One Hundred Fifty Years

Posted 1 July 2008 by Wesley R. Elsberry

You'll be hearing that a lot on science blogs over the next year-and-a-half in the run-up to November 24, 2009, the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species". But we should start with another 150th anniversary that is marked today, July 1, 2008... One hundred fifty years ago, this date fell on a Thursday. On that Thursday, the meeting of the Linnean Society in London had a reading of an essay by Alfred Russel Wallace and a manuscript chapter extract and a letter from Charles R. Darwin on the topic of tranformism, or the evolution of new species from existing species. This collage of material was presented under a single title, On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection. The reading itself produced hardly a ripple in the currents of scientific discourse; the Linnean Society president Thomas Bell noted in his journal that nothing of importance took place in that year. The real story lay in how it came to be that there was a joint presentation of material from Wallace and Darwin, rather than Wallace alone, and in the course of history that followed on. (Original posting at the Austringer.) Wallace was a naturalist in the field, his field being first the Amazon basin and later the Malay Archipelago. One of the hazards of being a European naturalist out in those regions was disease, and Wallace suffered an attack of malaria. While feverish, Wallace worked out the basics of how natural causes could explain the adaptations that mark different species of organisms. Once recovered, he wrote out an essay on the subject, and sent that on to Charles Darwin, with whom he had previously corresponded on the topic of transformism. The essay, titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type", caught Darwin rather by surprise. While Darwin appreciated Wallace's previous paper promulgating the "Sarawak Law" that all species are found in geographic proximity to allied species, Darwin had apparently classed Wallace's views on tranformism as corresponding to progressive creationism. In the essay Darwin read in spring of 1858, though, Wallace clearly laid out the very mechanism of natural selection that Darwin had cogitated over for about twenty years. Clearly, Wallace's essay deserved publication, but what of Darwin's own, unpublished, work on the topic? Darwin took the matter to his friends, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker. They have a preface to the piece read to the Linnean Society 150 years ago that explains their solution to the problem.

MY DEAR SIR,—The accompanying papers, which we have the honour of communicating to the Linnean Society, and which all relate to the same subject, viz. the Laws which affect the Production of Varieties, Races, and Species, contain the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace. These gentlemen having, independently and unknown to one another, conceived the same very ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of varieties and of specific forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important line of inquiry; but neither of them having published his views, though Mr. Darwin has for many years past been repeatedly urged by us to do so, and both authors having now unreservedly placed their papers in our hands, we think it would best promote the interests of science that a selection from them should be laid before the Linnean Society. Taken in the order of their dates, they consist of:— 1. Extracts from a MS. work on Species*, by Mr. Darwin, which was sketched in 1839, and copied in 1844,2 when the copy was read by Dr. Hooker,3 and its contents afterwards communicated to Sir Charles Lyell. The first Part is devoted to "The Variation of Organic Beings under Domestication and in their Natural State;" and the second chapter of that Part, from which we propose to read to the Society the extracts referred to, is headed, "On the Variation of Organic Beings in a state of Nature; on the Natural Means of Selection; on the Comparison of Domestic Races and true Species." 2. An abstract of a private letter addressed to Professor Asa Gray, of Boston, U.S., in October4 1857, by Mr. Darwin, in which he repeats his views, and which shows that these remained unaltered from 1839 to 1857.1 3. An Essay by Mr. Wallace, entitled "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type."2 This was written at Ternate in February 1858, for the perusal of his friend and correspondent Mr. Darwin, and sent to him with the expressed wish that it should be forwarded to Sir Charles Lyell, if Mr. Darwin thought it sufficiently novel and interesting. So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace's consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace), the memoir which he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us been privy to for many years. On representing this to Mr. Darwin, he gave us permission to make what use we thought proper of his memoir, &c.; and in adopting our present course, of presenting it to the Linnean Society, we have explained to him that we are not solely considering the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend, but the interests of science generally; for we feel it to be desirable that views founded on a wide deduction from facts, and matured by years of reflection, should constitute at once a goal from which others may start, and that, while the scientific world is waiting for the appearance of Mr. Darwin's complete work, some of the leading results of his labours, as well as those of his able correspondent, should together be laid before the public. We have the honour to be yours very obediently, CHARLES LYELL. JOS. D. HOOKER.

As solutions to wrangles over scientific priority go, this one is near the lead for deference being paid all around. Wallace and Darwin became, via this joint presentation, co-discoverers of natural selection and its proposed role in the production of new species from existing ones. The reading also forced Darwin's hand, and the following months saw him discard his long-term project of writing a large monograph on natural selection, and instead hurry to produce an "abstract" of his work. That "abstract" is what we now know as the book, "Origin of Species", published in November, 1859. The Lyell-Hooker solution of producing a joint presentation to the Linnean Society has been endlessly argued over. The primary question posed would be, was the solution unfair to Wallace, whose essay lays out the logic of natural selection in graceful and economical prose, preferred by some to Darwin's own explication? There's a book length treatment by Brackmann of the argument that Wallace was thoroughly swindled by Darwin and Darwin's colleagues, set to play a subordinate role to the elder naturalist. Brackmann, though, appears to have been letting a general animus for Darwin determine his approach to the material. The record of continued cordial correspondence between Darwin and Wallace, though strained at times by their varying views of selection with respect to human mental capacity, seems to run counter to various conspiratorial readings of the situation. I'll close this post with the final paragraph of Wallace's Ternate essay, the last part of the presentation given to the Linnean Society 150 years ago today.

We believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type—a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits—and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type. This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit.

Check out material on this anniversary at the Beagle Project, too.

159 Comments

Mike Elzinga · 1 July 2008

It seems to me that this “priority dispute” is not the central point of the observation of evolution and a proposed mechanism.

Rather, it illustrates that when certain ideas are “in the air”, as they say, more than one person can recognize what Nature is telling them. Darwin may have been influenced by Malthus and by artificial selection; Wallace certainly would have known about these also. But the evidence they both saw in the natural world fell into place for both of them within a relatively short period of time.

These kinds of co-discoveries happen often enough in science that they illustrate more dramatically the objective nature of evidence and the explanatory power of a good theory followed by the convergence of agreement and the opening up of active areas of research.

This is in stark contrast to sectarian dogmatic arguments that go on interminably with no resolution and with continual splintering into thousands of mutually suspicious sects (the same can be said for pseudo-science). Too often members of these warring sects project their own warring perceptions onto the scientific community and try to start wars in the public domain over which person is right. This in itself demonstrates how far sectarians miss the fundamental processes of science and the role of evidence.

The human desire for recognition and reward within the context of human society only clouds the real objectives of science, and so priority disputes loom larger than they should. Unfortunately they make for better press coverage than the science itself.

When Nature speaks, there ultimately has to be multiple, and often simultaneous, agreements among people who see and understand the evidence in the context of a good theory. From that point on, things start checking out for others as well; and that is the mark of good science, priority dispute or not.

Doc Bill · 1 July 2008

It must have been very cool to be at that Royal Society meeting when Darwin spoke. I'm sure drafts of his theory had circulated prior to the meeting, but that must have been very special as Charles laid out the results of his three decades of research.

Many people think that Darwin just came up with his theory out of the blue, but he spent years and years accumulating data before he was comfortable in expressing the theory to fellow naturalists.

Damn we don't have a video of the proceedings!

iml8 · 1 July 2008

Considering how Darwin has been treated since his time, we may well
judge that he did Wallace a favor. Reminds me of the old Lincoln
story about the man who had been tarred and feathered and run out
of town on a fencerail:

"Enjoying the ride?"

"Well, if it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I'd rather walk."

White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

RBH · 2 July 2008

Doc Bill wrote

It must have been very cool to be at that Royal Society meeting when Darwin spoke. I’m sure drafts of his theory had circulated prior to the meeting, but that must have been very special as Charles laid out the results of his three decades of research.

Well, aside from the fact that it was the Linnean Society and neither Darwin nor Wallace was there so both papers were read by the Secretary of the Society, yeah, it would have been cool. :)

David Stanton · 2 July 2008

Let me be the first to propose that, as of November 24, 2009 the theory of evolution henceforth be referred to exclusively as the Law of Evolution.

Please put this item on the agenda at the next secret meeting of the Darwinist society or bring it to the attention of the powers that be. I really don't know who gets to decide these things or who gets to vote, but it is time for this change to occur.

Really, 150 years is long enough. I mean, how many times must a theory be tested before it becomes a law? How many different observations must it explain and how many different fields must it unite? Besides, we call one idea the Law of Independent Assortment. If that can be called law then why not evolution?

Besides, "it's just a law" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

romartus · 2 July 2008

David Stanton said: Let me be the first to propose that, as of November 24, 2009 the theory of evolution henceforth be referred to exclusively as the Law of Evolution. Please put this item on the agenda at the next secret meeting of the Darwinist society or bring it to the attention of the powers that be. I really don't know who gets to decide these things or who gets to vote, but it is time for this change to occur. Really, 150 years is long enough. I mean, how many times must a theory be tested before it becomes a law? How many different observations must it explain and how many different fields must it unite? Besides, we call one idea the Law of Independent Assortment. If that can be called law then why not evolution? Besides, "it's just a law" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

How about making the 1st April 'All Trolls Day' as well ??

Doc Bill · 2 July 2008

"Well, aside from the fact that it was the Linnean Society and neither Darwin nor Wallace was there so both papers were read by the Secretary of the Society, yeah, it would have been cool. :)"

Obviously I didn't consult the Great Google Oracle before writing that. Or perhaps I should have tried to stay awake in my History of Science class. Dammit, Jim, I'm a chemist not a bricklayer!

chuck · 2 July 2008

romartus said: How about making the 1st April 'All Trolls Day' as well ??

To paraphrase my answer to my 7 year old's question about the date of "Children's Day" "Every day is Troll's Day"

Salvador T. Cordova · 3 July 2008

What is the number of species in production today via natural selection versus the number going extinct?

It would seem that from an operational standpoint Darwin's theory is being falsified by evidence today. Can someone at least give the number of speciation events in today's world via natural selection.

