechanics; thermodynamics is not
rich enough to provide such insights. (That is the power and
the weakness of purely thermodynamic arguments; they are
independent of microscopic details, but by that very fact they
cannot tell you about phenomena that do depend on such details.)
[I do not disagree with your general argument, but I think you are
pushing this particular point too far.]
------
Robert
Colin Mahoney
On 11 Jun 1996 19:08:38 GMT, wee...@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P
Wiener) wrote:
>In article <4pk4mt$n...@news.nd.edu>, scharle@joplin (Thomas Scharle) writes:
>
>[quoting Berlinksi:]
>
>> "Things fall apart. Energy, like talent, tends to squander
>>itself. Liquids go from hot to lukewarm. And so does love.
>>Disorder and despair overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our
>>rooms and our lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go
>>from bad to worse. And overall, they go _only_ from bad to worse.
>
>Sounds like my office. Somebody seeing the arrangement of books and
>papers and food and comics and other items might conclude that my
>office is _alive_, in fact. It's that bad.
>
I thougt he was leading up to "and colourless green ideas sleep
furiously."
>Perhaps the scientific content of the above Berlinski passage is that
>he was force fed scrambled eggs as a child.
>--
>-Matthew P Wiener (wee...@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
---------------------------------------
Colin Mahoney ( cmah...@readysoft.es )
Sabadell, Spain
---------------------------------------