I was discussing the second law argument with a scientist friend the other day, and mentioned that the second law is sometimes called the “common sense law of physics”. This morning he wrote:
Yesterday I spoke with my wife about these questions. She immediately grasped that chaos results on the long term when she would stop caring for her home. – Chaos does not produce life.
I replied:
Tell your wife she has made a perfectly valid application of the second law of thermodynamics. In fact, let’s take her application a bit further.
Suppose you and your wife go for vacation, leaving a dog, cat and a parakeet loose in the house (I put the animals there to cause the entropy to increase more rapidly, otherwise you might have to take a much longer vacation to see the same effect). When you come back, you will not be surprised to see chaos in the house. But tell her some scientists say, “but if you leave the door open while on vacation, your house becomes an open system, and the second law does not apply to open systems…you may find everything in better condition than when you left.”
I’ll bet she will say, if a maid enters through the door and cleans the house, maybe, but if all that enters is wind, rain and other animals, probably not.
This is an application of the main point in chapter 5 of my new book : “If an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering that makes it NOT extremely improbable.”
For a slightly more technical version of this story, complete with a mathematical analysis of the equations for entropy change, see my video .
In a recent PNAS paper John Avise argued that evolution emancipates “religion from the shackles of theodicy” by getting any god off the hook as the source of seemingly cruel design defects in the human genome. Giving a god credit for the good designs, so the story goes, makes that god responsible for the bad designs too. Defending his opinion in this week’s PNAS letters Avise restates that a “God directly responsible for the many malfunctions that characterize the human genome, would seem to be quite malevolent as well as bumbling”. Believing as he does that “IDers promulgate the notion of an omnipotent and benevolent deity who directly crafts life ex nihilo” and “vehemently oppose any suggestion that God has operated by setting into motion natural evolutionary processes”, he holds that it is a “longstanding pillar of science – that any “god” has (?and must only) act through natural laws.”
Michael Murray and Jeffrey Schloss who are no friends of ID question why “an entirely theological issue and not a scientific one” is suitable for publication in PNAS. Claims that evolution offers “salvation for theology” should not they say, be “made in a journal of scientific research”.
This is an interesting objection from theistic evolutionists who object to the breaching of Gould’s separate magisteria even in an attempt to demolish ID which they believe to be in error.
Avise’s insisting that ID itself makes claims about the nature of the Intelligent Designer is clearly false. Theodicy is a problem for anyone living in this world, not just ID proponents and Avise would be well advised to read Dr Dembski’s “The End of Christianity” before he attempts to speak with authority on theological issues about which he has little understanding.
On this episode of ID the Future, Anika Smith interviews mathematician and philosopher William Dembski on a break from teaching at Discovery Institute’s Summer Seminars on Intelligent Design. Listen in as Dr. Dembski shares his advice for young scientists interested in ID and the hope he has for the future of intelligent design.
And would be the worst, whether one is an ID proponent or not.
Many UD readers know the Australian molecular biologist John Mattick as a leader in thinking about functional roles for so-called ‘junk DNA.’ Mattick has earned the implacable ire of ID critics such as Larry Moran and T. Ryan Gregory, although not because Mattick is an ID proponent. He’s not — see the opening sections of this interview, which is also available as a video. (Scroll to the Supplementary Material at the end; SIZE WARNING: 46M.]
It’s a fascinating exchange, although I think Mattick greatly underestimates the significance of clade- or taxon-specific novel proteins in eukaryotes.
If nothing else, however, empirical discovery itself stands entirely on Mattick’s side. In biology, the claim “structure x has no function” can only topple in one direction, namely, towards the discovery of functions. “No function” represents a brick wall of infinite extent, from which one can only fall backwards, into the waiting arms of a function one didn’t see, or overlooked.
Imagine if you called a car salesman, explained the type of car you wanted to buy, and he exclaimed he has exactly what you are looking for. Furthermore, the car is almost new, has only a few miles, and yet is priced at a mere ten thousand dollars! You and a friend hurry over to the car lot and with a big smile the salesman shows you a junker. You recognize the make as being at least thirty years old, and the car looks like it has at least 200,000 miles. The tires are worn bare, the body is rusted away, the seats are so worn down there are holes in the fabric, the paint is so faded that you can see bare metal in places, the rear window is smashed, the hood doesn’t close properly, and half the steering wheel is missing. “Wait, this beauty is only ten thousand dollars, and it only has a few miles …” exclaims the salesman as you and your friend walk away in disgust. Read more
Biology textbook authors George Johnson and Jonathan Losos are leaders in the life sciences. They are accomplished researchers and professors from leading universities—they are also blind guides. In their otherwise well written and highly produced textbook The Living World ((Fifth Edition, McGraw Hill, 2008), Johnson and Losos badly misrepresent science and make fallacious arguments when they present evolution to the student. It is yet another example of smart people spreading lies and foolishness. Read more
Another school year is set to begin at high schools and colleges where the next round of biology students will be filled with evolutionary misinformation. At the center of this propaganda campaign are the many biology textbooks used to indoctrinate young minds with old dogma. These textbooks contain the latest evolutionary newspeak, but the underlying lies are no different. Read more
In my previous post I gave a typical example of evolutionary thinking and asked readers to identify the usual metaphysics that is interwoven. Here is the example: Read more
David Bentley Hart’ review of her book (see here) begins as follows:
The chief purpose of Absence of Mind — the published version of Marilynne Robinson’s splendid Terry Lectures, delivered at Yale in 2009 — is to raise a protest against all those modern, reductively materialist accounts of human consciousness that systematically exclude the testimony of subjectivity, of inner experience, from their understanding of the sources and impulses of the mind. Its targets are all the major schools of reductionism (Freudianism, Marxism, Darwinism), but also all the currently popular champions of the reductionist cause (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, E.O. Wilson, and so on). It is, in simple terms, a robust defense of the dignity and irreducible mystery of human conscience, personal identity, and self-awareness; and, as such, it is a stirring success.