These seem legitimate scientific questions before we go off arguing that Darwin made some sort of discovery. I don't think his theory has been confirmed.

Blyth had the more accruate conception of natural selection, namely the preservation of species. Wallace and Darwin got it wrong.

Further, based on Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, it appears a contradiction to assert selection can create more diversity by reducing diversity. Natural selection has to be disengaged for diversity to take place. One could argue diversification occurs by lack of selection!!!

Can't we have speciation events in the absence of selection (like say geographic isolation).....

Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.

Stanton · 3 July 2008

So then please state how Intelligent Design "theory" gets it right, then. No one from Intelligent Design "theory" has bothered to state how Intelligent Design "theory" works beyond making intentionally vague appeals to a mysterious, unknowable, ineffable Designer, and making maliciously incorrect assumptions that "Darwinism" (sic) is somehow wrong for the past 15 to 20 years ever since its inception by Philip Johnson. In other words, Mr Cordova, please put up or shut your smarmy mouth.

Salvador T. Cordova said: What is the number of species in production today via natural selection versus the number going extinct? It would seem that from an operational standpoint Darwin's theory is being falsified by evidence today. Can someone at least give the number of speciation events in today's world via natural selection. These seem legitimate scientific questions before we go off arguing that Darwin made some sort of discovery. I don't think his theory has been confirmed. Blyth had the more accruate conception of natural selection, namely the preservation of species. Wallace and Darwin got it wrong. Further, based on Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, it appears a contradiction to assert selection can create more diversity by reducing diversity. Natural selection has to be disengaged for diversity to take place. One could argue diversification occurs by lack of selection!!! Can't we have speciation events in the absence of selection (like say geographic isolation)..... Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.

Flint · 3 July 2008

Just for grits and shins, I think I'll comment on one of Cordova's posts...

What is the number of species in production today via natural selection versus the number going extinct?

How can such a question be answered? Speciation takes thousands of generations, often approaching a million years before a clear branching event can be unambiguously identified. Extinction events happen in a day (the day the last individual dies). I'd guess that, within a few orders of magnitude, there are a hundred million potential speciations taking place at any given time, not all of which lead to a clean break. Come back in a million years and get an update. (I think if we had complete data on all breeding of all organisms, we'd find that EVERY breeding population is in the process of multiple incipient speciation events, most of which abort.)

It would seem that from an operational standpoint Darwin’s theory is being falsified by evidence today. Can someone at least give the number of speciation events in today’s world via natural selection.

Wait a minute. Sal here is very carefully and deliberately conflating WHETHER speciation happens, with HOW speciation happens. No honest person would suggest any number of speciations-in-process within a couple orders of magnitude, because the timeframe since biology was invented is much too short to get a frame of reference.

These seem legitimate scientific questions before we go off arguing that Darwin made some sort of discovery. I don’t think his theory has been confirmed.

Is this the theory that speciation happens, or the theory that selection contributes to it? I take it Sal's argument here is that since we can observe nearly none of the speciation currently happening (need a baseline of at least half a million years of observation to come close), therefore it's not happening at all, and therefore natural selection is not the cause of what's not happening. And therefore goddidit, I guess?

Blyth had the more accruate conception of natural selection, namely the preservation of species. Wallace and Darwin got it wrong.

A basic (and I'd say deliberate) distortion of the concept of selection. Selection presumably works to adapt organisms to an environmental niche. Where they fit, selection keeps them there. Where they don't fit (or a new niche opens up), selection acts to facilitate (or not act to discourage) the origination a new species to fill it. After which selection acts to preserve that new species so long as the niche lasts.

Further, based on Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, it appears a contradiction to assert selection can create more diversity by reducing diversity. Natural selection has to be disengaged for diversity to take place. One could argue diversification occurs by lack of selection!!!

Same conceptual error, of course. Selection's complex powers have completely escaped Sal - or, more likely, he recognize them and decides to hand-wave them away. Selection creates diversity when environmental diversity presents opportunities, and preserves or reduces diversity when those opportunities are taken advantage of.

Can’t we have speciation events in the absence of selection (like say geographic isolation).….

Geographic isolation, and indeed anything that leads to breeding isolation, is often a precursor to speciation for a variety of reasons. But selection remains unavoidable - there are ALWAYS more individuals produced than their environment can carry. Always. And there is always variation to be selected from. I don't see how this can be denied.

Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.

In what way? By saying new species arise, or by saying selection is a contributing cause to this? Nobody claims Darwin and Wallace got it complete, nobody even thinks current understandings are complete. But incomplete isn't wrong.

Wesley R. Elsberry · 3 July 2008

Charles R. Darwin:

No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us. Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world during the many past geological epochs in its history. Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgement of which I am capable, that the view which most naturalists entertain, and which I formerly entertained -- namely, that each species has been independently created -- is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

The only thing that people can argue about in the above, AFAICT, is the claim that natural selection is the main means of evolutionary modification. As Richard Dawkins put it in a radio interview, while most change at the level of the genotype and proteins is neutral, most change in the characters and traits visible to human inspection of organisms has been touched by natural selection. Darwin was mostly limited to the view of things appreciable via gross morphology, thus it is quite natural that he would be convinced that natural selection was the main but not exclusive means of descent with modification. This is hardly a basis upon which to make a bald statement that "Darwin was wrong" upon. Salvador Cordova has a long history of being egregiously wrong. We have another example here now.

Richard Simons · 3 July 2008

Sal: What is the number of species in production today via natural selection versus the number going extinct? It would seem that from an operational standpoint Darwin’s theory is being falsified by evidence today. Can someone at least give the number of speciation events in today’s world via natural selection.

Sal clearly does not understand speciation, which is a process not an event. To use an analogy he might find easier to understand: Sal, how many of the world's babies turned into toddlers (or preschoolers) in the last hour? Why is this a difficult question to answer? Why might it be difficult to answer how many speciation 'events' are taking place right now?

Romartus · 3 July 2008

chuck said:
romartus said: How about making the 1st April 'All Trolls Day' as well ??
To paraphrase my answer to my 7 year old's question about the date of "Children's Day" "Every day is Troll's Day"

Every day has its Troll ! Are the really nasty ones Grade One Goblins ??

chuck · 3 July 2008

Every day has its Troll ! Are the really nasty ones Grade One Goblins ??

No, it just feels that way sometimes ;)

MPW · 4 July 2008

I find it hard to believe Sal C. has learned almost nothing about evolution in all the years he's been worrying at it like a dog with a chew toy. Just plain dishonesty seems the more likely explanation at this point.

Nigel D · 4 July 2008

Hi, Sal, glad yuou could join us...

Salvador T. Cordova said: What is the number of species in production today via natural selection versus the number going extinct?

Who knows? By definition, speciation events can only be identified in retrospect. After all, how are we to tell of the evolution of TTX resistance in garter snakes (for instance) is the beginning of a speciation event or not? Additionally, given how many species remain unidentified (for which estimates vary, as is to be expected), how are we to know when a new species arises?

It would seem that from an operational standpoint Darwin's theory is being falsified by evidence today.

What? What evidence? You seem to have missed something - the absence of speciation events at any one specific time does not constitute evidence against modern evolutionary theory (that I call MET). Periods of stability are quite possible within the theory, because selection pressures depend on the environment, and if an environment remains stable, selection pressure on organisms inhabiting that environment tend to relax. This is entirely in accordance with both Darwin's concept of natural selection and Eldredge and Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium.

Can someone at least give the number of speciation events in today's world via natural selection.

This is irrelevant to anything except "stamp-collecting". What do you think that number (if it could be known) might mean?

These seem legitimate scientific questions...

I think you have to justify this. In what way are these questions scientific? What insight into the natural world would the answers offer us?

...before we go off arguing that Darwin made some sort of discovery. I don't think his theory has been confirmed.

It was a monumental discovery. As important as those of Maxwell, Einstein, Newton and Planck. What Darwin and Wallace achieved was to explain what had hitherto been a mystery. And, while Darwin's original theory is now recognised as having been incomplete, and has been much embellished as new discoveries have informed the science, the core of his theory is still a key part of MET. It has been confirmed so many times and by such a wealth of observations that even if it is wrong it is at least a good approximation to what happens in reality. Meanwhile, no contender has appeared to challenge it. The rebranding of religious ideas as so-called "creation science" or "intelligent design" has not changed the fact that they are religious dogma masquerading as something they are not. Or, IOW, lies.

Blyth had the more accruate conception of natural selection, namely the preservation of species. Wallace and Darwin got it wrong.

No. If sepcies are preserved, then where is the fossil record of hominids in the Permian? Where are the Tyrannosaurs today? Species are quite clearly not preserved. The inevitable conclusion from the fossil record is that life changes. This is a fact. Deal with it.

Further, based on Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, it appears a contradiction to assert selection can create more diversity by reducing diversity. Natural selection has to be disengaged for diversity to take place. One could argue diversification occurs by lack of selection!!!

This has the appearance of a deliberate mischaracterisation of MET. Your logic is so poor that it is hard to conceive that you might actually believe this. Variation occurs within any and every population. This is how we are able to distinguish individuals from one another. This is a trivially simple observation to make and understand. Some of this variation is environmentally-induced, and some is genetic. The genetic portion is heritable (well, duh!). Similarly, within any population, not all individuals survive to reproduce (except, perhaps, a very few populations of humans). Some of the elimination of individuals is by chance, some of it is influenced by traits that the individuals have inherited. Wherever a selection pressure is quite modest, all variants that possess a certain basic adequacy will survive and persist. Strong selection pressures can eliminate all but the most successful traits (thus causing "genetic bottlenecks"), or make a species extinct. So, your words are nothing more than a carefully phrased game to build a strawman at which you can point and laugh. But your caricature of evolutionary theory has neither evidence nor reason to support it.

Can't we have speciation events in the absence of selection (like say geographic isolation).....

Yes, this is called genetic drift. It is a component of MET. Geographic isolation does not cause this, and geographic isolation may often play a role in selective speciation events (e.g. if a population is divided into two populations that live on in different habitats, selection will cause them to diverge in character).

Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.

No. You got it wrong, as I have shown.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 4 July 2008

Flint said: Just for grits and shins, I think I'll comment on one of Cordova's posts...

He makes our day just by commenting, he can't do the math he thinks he knows, and he doesn't get speciation. Yet he tries to comment on science. Perhaps he has science envy. Well, sorry, but Impoverished Design can't measure up to biology.

Flint said: I take it Sal's argument here is that since we can observe nearly none of the speciation currently happening (need a baseline of at least half a million years of observation to come close), therefore it's not happening at all, and therefore natural selection is not the cause of what's not happening.

Picture a creationist staring into the skies. For him the Sun wouldn't orbit the galaxy, in fact all stars would hang there, because observable velocities (if in fact a creationist would use telescopes to actually do observations - but why would he, the universe is no larger than 6000 light years) surely are too small to account for an entire orbit, therefore orbiting is not happening at all, and therefore gravity can't affect stars.

Flint said:
Further, based on Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, it appears a contradiction to assert selection can create more diversity by reducing diversity. Natural selection has to be disengaged for diversity to take place. One could argue diversification occurs by lack of selection!!!
Same conceptual error, of course. Selection's complex powers have completely escaped Sal - or, more likely, he recognize them and decides to hand-wave them away. Selection creates diversity when environmental diversity presents opportunities, and preserves or reduces diversity when those opportunities are taken advantage of.

I think Sal's slight of hand is raising a giant strawman over Fisher's theorem

"The rate of increase in the mean fitness of any organism at any time ascribable to natural selection acting through changes in gene frequencies is exactly equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time".

because he can't handle the the precise math. Notably there is nothing about speciation and so species diversity here, only allele frequencies and fitness variances. Not all differences are created equal, even if Sal in his inimitable quixotic style tries to conflate them all on the lanza he waves about.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 4 July 2008

Nigel D said: Geographic isolation does not cause this, and geographic isolation may often play a role in selective speciation events (e.g. if a population is divided into two populations that live on in different habitats, selection will cause them to diverge in character).

Hmm. If I would look at it from a naive physics model of populations, I would conclude that geographic isolation mostly acts as boundary conditions that affects the trajectories of populations. The same population would follow individual trajectories even if the environment where the same, by drift and/or contingency. So a large population that were divided into sufficiently large parts and isolated by say mountain production would just continue happy evolutionary trajectories. This is the same way that a divide can split a river into two. The divide just acts as a boundary condition on the same hydrodynamic description. Now real life biology is messier, with potentially spreading demes instead of geographically fixed homogeneous populations et cetera, but it seems IMHO still crude to describe geographic isolation as a bona fide mechanism, in the first approximation. Besides, it seems really difficult to look Paris Hilton's pets in their eyes and and imagine that "they are still just wolves" after thousand of years of selection. Put them in the woods and they are wolf food more likely.

Nigel D · 4 July 2008

Torbjorn, I think you have a point, and I may not have been very clear.

When I referred to geographic isolation playing a role in speciation, I referred to it not as a mechanism of change in and of itself, but as a means of dividing a species into two populations that thus become forced* to evolve in different directions. In this sense, I guess it is acting as a boundary condition.

*BTW, I use this term here because my preceding example had the two populations of the progenitor species occupying different habitats. they would therefore accumulate different sets of adaptations and, over many generations, become distinct species.

Salvador T. Cordova · 4 July 2008

See my entry on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem here with some math examples: http://tinyurl.com/6hjhw5

many genomic features could not have emerged without a near-complete disengagement of the power of natural selection Michael Lynch opening, The Origins of Genome Architecture

I notice no one answered a rather straight forward question:

What is the number of species in production today via natural selection

Even a good guess would be welcome. 10, 20, 400 per year? C'mon if selection is as obvious as gravity we ought to have some observed examples today.

Richard Simmons: To use an analogy he might find easier to understand: Sal, how many of the world’s babies turned into toddlers (or preschoolers) in the last hour?

About as many as there are babies born every hour, just slightly less on account of 2 factors: 1. increasing populations 2. infant mortality might be higher than todler aged deaths This would be approxmiately true what ever definition of toddler was offered! Bottom line, there is a reasonable estimate by inference! And if Darwinism is as obvious as gravity, my question doesn't seem like it should be that hard a question. And if one considers the notion of Darwinian species rather nebulous, then that speaks poorly of Darwin not me.

Nigel D: I think you have to justify this. In what way are these questions scientific? What insight into the natural world would the answers offer us?

The question relates to the fact that if over the last 150 years, if the number of speciations has been outnumbered by extinctions, then it would appear from an operational standpoint the evidence refutes Darwinian evolution. The only justification for Darwinian evolution would not be observed empirical operation of biology today, but little more than pure assertion not backed up by direct operational measurements of biology today... Some biologists who are not ID proponents speculate that non-Darwinian mechanisms were the major cause for biological diversification, that natural selection must be disengaged for diversification to occur. This would seem consistent with Fisher's Fundamental theorem of natural selection. An example Lewontin gave was rhinos with two horns versus one. Was selection responsible for the fixation of these traits in to subspecies? Doubtful....mechanisms of geographical, isolation, mutation,drift, and isolation could be just as effective in creating such subspecies.

Salvador T. Cordova · 4 July 2008

Accepted population models with realistic parameters lead to error catastrophe.

Jody Hey's simulation defaults to parameters that prevent error catastrophe, but to his credit the parameters are user selectable. When realistic parameters are input into Hey's model, they lead to error catastrophe. So not only is Darwinism refuted by empirical observation, theoretical population models support Sanford's thesis of of Genetic Entropy, not Darwinian evolution.

See Hey's lab here:
http://lifesci.rutgers.edu/~heylab/

Cornell Geneticist John Sanford will give a presentation at ICC 2008 this August to independently confirm Hey's model with realistic parameters. Stay tuned...

I think it is premuture to celebrate Darwinian evolution as true.

Stanton · 4 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: I think it is premuture to celebrate Darwinian evolution as true.

So please explain why "Darwinian evolution" is false because speciation, which takes hundreds to thousands of generations to occur, occurs more slowly than extinction, which occurs when either the last individual of a species or population dies, or is no longer capable of reproducing, and please explain in great detail why Intelligent Design "theory" is a superior explanation, despite the fact that no one has ever bothered to demonstrate how Intelligent Design "theory" is capable of explaining anything, despite demands of countless scientists and numerous court supoenas. Or, Mr Cordova, are you going to go on and on like a flapping-jawed moron in ignoring this gaping fatal flaw like you did last time when I asked you to explain why a literal interpretation of the circumstances of Noah's Ark is a better explanation of the origin of beetle diversity than fossil and genetic evidence suggesting that beetles diverged from scorpionflies during the Carboniferous over 220 million years ago?

Stanton · 4 July 2008

Nigel D said:
Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.
No. You got it wrong, as I have shown.

Thank you for that earth-shakingly shocking statement, Nigel.

Science Avenger · 4 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: See my entry on Fisher's Fundamental Theorem here with some math examples: http://tinyurl.com/6hjhw5

Ah yes, Fisher, who Sal made part of that horrible Gambler's Fallacy argument where I showed he was making shit up and cutting and pasting things he didn't understand every step of the way. And yet here he comes, shamelessly doing the same thing:

Richard Simmons: To use an analogy he might find easier to understand: Sal, how many of the world’s babies turned into toddlers (or preschoolers) in the last hour?
Sal said: About as many as there are babies born every hour, just slightly less on account of 2 factors: 1. increasing populations 2. infant mortality might be higher than todler aged deaths This would be approxmiately true what ever definition of toddler was offered! Bottom line, there is a reasonable estimate by inference!

Bottom line, Sal is talking out of his ass, again. Not only did he completely miss the point of the analogy (revise it to be how many people became arthritic in the last hour and you might get the point), he can't even do the SIMPLE math involved in coming up with an answer to the question! His #1 should read "increasing births", not increasing population, since the latter could come about through increased longevity. His #2 above makes no sense at all. In a population with increasing births, the number of babies becoming toddlers is going to be smaller than the number of babies born REGARDLESS of the relationship between infant mortality and toddler mortality. This should be obvious, to wit: B(t) = births at time t T(t) = babies becoming toddlers at time t Toddler age = a Now, our birth rate is increasing, so B(t+x) > B(t) for all x. Thus B(t+a) > B(t). Our birth and toddler mortality are greater than zero, so B(t) > T(t+a). So B(t+a) > B(t) > T(t+a), QED. The relationship of toddler mortality and infant mortality is completely irrelevant.

Sal said: The question relates to the fact that if over the last 150 years, if the number of speciations has been outnumbered by extinctions, then it would appear from an operational standpoint the evidence refutes Darwinian evolution.

Only to someone completely ignorant, or a shill for the ID crowd trying to make any argument, no matter how absurd, against MET. Suffice it to say there is nothing about MET that says life must continue forever.

Flint · 4 July 2008

The question about rates of speciation and number of speciation events is based on a fundamental misconception about the process of speciation. It might even be legitimate to say that every breeding population is undergoing a great many incipient (or potential) speciation trends, some of which might or might not result in what someone in the future decides is or is not a new species. Sal, like any creationist, can't seem to get past the model of new species appearing POOF overnight, distinct and unambiguous, according to the whim of the Designer.

And so when one poster after another points out the conceptual error on which Sal's question is based, which renders the question itself meaningless, he crows that "nobody has answered the question."

Still, the historical record shows numerous mass extinctions at times in the past. Whatever caused these, it's still the case that extinctions exceed speciation by orders of magnitude at specific times. And by observation, after each of these events new species radiated rapidly to fill the gaps. So I suppose we could say that during non-mass-extinction periods, there's a rough equilibrium between extinctions and speciation, with probably a slight edge to speciation. During catastrophic periods, extinctions have a big edge. Immediately following them, speciation has a big edge.

