Hi CTD

<snip> ad hom

Looks like RAZD is rubbing off on someone. We all know all Laws of Thermodynamics are the bane of evolutionism, most especially the second.

I guess there are some who don’t understand the laws of thermodynamics and so see them today as a challenge to ToE but there’s not many left. Given the YEC straw man that you present even biological reproduction is impossible under 2LoT but reproduction does occur and so does evolution. The fact that we observe evolution to occur destroyes this argument before we actually get into understanding why it is a foolish argument. When you get into the guts of it you will realize that it is built on a very clever deception, 2LoT predicts an increase in order in a closed system but of course the earth is not a closed system, energy flows in and out all the time and in such an environment 2LoT predicts that work will be done, work such as reproducing, work such as evolving new organisms. It’s a very basic premise of 2LoT and has been there since the law was first formulated.

But the asserted definition fails. The more "orderly" the matter, the less likely it is to contain information. Consider distilled water, or a solid brick. They're as orderly as can be. Do they contain as much information as even a first grade reading primer?

You’re getting closer to understanding this CTD but you miss a few details that will fully explain how information arose. Distilled water contains very little information but it is more ordered than a plasma of hydrogen nuclei but cool that and you get hydrogen, then stars, then heavy elements, then planets and water each a bit more ordered and containing a bit more information that the previous. Take that water a little further and cool it which is what happens as entropy drops per unit of space and it solidifies into ice. Ice is a substrate with the ability to hold information (actually distilled water can too but it’s easier to imagine it with ice so I’ll use that as an example). So we’ve gone from the early universe which was, according to the theory and all the evidence, too hot to contain matter or stable information at all to a universe which contained only the simplest of matter, hydrogen and helium neuclei, to today’s universe in which heavier elements exist. Elements capable of forming bonds and so order and so of holding stable information. Without any intelligent input these elements will connect together following the laws of chemistry. So what do we have at the end of that process. We have planets, stars, rocks, oceans, asteroids.

What do you call the distance from the sun to mercury?

Is that not information?

What do you call the distance between mineral grains in the rocks of Mercury?

Is that not information?

If not what is information?

Now this is meaningless information, like all information in the absence of a mind but it is information and it is exactly what evolution uses to shape organisms, they are shaped by their environments to be ‘fit’ and this information, the size, shape, temperature, brightness, and chemical composition of their surroundings (and much more) is the source of information that evolution uses to shape them.

Neither will such examples fit the narrow constraints of his scheme for claiming reduced entropy, because they don't expand as he needs them to. Entropy always increases unless a mechanism is in place to reduce it locally in exchange for increasing it elsewhere. The known mechanisms that can accomplish this are life and created tools.

The second law of thermodynamics says in closed systems entropy will always increase but entropy will reduce locally in open systems. If this were not true snowflakes (as just one example) would not exist but they do. In an expanding universe the entropy for a given area of space decreases as the universe spreads out and cools just as snow flakes form as the air gives off its heat and its entropy reduces. Is it not obvious that a snowflake contains more information than water vapour? You could write your name on a snowflake (OK tricky but not impossible) but try doing so on water vapour. Such ordered matter both contains raw information in it’s structure but it also contains the ability to store further information in reaction to what it ‘experiences’. If two snowflakes collide information about that collision is stored in the scars they carry away from the incident. It’s not very interesting information maybe but who said that information had to be interesting. It is still information even if boring.

Most importantly, the genetic code contains meaningful information. (That's why it's called a 'code'.) If, AS STATED, a mind is required to assign meaning, the meaningful information in DNA requires a creator.

So meaning is simply information that can accomplish something? The trajectory of a comet that will one day crash into a planet we can’t even detect has meaning then is that your thesis. This information forms the crux of the events that will occur, it determines the fate of that planet just as the DNA sequences in our gene’s determine how, in a purely mechanistic sense, our proteins will be formed. It reduces meaning to facts and figures regardless of minds which is not my definition of meaning but it is my definition of information. Maybe all we have here is a difference of definition.

DNA carries bases in a sequence that will drive a machine to blindly run through a process of connecting RNA bases together without understanding of the process. If the DNA were purely random the machine would still transcribe it into RNA and from there into Proteins. If they ‘worked’ in a fitness sense evolutionary forces would select for them regardless of any meaning they may or may not contain, it’s a purely mechanistic scenario.

Put some man-made replicators in a vat & come back next week. Next century. Next billion years. According to the laws of chemistry, they won't evolve.

Are you really suggesting that our replicators are perfect? That’s the only way that this statement could be true. Any variations within the products of these replicators will drive their evolution.


Competition, Cooperation, and Mutation: Improving a Synthetic Replicator by Light Irradiation
J.-I. HONG, Q. FENG, V. ROTELLO, and J. REBEK, JR. (14 February 1992)
Science 255 (5046), 848-850. [DOI: 10.1126/science.255.5046.848]

That article was quite old but then so is your complaint. It was, long ago, disproved by experiments as this article points out. There have been many more such experiments since 1992 many more experiments showing that synthetic replicators both chemical and in computers can evolve while we watch.

In reason

Russell