Evolutionists claim evolution is a fact as much as gravity is a fact. As with gravity, we may not yet understand the details of evolution, but evolution in one way or another is an undeniable fact. Well is it? One evolutionist is certain and wrote this to me: Read more
…the technical accomplishment is not quite what the JCVI press release claimed. It’s hard to see this as a synthetic species, or a synthetic organism, or a synthetic cell; it’s a synthetic genome of Mycoplasma mycoides, which is familiar enough. David Baltimore was closer to the truth when he told the New York Times that the researchers had not created life so much as mimicked it. It might be still more accurate to say that the researchers mimicked one part and borrowed the rest.
The explanation from the Venter camp is that the genome took over the cell, and since the genome is synthetic, therefore the cell is synthetic. But this assumes a strictly top-down control structure that some biologists now question. Why not say instead that the genome and the cell managed to work out their differences and collaborate, or even that the cell adopted the genome (and its identity)? Do we know enough to say which metaphor is most accurate?
May, 2010 editorial in Nature Immunology makes it clear that they don’t trust religious persons–even those who are neo-Darwinian evolutionists like Francis Collins–in positions of scientific authority. The editorial (written by the journal’s editors) states:
The openly religious stance of the NIH director [Francis Collins] could have undesirable effects on science education in the United States. … In the introduction and in interviews surrounding [Collins'] book release, he describes his belief in a non-natural, non-measurable, improvable deity that created the universe and its laws with humans as the ultimate aim of its creation. Some might worry that describing scientists as workers toiling to understand the laws and intricacies of this divine creation will create opportunities for creationism adepts.
….
Strikingly, despite being a world leader in science, the United States still struggles when it comes to scientific education. Creationism is creeping back into the science curricula of public schools. And although intelligent design, the latest form of creationism, suffered a major defeat in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial (Nat. Immunol. 7, 433–435, 2006), when the US Supreme Court ruled that including it in science curricula is unconstitutional, creationists are making a comeback.
(“Of faith and reason,” Nature Immunology, Vol. 11(5):357 (May 2010).)
The major headlines from today’s news at Foxnews.com:
Bailout Watchdog Calls Mortgage Programs a Bust, Obama Signs Wall Street Overhaul, Senate Poised to OK Jobless Benefits Bill, and Professor P.Z. Myers Goes On Strike With His Blog. Okay, that last one wasn’t one of the major, or even minor news stories at the Foxnews website (nor anywhere else, for that matter.) Never the less, P.Z. Myers, Assoc. Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and frequent anti-ID, pro- Darwinism blogger has announced he is going ON STRIKE. He made this announcement, ironically, on the very website, ScienceBlogs, he is striking against, where he has his own blog, Pharyngula. Read more »
Most of the time, scientific research seeks to build on theoretical foundations that have been carefully constructed by the wider research community, often over many years. If a theoretical framework is found to be robust, it gains widespread assent, with few interested in challenging it. Those who are attracted to the idea that science develops progressively are the least likely to talk about challenges. For them, any change is a minor modification of the theoretical edifice. Thomas Kuhn referred to these theoretical frameworks as ‘paradigms’, and the progressive refinement of that framework as ‘normal science’. Kuhn pointed out that anomalies do not trigger the practitioners of ‘normal science’ to question the paradigm, but they either treat them as problems waiting to be resolved, or they ignore them altogether. In recent months, I’ve become aware that this phraseology and understanding of scientific activity is intensely irritating to some scientists. They appear to regard such talk as an invention of outsiders with a subversive agenda. A desire to comment on these issues has stimulated this blog, which is based on a paper authored by Walter Alvarez, an experienced and respected scientist working in the field of geology. He introduces his paper thus:
“Lightman and Gingerich (1992) argued that when a ruling theory is successful in accounting for a wide range of observations, scientists ignore observations that are not explained by the theory. They argued that such “anomalies” are only “retro-recognized” when a modification or replacement of the original theory calls attention to and explains the conflicting observations.”
Marilynne Robinson, one of College Crunch’s