But what does this pattern have to do with creationism? How does it make Darwin wrong? How does it relate to the power of selection? I'm guessing that Sal's unstated thesis is that ordinary evolutionary processes can't explain all the diversity he sees, because if it DOES explain that diversity, Sal's Designer either works through evolution, or does nothing.

And so if extinctions consistently exceed speciation through Darwinian processes, then Sal's Designer must be hard at work making up the difference. And to make this argument, he carefully distorts the speciation process as required to fit his foregone conclusion. The fact that Sal's distortion just happens to fit the creationist POOF model is surely not an accident.

Mike Elzinga · 4 July 2008

And to make this argument, he carefully distorts the speciation process as required to fit his foregone conclusion. The fact that Sal’s distortion just happens to fit the creationist POOF model is surely not an accident.

And neither am I convinced that this is simply an innocent process just to build some kind of consistency with sectarian dogma. It takes far more effort and mental gymnastics to mangle scientific concepts repeatedly than it does to actually sit down and learn the stuff properly; especially since there are so many corrections to these mangled concepts that are available to anyone who wants to get the ideas right. And in this process, Sal betrays his training and motivations. He is conscious of doing this, as are the entire DI crowd. These distortions are thought through, tested against “evilutionists”, and reworked until rubes begin to adopt them and use them routinely. Then the DI crowd pulls a disappearing act and lets the rubes take all the heat for all the misconceptions that have been so deliberately built in. Sal’s narcissistic fantasies about being a multi-degreed math/science/engineering genius just make the game more obvious and ridiculous. The comedy has worn off long ago.

Science Avenger · 4 July 2008

Sal takes advantage of the fact that genius and gibberish look the same to the sufficiently ignorant.

David Stanton · 4 July 2008

Sal,

According to your own calculations, the doubling rate for the number of species of beetles produced by speciation is more than sufficient to produce over 300,000 species in less than 6,000 years. Obviously, speciation is more than capable of exceeding extinction rates and often has in the past.

If you want to know how many species are being produced at this instant, the answer is 47, everyone knows that. The number will be different tomorrow and so will the number of extinctions. As Flint pointed out, even if speciation cannot keep up with extinctions, it still does not invalidate evolution. Life on earth would end, but Darwin would still be correct.

If you think that there is another mechanism acting to produce new species, by all means present your evidence. Wishful thinking and creative math will not suffice. Maybe a nice video of POOF would convince someone.

I am guessing that Sal will not vote for my proposal to call it the Law of Evolution from now on. Hopefully, more informed opinions will prevail.

Eric Finn · 4 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: It takes far more effort and mental gymnastics to mangle scientific concepts repeatedly than it does to actually sit down and learn the stuff properly; [...]

I tend to agree with you. In physics, the concept of entropy is well defined (e.g. Feynman, Vol 1, ch 44). Here, on Panda's Thumb, we can read about "entropy barriers" that contradict the theory of biological evolution. Also, I noted the concept of "Genetic Entropy", which I am totally unfamiliar with. Please, could you tell me (us), how the use of the concept of entropy in these examples relates to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. Regards Eric

Mike Elzinga · 4 July 2008

Also, I noted the concept of “Genetic Entropy”, which I am totally unfamiliar with.

A well you should be totally unfamiliar with it. It is a made-up term used especially by the Young Earth Creationists; and, like all their misconceptions about thermodynamics, it confounds the spatial arrangements of matter with the multiplicity of energy states. They have no clue about the laws of thermodynamics or the meaning of entropy. If you Google “Genetic Entropy” you will find quite a number of sectarian sites making use of the old creationist argument that the second law of thermodynamics forbids evolution. I’ve posted on this misconception a few times, most recently here. The basic misconception behind genetic entropy is again the “tornado-in-a-junkyard” argument; in this case, the claim is that the genome is degenerating therefore evolution can’t happen. You can find the basic misconceptions on various sectarian sites if you Google. It’s not worth repeating the misconceptions again here. I am not surprised that Sal of Several Shallow Degrees pushes this argument. He doesn't understand thermodynamics either (along with math or any other science or engineering concepts). He just makes up crap as he goes.

Flint · 4 July 2008

He doesn’t understand thermodynamics either (along with math or any other science or engineering concepts). He just makes up crap as he goes.

I think he's pulling a Jonathan Wells here, using his education to equip him to misrepresent things and generate known falsehoods more difficult to refute in a way his target audience can understand. There's a real challenge to this, as you said earlier. The audience has to know just enough for the lie to sound plausible, but yet not nearly enough to understand why it's false. And so that audience has only a vague notion of what a genome is, no clue what "genome degeneration" might be, nowhere near enough relevant education to even understand the concepts necessary to explain why it's nonsense, and their hazy notion of what it might be plays right into the common intuition that nature all by itself couldn't possibly have produced anything as exalted as us. I do agree with you that Sal KNOWS he's generating falsehoods. He fully understands that the ignorance creationists have so successfully maintained for all these decades by making evolution too much bother to cover in schools, makes his target audience easy to manipulate. He grabs them by their Jesus, yanks them into error and ignorance, and holds them there. It seems to be characteristic of religious faith (with some exceptions) that it inspires its victims to fight fiercely and actively to defend their ignorance against the slings and arrows of knowledge and logic. Sal works to provide these people with yet more falsehoods to wrap around their brains to protect them from such evil forces.

Mike Elzinga · 4 July 2008

Well said, Flint.

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

I notice no one answered a rather straight forward question:
What is the number of species in production today via natural selection
— Salvador T Cordova
Even a good guess would be welcome. 10, 20, 400 per year? C’mon if selection is as obvious as gravity we ought to have some observed examples today.

You seem to have missed two things here, Sal. First, one commenter (Flint) did post a guess (about a hundred million). Second, your question is pointless, irrelevant, and impossible to answer accurately. Without some degree of confidence in the answer, what use is it?

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

I think you have to justify this. In what way are these questions scientific? What insight into the natural world would the answers offer us?
— Salvador T Cordova
The question relates to

This is not what I asked. What about your questions is scientific? What makes them scientific questions? In what way can they be described as being a part of some kind of scientific process of investigation? I've even rephrased it in three different ways for you. Surely you can answer so straightforward a question as that, Sal, hmm?

the fact that if

(my bolding) Whoa! Hold your horses there, Sal. Fact? What fact? All that I see follow is some claims and assertions, not any facts.

over the last 150 years, if the number of speciations has been outnumbered by extinctions, then it would appear from an operational standpoint the evidence refutes Darwinian evolution.

How the hell do you get this? Extinctions will always outnumber speciation events, during, for example, a mass extinction! Speciation takes time. Extinction can happen very quickly (technically, extinction occurs at the moment the last individual of a species dies, but let's assume for the sake of argument that an "extinction event" begins when the last population of a species loses the ability to breed, and ends when the last individual dies, so the extinction event could take several years). Typically, I would expect speciation to take at least 1000 years (with the exception of speciation by hybridisation), but more commly hundreds of thousands to millions of years (particularly with large organisms such as vertebrates). Can you see, Sal, how easy it is for extinctions to occur faster than speciations? Now, where in all this is any challenge to MET (NB - emphatically not "Darwinism", which is technically meaningless and anachronistic)? It is a theory that describes how life changes. It does not need the number of extant species to remain constant, nor does it require the number of species to increase. Where the hell did you get this crap? AiG?

The only justification for Darwinian evolution would not be observed empirical operation of biology today, but little more than pure assertion not backed up by direct operational measurements of biology today…

This is an empty assertion, Sal. You do not seem to understand what the evidence is that supports MET, and you do not seem to understand the logical relationships between the various fields of evidence.

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: The basic misconception behind genetic entropy is again the “tornado-in-a-junkyard” argument; in this case, the claim is that the genome is degenerating therefore evolution can’t happen. You can find the basic misconceptions on various sectarian sites if you Google. It’s not worth repeating the misconceptions again here.

I was worried after having GE thrown in my face that I was going to get dragged by a rope through the tumbleweeds and cactus trying to figure out what was going on. Fortunately a few references showed GE to be paper tiger: it's just a fancy way of saying "there ain't no such thing as a constructive mutation". The thing about this John Sanford (who came up with the phrase, the idea being nothing new) is that Wikipedia says he had some fairly impressive qualifications in academia and industry. Looks like he was pulling a Hoyle: a reputable scientist gone off the rails. The result, an endorsement by Bill Dembski. "Oh, the humiliation." White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Richard Simons · 5 July 2008

Bottom line, Sal is talking out of his ass, again. Not only did he completely miss the point of the analogy (revise it to be how many people became arthritic in the last hour and you might get the point),

Thanks, Science Avenger. Sal did indeed completely miss my point but I am away from home at present and cannot get to a computer every day. I think your analogy is a lot better than mine, I'll have to remember it.

Salvador T. Cordova · 5 July 2008

Eric: Please, could you tell me (us), how the use of the concept of entropy in these examples relates to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics.

There is no relation. The word "entropy" is simply meant to state disorder from a more functional state.

Mike wrote: It takes far more effort and mental gymnastics to mangle scientific concepts repeatedly than it does to actually sit down and learn the stuff properly; […]

Yes, Mike, so how much population genetics have you studied? If you answer "a lot", then I'll ask you some technical questions. If you say, "not a lot", then I'll ask you why the heck you're defending a theory you don't even understand. That said, Mike, you're taking shots at my person. Perhaps we could stay on topic about:

Wallace and Darwin became, via this joint presentation, co-discoverers of natural selection and its proposed role in the production of new species from existing ones.

And so I asked a simple empirical question. How many confirmed new speciations have we actually observed each year or even in the last 20 years due to natural selection? If Darwinism is a real discovery, we ought to have some direct observable data to back the claim of this "discovery". I mean how many new species came out of Lenski's lab experiments of "natural" selection after tens of thousands of generations? I'm not even asking how many speciations total world-wide, just how many new species can we confirm have evolved in the last 20 years via direct observation? 1, 2, 3, 20? Anyone want to answer? ANYONE!

Salvador T. Cordova · 5 July 2008

I wrote: About as many as there are babies born every hour, just slightly less

Science Pretender wrote: B(t) > T(t+a),

Which means T(t+a) is less than B(t) which is consistent with my statement of "just slightly less". Your calculations agrees with my statement, number of babies turning into toddlers is slightly less than the number of births. You're having reading comprehension issues again. What's embarrassing is you can't even comprehend that you wrote is consistent with my claim. LOL! hahaha.....try again Science Pretender.

David Stanton · 5 July 2008

Sal,

According to your own calculations, over 150,000 species of beetles must have arisen by speciation in the last 20 years. Multiply that by about 10 and I guess you will have your answer, at least according to YECs.

What possible difference could it make to place an arbirtary limit of 20 years on a process that takes on average millions of years? As has been pointed out already, your question is nonsensical and betrays a deep misunderstanding of the processes involved. Every extant lineage could be in the process of speciation. It is ridiculous to ask how many have completed the process in the last 20 years when the process really has no end. Also, even if absolutely no speciation had occurred in the last 20 years, it would not disprove evolution in the slightest.

If your point is that no speciation has ever been observed, you are just plain wrong. If you are trying to say that no speciation has occurred in the last 20 years, that is just foolish. If you are just trying to provoke an argument, you are wasting your time. Now how about answering a really important question, how many stars have formed in the last 20 years? If you can't answer, then stars cannot form. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin in 20 years? If you can't answer, then God does not exist.

Flint · 5 July 2008

Sal knows perfectly well that there have been periods in the past when extinctions far exceeded speciation, followed by periods where speciation far exceeded extinctions. Sal knows that these periods were many millions of years long. Sal knows that these cycles say nothing whatsoever about Darwin's selection mechanism being wrong. Sal knows they're irrelevant. Sal is lying.

And so I asked a simple empirical question. How many confirmed new speciations have we actually observed each year or even in the last 20 years due to natural selection?

This "simple empirical question", as Sal has now been told at least a dozen times, ASSUMES what Sal knows to be false about the speciation process. Despite everyone's efforts, Sal STILL hasn't stopped beating his wife, and STILL won't admit it.

I’m not even asking how many speciations total world-wide, just how many new species can we confirm have evolved in the last 20 years via direct observation? 1, 2, 3, 20? Anyone want to answer? ANYONE!

You have been answered ad nauseum. Repeating a meaningless question does not increase its meaning. But hey, I'll give Sal an answer. There are 200 million speciation "events" currently in process. Prove me wrong! Sal DEMANDS that someone give him a COUNT of what Sal knows can neither be observed nor clearly defined (because a species, as Sal well knows, is a taxonomic convenience rather than a biological condition). Sal seems to think that if he pretends to misunderstand everyone's incessant corrections of his lies, and contines to lie, that this will somehow make it come true. The Religious Method, hard at work.

Science Avenger · 5 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: Your calculations agrees with my statement, number of babies turning into toddlers is slightly less than the number of births. You're having reading comprehension issues again. What's embarrassing is you can't even comprehend that you wrote is consistent with my claim. LOL! hahaha.....try again Science Pretender.

Jesus Sal, have you no shame? What defect of character allows you to lie so blatantly, with the evidence simply one mouse click away? As those who read my post on the previous page know, I was attacking your claim that the conclusion above (which is so obvious only an ignorant fool like yourself could think proving it is some sort of accomplishment) was dependent on "infant mortality [being] higher than todler [sic] aged deaths". As I showed, it isn't, which means, as usual, you haven't the faintest fucking clue what you are talking about. Cutting and pasting from the net and composing word salads of sciency sounding terms might impress among the willfully ignorant over there at UD, but the people here know their shit, and are going to emasculate you every time you try this stunt.

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: And so I asked a simple empirical question. How many confirmed new speciations have we actually observed each year or even in the last 20 years due to natural selection? If Darwinism is a real discovery, we ought to have some direct observable data to back the claim of this "discovery". I mean how many new species came out of Lenski's lab experiments of "natural" selection after tens of thousands of generations? I'm not even asking how many speciations total world-wide, just how many new species can we confirm have evolved in the last 20 years via direct observation? 1, 2, 3, 20? Anyone want to answer? ANYONE!

What I am curious about is the number of confirmed supernatural interventions we have observed in the last year. Or last century. Or last millennium. 1? 10? 1000? I'm not talking about Design interventions, anything will do, doesn't have to have anything to do with biology. Anyone care to answer? ANYONE? White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Science Avenger said: Jesus Sal, have you no shame?

Now WHAT kind of a SILLY question is that? He's a DARWIN-BASHER for Bob's sake. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

mharri · 5 July 2008

Eric:

From what I've seen, entropy comes up usually when folks try to argue that the 2nd law of thermodynamics says evolution can't happen. However, they tend to forget that entropy-reducing events happen all the time! For example, consider the freezing of water into ice, which reduces entropy. The key here is that it is not entropy, but enthalpy which is important. Thus, in an open system, entropy can decrease; and earth on its own is an open system. However, if we include the sun, we have ourselves a heat reservoir! Important lesson: in thermodynamics, it is important to keep track of the boundary of the system.

This is where my understanding breaks down. Is the concept of entropy best understood in biology on the biochemical level of genes? Or is it best understood on the population level, where selection processes occur? Also, another problem that has been bothering me is the following. If my understanding of thermodynamics is correct, then a change in state is not so much a decrease or increase in information, as a gradual replacement of information about the old environment by information about the new environment. Yet this seems to conflict with posts I have seen here about how important history is in understanding the evolution of a species.

Mike Elzinga · 5 July 2008

Sal seems to think that if he pretends to misunderstand everyone’s incessant corrections of his lies, and continues to lie, that this will somehow make it come true.

Note also how often he taunts and tries to draw people into a “debate”. This is one of the worn-out shticks he learned from Gish in order to find a foil against which to hone his deliberate misrepresentations and misconceptions. He is also attempting to fulfill his narcissistic fantasy of being a multi-degreed genius who deftly confounds the experts.

Cutting and pasting from the net and composing word salads of sciency sounding terms might impress among the willfully ignorant over there at UD, but the people here know their shit, and are going to emasculate you every time you try this stunt.

It’s pretty hard to emasculate someone who doesn’t have the balls to learn science in the first place. He changes the subject so many times that it becomes clear that he is, in fact, a coward looking only for openings to hone his shtick. We all noticed how he avoided your question about how many people have become arthritic in the last hour. :-) At what point does one decide during the incipient formation of dendrites (e.g., icicles, arthritic growths) when a new identifiable branch can be labeled as such? How does one know that growth in that particular direction will continue in a stochastic environment?

What I am curious about is the number of confirmed supernatural interventions we have observed in the last year. Or last century. Or last millennium. 1? 10? 1000? …

:-) How many scientific experiments has Sal-of-Several-Shallow-Degrees done in the last 20 years that connected to a supernatural realm and singled out the particular sectarian deity within that realm that produced those supernatural interventions? Where are the data? How long is a piece of string? And, after waiting patiently for several days, David Stanton finally had to do the calculation about the speciation of beetles before Sal-of-Several-Shallow-Degrees could figure out how to do it and pretend he figured it out on his own. The multi-degreed "genius" who took algebra in high school was bested in math by Darwin and a biologist. That's gotta hurt. The “nimble genius” looks more like a dancing clown.

Flint · 5 July 2008

What bothers me about Sal is, he clearly knows he's lying. He knows we realize he's lying. He knows that we know that he knows he's lying. He knows that if he should ever tell the truth, we'd recognize it and congratulate him for it. What can he possibly think he's gaining by coming here and lying to us? We're not a very good test bed for proposing or honing dishonest representations.

I personally classify Sal in the same categories as con men who make a living taking the life savings away from old people. There's absolutely no justification for such behavior, except that evil people can injure trusting people, and evil people enjoy doing so. Sal isn't deluded, he is diseased.

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: Note also how often he taunts and tries to draw people into a “debate”.

"Refute my assertions lalalalalalalala I can't hear you I've got my fingers in my ears." White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 5 July 2008

However, they tend to forget that entropy-reducing events happen all the time! For example, consider the freezing of water into ice, which reduces entropy. The key here is that it is not entropy, but enthalpy which is important. Thus, in an open system, entropy can decrease; and earth on its own is an open system.

Part of the misconception, as I mentioned on another thread , is the confusion between the spatial organization of matter and the multiplicity of available energy states. Popular attempts to explain entropy have been partially responsible for the confusion. Scientists in some specialty areas use terms loosely and, in context, they understand among themselves what is meant. But the well-financed propaganda of the ID/Creationists in the last 20 to 30 years has greatly exacerbated this confusion. They confound these ideas routinely, and unfortunately, people who argue with them get sucked into adopting the confusions. In order for atoms or molecules to condense into an ordered lattice such as ice, energy has to be released. That means that energy has to be carried away in the form of phonons, photons, or some other means that depends on the system and the environment with which it interacts. Those channels by which energy is carried away are available energy states. If energy is not carried away, we have “elastic” collisions of molecule on molecule or atom on atom, and they will not settle into the arrangements which are determined by their electromagnetic interactions and the rules of quantum mechanics.

This is where my understanding breaks down. Is the concept of entropy best understood in biology on the biochemical level of genes? Or is it best understood on the population level, where selection processes occur?

Again, entropy is about the number of available energy states, not the spatial arrangements of genes or the arrangements of atoms and molecules.

If my understanding of thermodynamics is correct, then a change in state is not so much a decrease or increase in information, as a gradual replacement of information about the old environment by information about the new environment.

Here again “information” is being confounded with entropy. This is partly the fault of scientists. One of the formulas for “information” looks much like the Boltzmann expression for entropy. People began using the words carelessly; the ID/Creationists do this routinely.

Yet this seems to conflict with posts I have seen here about how important history is in understanding the evolution of a species.

The confusion is rampant and frustrating for all. However, if you remember that entropy and the laws of thermodynamics are primarily about counting blocks of energy (the enumeration of available energy states and accounting for where energy comes from and where it goes), then you start getting back onto the right track. How molecules and atoms arrange into arrays or other patterns comes from quantum mechanics and, when macroscopic systems form, also from the emergent properties of condensed matter. These emergent properties are frequently governed by quantum-like rules also (eigenmodes of oscillation or folding, etc.). Energy still flows into and out of these system enough to make interactions inelastic and non-linear. The laws of thermodynamics still hold; but they are not “barriers” or “obstructions” that prevent things from happening and must be overcome by supernatural means.

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

Some biologists who are not ID proponents speculate that non-Darwinian mechanisms were the major cause for biological diversification,
— Salvador T Cordova

Actually, Sal, you are right here. There is indeed debate over the relative importance of the various mechanisms of biological change. This proves nothing more nor less than that science is not complacent.

that natural selection must be disengaged for diversification to occur.

But this is made up. No scientist claims that natural selection must be disengaged (hey, if I'm wrong all you need to do is reference the relevant paper!). In fact, natural selection cannot be disengaged, unless all individuals in a population survive and successfully reproduce. As soon as some individuals in a population die before reproducing, selection will again apply. You may be confusedly referring to the potential for NS to become less important when selection pressures are light, in which case genetic drift may become a more significant mechanism for change. Guess what? It's all part of MET.

This would seem consistent with Fisher’s Fundamental theorem of natural selection.

I don't believe Fisher ever stated that NS had to stop applying at any point. Maybe I missed that paper, hmm...?

An example Lewontin gave was rhinos with two horns versus one. Was selection responsible for the fixation of these traits in to subspecies? Doubtful.…mechanisms of geographical, isolation, mutation,drift, and isolation could be just as effective in creating such subspecies.

You are right here without seeming to understand why. It is eminently possible for mechanisms other than NS to have been foremost in the process that led to 2-horned rhinos. However, this is openly acknowledged by biologists, and is not the least bit controversial. Just because selection was not a predominant mechanism in some diversification processes does not alter the fact (yes, fact, actually, Sal - or as near as anything ever gets when discussing processes that occurred over a period of many millions of years) that NS remains the most significant factor in long-term biological change.

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: ... So not only is Darwinism refuted by empirical observation, ...

Something you seem to be claiming over again without actually demonstrating, Sal. Don't merely tell me. Sow me the evidence!

I think it is premuture to celebrate Darwinian evolution as true.

Well, of course you would. But that does not make you any less wrong. And, there is an additional point that all you creos seem to ignore (and no troll has ever even attempted to address it): even if MET is wrong, it is at the very least a good approximation of what really happens. If it were not, we would have seen it by now.

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

Stanton said:
Nigel D said:
Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.
No. You got it wrong, as I have shown.
Thank you for that earth-shakingly shocking statement, Nigel.

Stanton, I'm sorry to shock you so. Did your heart cope with it? ;-)

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

Science Avenger said: Sal takes advantage of the fact that genius and gibberish look the same to the sufficiently ignorant.

LOL!!

Nigel D · 5 July 2008

Eric Finn said:
Mike Elzinga said: It takes far more effort and mental gymnastics to mangle scientific concepts repeatedly than it does to actually sit down and learn the stuff properly; [...]
I tend to agree with you. In physics, the concept of entropy is well defined (e.g. Feynman, Vol 1, ch 44). Here, on Panda's Thumb, we can read about "entropy barriers" that contradict the theory of biological evolution. Also, I noted the concept of "Genetic Entropy", which I am totally unfamiliar with. Please, could you tell me (us), how the use of the concept of entropy in these examples relates to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. Regards Eric

Oh, Eric, that's so easy I'm surprised you don't know. It was first elucidated during the study of a particular species of crimson herring, but I cannot recall the author's name...

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Science Avenger said: Sal takes advantage of the fact that genius and gibberish look the same to the sufficiently ignorant.

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Stanton · 5 July 2008

Nigel D said:
Stanton said:
Nigel D said:
Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.
No. You got it wrong, as I have shown.
Thank you for that earth-shakingly shocking statement, Nigel.
Stanton, I'm sorry to shock you so. Did your heart cope with it? ;-)

I had a little Peptobismal and defribulation, and I was back to drawing as usual.

Stuart Weinstein · 5 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said:
Eric: Please, could you tell me (us), how the use of the concept of entropy in these examples relates to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics.
There is no relation. The word "entropy" is simply meant to state disorder from a more functional state.

Really? Please show me any Physics Book where the word "functional" appears in the definition of entropy. And I don't mean "functional" in the sense of mathematics, but functional as you use it above. How many semesters of thermo did you have Sal?

Mike Elzinga · 5 July 2008

There is no relation. The word “entropy” is simply meant to state disorder from a more functional state. .

Then this requires some explanation. This site is simply one of dozens of examples one can find just by Googling on the Internet. Maybe Sal can explain why these misconceptions are allowed to dangle out there without correction by the “fine fellows” at DI. Why are scientists and educators left to always clean up the messes made by the ID/Creationist movement while Sal and his cohorts dance around and avoid definitive answers? The answer, of course, is found right here with Sal’s sophistry. Get the crap out there no matter what; but never retract it after it has been shot down in flames. In fact, simply bring it up in another venue just as Sal did here. This is why the people at DI, AnswersInGenesis, ICR, and other propaganda outlets are so despicable. Unlike responsible scientists and science educators, they refuse to take any responsibility for helping the public understand science. In fact, their whole shtick is to maliciously sew confusion and error and let their following, as well as the children of parents who want nothing to do with sectarian dogma, deal with the consequences.

iml8 · 5 July 2008

Nigel D said: It is eminently possible for mechanisms other than NS to have been foremost in the process that led to 2-horned rhinos. However, this is openly acknowledged by biologists, and is not the least bit controversial.

I sort of laugh at this (in agreement not in mockery). I tend to be attracted to concepts of neutral evolution; if organisms are the products of random mutational processes, screened more or less by natural selection in its various guises, then we'd EXPECT them to have features that are abitrary and quirky. Does natural selection "insist" on one or two horns? Sometime back a mutational event or events sent one rhino population down the road toward two horns and the other down the road to one horn. If a feature is selectively neutral -- one versus two horns -- where's the problem? No brainer. The laugh issue is at the fact a cdesign proponentsist would even THINK of using such an argument. The most fundamental objection by Darwin-bashers in general to modern evolutionary theory is the undirected nature of evolution. So why would one of them point to haphazard variations that don't seem to be even guided by natural selection as a score against modern evolutionary theory? Well, the answer's obvious: TO DUMB DOWN THE ARGUMENT. "Is this the best you can do?!" White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Stanton · 5 July 2008

iml8 said:
Nigel D said: It is eminently possible for mechanisms other than NS to have been foremost in the process that led to 2-horned rhinos. However, this is openly acknowledged by biologists, and is not the least bit controversial.
I sort of laugh at this (in agreement not in mockery). I tend to be attracted to concepts of neutral evolution; if organisms are the products of random mutational processes, screened more or less by natural selection in its various guises, then we'd EXPECT them to have features that are abitrary and quirky. Does natural selection "insist" on one or two horns? Sometime back a mutational event or events sent one rhino population down the road toward two horns and the other down the road to one horn. If a feature is selectively neutral -- one versus two horns -- where's the problem? No brainer.

Apparently, 2 horns is the limit for rhinoceri, though, there has been a lot of variations on this, in that we had the (later genera of) elasmotheres develop a huge conical horn from the first horn, while we see a pair of nasal horns on Diceratherium and its look-alike replacement, Menoceras, as well as the super-exaggerated horns of the woolly rhinoceros, the first horn being used to sweep away snow in searching for forage.

Eric Finn · 6 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: Popular attempts to explain entropy have been partially responsible for the confusion. Scientists in some specialty areas use terms loosely and, in context, they understand among themselves what is meant.[...]

Indeed, even scientists do not treat their working concepts with mathematical precision. I think it is safe to claim that the current theory of biological evolution is wrong (I refuse to call it MET). One of the clear indications is that it is still (after 150 years) studied and constantly refined. The Pioneer anomaly (unexpected trajectories of Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes) seems to indicate that the theory of general relativity is wrong, since no natural explanation has been found. However, the Church of Relativity stubbornly refuses to abandon their pet theory, in spite of the accumulating scientific hard evidence against it. Their excuse is that currently they have no better theory to replace it. Also, they try to refer to a few successful predictions by their pet theory. Now, this is not the way of proper science. A scientific theory, even a beautiful one, should be abandoned as soon as it is contradicted by evidence. What else falsifiability might mean? Regards Eric

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: Accepted population models with realistic parameters lead to error catastrophe. Jody Hey's simulation defaults to parameters that prevent error catastrophe, but to his credit the parameters are user selectable. When realistic parameters are input into Hey's model, they lead to error catastrophe.

Quote from Hey's web page: "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" (Theodosius Dobzhansky 1973)". And indeed, it is biologists that have elucidated the requirements of faithfulness in heredity, first by Manfred Eigen in Selforganization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules 1971. He identified the Darwinian threshold between less faithful replicators and faithful evolutionary lineages in abiogenesis. This is an observation on a necessary phase transition during the pathway from abiogenesis to lineages. Ordinary evolutionary population models existing lineages of course. But virologists who deals with rapidly evolving quasispecies recognized that this could be used as a method of treatment:

The work on the error threshold opens a new paradigm for how to fight viruses, namely not by inhibiting their replication but rather by favoring it with an increased rate of mutation. [Manfred Eigen.]

So of course you try a slight of hand, as some population models describes the expected and observed frustration of evolution in viruses. A HIV treatment based on this evolutionary research is now under clinical trial:

Summary: KP-1461, an experimental HIV drug already in a phase II trial, works so differently from other antiretrovirals that at first glance it looked like science fiction, and we found it hard to take seriously as a current possibility today. In fact this drug is highly credible, and based on elegant science that goes back at least 25 years. KP-1461 is the only antiretroviral in human use or testing that can eradicate HIV from laboratory cell cultures. No one knows how it will work in people -- but we might know by the second quarter of 2008, when the current phase II trial could be complete.

Salvador T. Cordova said: I mean how many new species came out of Lenski's lab experiments of "natural" selection after tens of thousands of generations? I'm not even asking how many speciations total world-wide, just how many new species can we confirm have evolved in the last 20 years via direct observation? 1, 2, 3, 20? Anyone want to answer? ANYONE!

I doubt that this is the answer you were looking for, but since you asked: out of Lenski's lab came at least one new putative species (ecological species concept). Now, as I understand it, the putative new species lives in a peculiar environment with regular infusion of new food, and it can AFAIU still metabolize the old food source. But if the increase the time period slightly and go back to 1980's, the same type of adaptation happened in a serial liquid culture, resulting in a completely niched species:

J Bacteriol. 1982 Jul;151(1):269-73. Links Chromosomal mutation for citrate utilization by Escherichia coli K-12.Hall BG. A mutant strain of Escherichia coli K-12 that utilizes citrate as a sole source of carbon and energy was isolated. [My bold.]

Finally, on topic of the post we can note that Darwin got many things correct in his early version of evolution theory. Manfred Eigen notes in the above linked PNAS paper on quasispecies error catastrophe:

Natural selection is a direct consequence of this competitive replication. It presupposes differences in efficiency of replication without excluding neutral mutants. Neutral copies, all belonging to the group of best-adapted ones, are selected against the rest, but because of their inherently reproductive behavior, they continue to compete with one another in a stochastic manner. Kimura and Ohta (9) called this nondeterministic fluctuating selection “non-Darwinian,” although Darwin himself anticipated it. Kimura and Ohta's stochastically fluctuating selection reminds us of “critical phase transitions,” as found in ferro- or antiferromagnetism or liquid-gas transformation near the critical point where, in analogy to neutrality among replicative units, the densities of the liquid and gaseous phases become equal, with the consequence of density fluctuations on all scales of spatial dimensions manifesting themselves in the phenomenon of “critical opalescence.” [My bold.]

It seems the error catastrophe can be understood in terms of selection and drift, two common evolutionary mechanisms considered by Darwin early on. Not a bad testament to the man himself, and an excellent reminder why we celebrate his achievements in biology 150 years afterwards.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

Wow! So is it just me, or does anyone else find it a LOL that Cordova tries to claim precedence to over 25 years old "elegant research" on a biology site!? Another evidence, as if we needed more, that creationists can't even be derivative and will never try to do the research they pompously claims they will. Not that this was that hard to find out for a layman. Also, I recognized Eigen's work that Cordova tries in vain to steal as I'm interested in abiogenesis too. [And I will gladly study the work Cordova made me find.] There is stupidity, there is creationists, and then there is Salvador Cordova.

Nigel D said: Oh, Eric, that's so easy I'm surprised you don't know. It was first elucidated during the study of a particular species of crimson herring, but I cannot recall the author's name...

LOL, again!

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

Eric, speaking of LOLs, a master piece.

Eric Finn said: The Pioneer anomaly (unexpected trajectories of Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes) seems to indicate that the theory of general relativity is wrong, since no natural explanation has been found.

I'm sure you know this, but you are only 2/3 correct here. Recently a better thermal model accounted for 1/3 of the discrepancy between predictions and observations. OTOH we could add the approach trajectory discrepancy here. Seems some probes that have used Earth for later sling shots have been observed to exit the sling shot with higher than predicted velocity. (As opposed to the Pioneer anomaly, which is a higher than predicted acceleration towards the Sun.) IIRC it is claimed that the velocity addition can be modeled as a function of incoming vs outgoing latitude. (I.e. probes equatorially incoming and outgoing doesn't experience the effect, while equatorially incoming and polarly outgoing does.) So what is this beef between hyperbolic trajectories, inclinations, and GR? Somewhere here it is starting to feel like astrology pattern matching. Astrology and pattern matching, that reminds me of ... oh, right.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

mharri said: Also, another problem that has been bothering me is the following. If my understanding of thermodynamics is correct, then a change in state is not so much a decrease or increase in information, as a gradual replacement of information about the old environment by information about the new environment.

As Mike Elzinga notes, we shouldn't confound information with entropy. I'm not sure if it will help you consolidate the above advice, if I tell you that "a gradual replacement of information about the old environment by information about the new environment" is an apt description of what selection does on a populations genome during evolution. From Dawkins' The Information Challenge, an article in response to creationists obsession of information instead of biologists observation of functional traits:

But it still remains true that natural selection is a narrowing down from an initially wider field of possibilities, including mostly unsuccessful ones, to a narrower field of successful ones. This is analogous to the definition of information with which we began: information is what enables the narrowing down from prior uncertainty (the initial range of possibilities) to later certainty (the "successful" choice among the prior probabilities). According to this analogy, natural selection is by definition a process whereby information is fed into the gene pool of the next generation.

If natural selection feeds information into gene pools, what is the information about? It is about how to survive. Strictly it is about how to survive and reproduce, in the conditions that prevailed when previous generations were alive. [Dawkins' emphasis removed, mine added.]

I'm also currently reading Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann's book The Quark and the Jaguar from 1994, where he describes pretty much the same thing from the viewpoint of his work at the Santa Fe Institute on complex adaptive systems, or simply "adaptors" as IIRC Cosma Shalizi would prefer to call it.

The common feature of all these processes is that in each one a complex adaptive system acquires information about its environment and its own interaction with that environment, identifying regularities in that information, condensing those regularities into a kind of "schema" or model, and acting in the real world on the basis of that schema. In each case, there are various competing schemata, and the results of the action in the real world feed back to influence the competition among those schemata. [p 17.]

You can identify Dawkins selection and gene pool here, and indeed evolution is chosen by Gell-Mann as an example of a complex adaptive system. Where "complex" mostly refers to the existence of competing schemata as opposed to "simple" direct feedback, as I understand it, not the complexity of the adaptor as such. Even the simplest early darwinian replicator would be a complex adaptive system. [Gell-Mann also distinguishes between "internal effective complexity" of observation and schema, such as the genome, which isn't comprehensible to another system, and external schema which are used by an outside observer. I.e. a gene pool is a cookbook recipe on how to make a population in the current environment, you can't identify which processes are taking place from reading the codons. The "design" isn't specified, it is selected.] So while I'm not sure why you claim a connection to thermodynamics here, it is never the less a correct description as regards information. Now, if only creationists would learn about biology, information and complexity.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

Make that "maintain a population in the current environment".

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 6 July 2008

Um, okay, as ususal when a layman dabbles in a field, he doesn't get the full picture. Now I also found criticism of the error catastrophe. Seems reasonable to me, the idea is that the model doesn't produce lethal mutations which counteracts the errors.

Be that it may, either outcome means that it was evolutionary research that covered the area. But I need to retract that the Darwinian threshold is "necessary".

Btw, I also had time to reflect on what happens in abiogenesis. The ELO thread points to material that shows how a membrane later adopting nucleotides in a Szostak type replicator will prevent the latter from unfaithful and ineffectual simple copying of whatever lies around instead of itself. So there is an implicit transition already there.

The reason it works seems to me be because the requirements for non-lethality is practically non-existent. (Which, amazingly, would fit with the above criticism - "no lethal mutations". Maybe Eigen and the error catastrophe critics are both right...)

Mike Elzinga · 6 July 2008

Indeed, even scientists do not treat their working concepts with mathematical precision.

While that is often correct, that is not quite what I was trying to say. I was pointing out that scientists, in attempting to explain concepts to the general public, sometimes make inadvertent mistakes. For example, they attempt to use analogies with the best of intentions, but sometimes analogies generate unexpected misconceptions on the part of the listener. An experienced educator runs into this all the time.

A scientific theory, even a beautiful one, should be abandoned as soon as it is contradicted by evidence. What else falsifiability might mean?

The idea of falsifiability is based on logic (If P => Q, then NOT Q => NOT P). So the idea is, if a theory implies specific experimental results, not getting those experimental results implies the theory is false. While the formal logic remains true, assuring that NOT Q is the case is more difficult in experimental science. There are many reasons an experiment can go wrong. So one doesn’t immediately jump to the conclusion a theory is wrong if an experiment fails to produce results predicted by the theory. In fact, the broader the experimental support for a theory, the more a given experimental discrepancy will be regarded with suspicion. It simply takes time and cross-checking to eliminate systematic errors in an experiment. It’s one of the reasons experimental science is so challenging. In the case of trajectories, there are so many mundane reasons that the trajectories could be perturbed that one has to eliminate them all before deciding that this “experiment” raises problems for general relativity. So it’s not the case that scientists are making stubborn excuses here. Everybody knows that a theory can be overthrown; but the process of doing so is not so cavalier. If overthrowing a theory were that easy, every incompetent “experimenter” could overthrow any theory at any time; which is what the ID/Creationists do routinely.

Eric Finn · 6 July 2008

I do agree with all the points you made in your post.

Mike Elzinga said: The idea of falsifiability is based on logic (If P => Q, then NOT Q => NOT P). So the idea is, if a theory implies specific experimental results, not getting those experimental results implies the theory is false.

Very often, a scientific theory is a collection hypotheses, each of which can be verified individually. A theory typically unites a range of observations in a comprehensible manner. The main purpose of any scientific theory is to present patterns that alleviates the need to count all the observations (my definition). The principle of falsifiability, in my opinion, works best on the level of hypotheses. It is not so straight forward to apply it to theories, but, of course, it can be done and it is done all the time. Historically, scientific theories tend to be rather persistent. They are not abandoned until a better one is at sight. They are used even when problems have already been identified. On the other hand, no scientist is claiming that any theory represents the absolute truth. Personally, I sincerely hope that you hold a position that involves teaching. Regards Eric

mharri · 6 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: Here again “information” is being confounded with entropy <\blockquote> Yeah, I guess I thought about how systems that aren't thermally insulated take on the temperature of its surroundings, and compared it to the environment shifting a population's genetic distribution. And went too far with the comparison.
The confusion is rampant and frustrating for all. However, if you remember that entropy and the laws of thermodynamics are primarily about counting blocks of energy (the enumeration of available energy states and accounting for where energy comes from and where it goes), then you start getting back onto the right track.
I really should have realized that. Thermodynamics doesn't seem too clear on what the ideas involved describe (I'm still not completely sure how the zeroth law leads to temperature), but that is pretty much the whole idea of the microcanonical ensemble: the probability, given a certain energy, of being in such-and-such position in phase space. (I have a math background, and am trying to learn physics on my own time.)

Stanton · 6 July 2008

mharri said:
Mike Elzinga said: Here again “information” is being confounded with entropy
Yeah, I guess I thought about how systems that aren't thermally insulated take on the temperature of its surroundings, and compared it to the environment shifting a population's genetic distribution. And went too far with the comparison.
The confusion is rampant and frustrating for all. However, if you remember that entropy and the laws of thermodynamics are primarily about counting blocks of energy (the enumeration of available energy states and accounting for where energy comes from and where it goes), then you start getting back onto the right track.
I really should have realized that. Thermodynamics doesn't seem too clear on what the ideas involved describe (I'm still not completely sure how the zeroth law leads to temperature), but that is pretty much the whole idea of the microcanonical ensemble: the probability, given a certain energy, of being in such-and-such position in phase space. (I have a math background, and am trying to learn physics on my own time.)

Mike Elzinga · 6 July 2008

Yeah, I guess I thought about how systems that aren’t thermally insulated take on the temperature of its surroundings, and compared it to the environment shifting a population’s genetic distribution. And went too far with the comparison.

Here is an analogy that is sometimes useful (offered with some trepidation because analogies can be misleading in unexpected ways). When you think of selection pruning a population, think of the incipient emergence of a bunch of icicles hanging from eaves toughs (any type of dendritic formation will work). The growth of the icicles or dendrites is determined by the underlying quantum mechanical rules and the many contingencies associated with wind, temperature, relative humidity, etc. (all acting together to produce some kind of arrangement of icicles or dendrites). To emphasize the role of selection, add on top of all these contingencies some other factor such as small wrinkles or bumps in the eaves that place a “bias” on where gravity will assist in directing accumulating water molecules. The dendrites that actually emerge will reflect, in a somewhat imperfect, manner what those bumps on the eaves contribute to the ultimate growth. If further perturbations redirect the growth, think of these as further changes in the “environment” which are shifting the “population” of the dendrites.

Thermodynamics doesn’t seem too clear on what the ideas involved describe (I’m still not completely sure how the zeroth law leads to temperature), but that is pretty much the whole idea of the microcanonical ensemble: the probability, given a certain energy, of being in such-and-such position in phase space. (I have a math background, and am trying to learn physics on my own time.)

Hint: Temperature ultimately comes down to being the average kinetic energy per degree of freedom of a physical system. Degrees of freedom are the number ways kinetic energy can be stored, like vibration modes, rotational modes, translational modes, etc. In some cases, researchers can attribute several temperatures to the constituents of a thermodynamic system by selectively referring to each degree of freedom. Usually they do this when the system is far from equilibrium. Temperatures between two systems ultimately come into equilibrium because of momentum transfers between the constituents of the two systems. The kinetic energies of the various degrees of freedom ultimately get coupled into each other by collisions, radiative transfer (photons), lattice vibrations (phonons) and the like. In general, the kinetic energy ultimately gets distributed evenly among degrees of freedom in a system if energy is prevented from flowing into or out of a system. Thank you Stanton.

Mike Elzinga · 6 July 2008

Thermodynamics doesn’t seem too clear on what the ideas involved describe (I’m still not completely sure how the zeroth law leads to temperature),...

I occurred to me after that last post that I may have not answered the question you were asking. If you happen to be studying out of a classical thermodynamics text and have not yet penetrated into kinetic theory or statistical mechanics, then my last explanation may have included ideas that come from these latter courses (nevertheless, they should still help). The upshot of my last explanation as it relates to classical thermodynamics is that these underlying atomic and molecular ideas have manifestations at the classical and macroscopic level. For example, higher kinetic energies per degree of freedom can manifest itself in an increase in the mean distance between atoms or molecules; i.e., things (like mercury) expand. Place mercury in a narrow glass bore and most of its expansion occurs linearly along the bore; voila, a “thermometer”. There are a couple of ways to express the zeroth law: (1) systems in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other are at the same temperature (which doesn’t help much), and (2) If system A is in thermal equilibrium with system T, and if system T is in thermal equilibrium with system B, then system A is in thermal equilibrium with system B. Now, if system T is that “thermometer”, one simply places it into thermal contact with A and waits until the mercury expands to a specified point. If that “thermometer” is now placed in thermal contact with B and it expands to the same point, A and B are in thermal equilibrium, i.e., at the same “temperature”. Then it is simply a matter of scribing numbers to make a "temperature scale" along the mercury column to allow for different amounts of "hot and cold". Other “thermometers” make use of different phenomena that connect to the underlying kinetic energy per degree of freedom. Some put out a voltage, others change resistance, others change their magnetic susceptibility, others like black body radiators emit radiation of a particular distribution (hence color), and so on. But whatever device one uses for a “thermometer”, the logic of defining temperature and thermal equilibrium is the same. My apologies if the previous post jumped to far ahead.

iml8 · 6 July 2008

Torbjörn Larsson citing Dawkins: If natural selection feeds information into gene pools, what is the information about? It is about how to survive. Strictly it is about how to survive and reproduce, in the conditions that prevailed when previous generations were alive.

Very nice, Dawkins at his cutting best. I saw a citation from Berlinski about Darwinian evolution having "no memory". Of course it does, it's called "heredity". And what does it remember? See above. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Shebardigan · 6 July 2008

fixing... (hope that the somewhat less than reliable board software hasn't hidden an earlier fix)

mharri said:
Mike Elzinga said: Here again “information” is being confounded with entropy
Yeah, I guess I thought about how systems that aren't thermally insulated take on the temperature of its surroundings, and compared it to the environment shifting a population's genetic distribution. And went too far with the comparison.
The confusion is rampant and frustrating for all. However, if you remember that entropy and the laws of thermodynamics are primarily about counting blocks of energy (the enumeration of available energy states and accounting for where energy comes from and where it goes), then you start getting back onto the right track.
I really should have realized that. Thermodynamics doesn't seem too clear on what the ideas involved describe (I'm still not completely sure how the zeroth law leads to temperature), but that is pretty much the whole idea of the microcanonical ensemble: the probability, given a certain energy, of being in such-and-such position in phase space. (I have a math background, and am trying to learn physics on my own time.)

Nigel D · 7 July 2008

Yes, Mike, so how much population genetics have you studied? If you answer “a lot”, then I’ll ask you some technical questions. If you say, “not a lot”, then I’ll ask you why the heck you’re defending a theory you don’t even understand.
— Salvador T Cordova, replying to Mike,

Judging from posts in this thread alone, Sal, you are in no position to throw stones. Mike's understanding of population genetics seems to be adequate to the task at hand. Yours, however, appears to be sadly lacking. So, Sal, maybe you should try to understand MET before you try to criticize it, huh? Or is hypocrisy your stock-in-trade, just like all the DI fellows?

Nigel D · 7 July 2008

The word “entropy” is simply meant to state disorder from a more functional state.
— Salvador T Cordova

This sounds exactly as if you are trying to introduce a subjective judgement into a physical parameter. The word "entropy", when used in science, has a very specific meaning. That meaning arises from the field of thermodynamics. As a biochemist, whenever I see or use the term "entropy", it is as defined by the field of physical chemistry. There is no other use of the term. So, you have revealed the sly way in which creationists try to take scientific terminology and abuse it to justify arguments from ignorance or from personal incredulity.

Nigel D · 7 July 2008

mharri said: This is where my understanding breaks down. Is the concept of entropy best understood in biology on the biochemical level of genes?

Actually, most biochemists do not use the term "entropy". When they do wander into the territory of thermodynamics, they are usually more interested in the Gibb's free energy of a reaction (delta-G), because this is what indicates the "preferred" direction of a chemical reaction, and the way in which the reaction can be or must be coupled into the energy "economy" of the cell. In terms of genes, "entropy" has no real meaning.

Or is it best understood on the population level, where selection processes occur?

No, because the "entropy" of a population of organisms cannot be measured.

Also, another problem that has been bothering me is the following. If my understanding of thermodynamics is correct, then a change in state is not so much a decrease or increase in information, as a gradual replacement of information about the old environment by information about the new environment. Yet this seems to conflict with posts I have seen here about how important history is in understanding the evolution of a species.

I think you may have been fooled by the way in which creationists tend to bandy about terms such as "information". "Information", as a term, has different meanings according to context. In the context of physical chemistry, you will need to consult information theorists, because I really am not qualified to comment on what it means in this context. However, when you get to the level of genetics and populations, "information" can indeed be meaningful to the biologist, but still depends on context. For instance, a typical gene "contains" the information to make a protein (not counting such phenomena as multiple-germ-line genes). A protein's primary sequence (the linear order of amino-acid residues it contains) "contains" the information required for the protein to fold into its native shape (which is typically required for functionality). However, in these cases, it is not information in the everyday sense that you or I would understand intuitively (in e.g. the way a train timetable contains information). The information is instead an inevitable consequence of the laws of chemistry and physics operating upon a particular set of chemical properties. In terms of evolutionary history, the construction of a phylogenetic tree provides information about the evolutionary history of the organisms in the tree. But this does not mean that each organism "contains" information about its own evolutionary history. Each organism contains the genetic information that encodes itself. It is the relationships between organisms (i.e. phylogenies) that derive the information about the evolutionary past. Thus, the patterns of similarities and differences between organisms are what "contain" the "information" about evolutionary history. However, in this sense, the term "information" is nebulous and esoteric - it is a term of convenience only, to assist understanding. It does not have a technical definition in the context of biology.

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Nigel D said: No, because the "entropy" of a population of organisms cannot be measured.

Yeah, I was looking at that wondered: "'Entropy' of a population? Say what?" White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

iml8 · 7 July 2008

My knowledge of thermo is kind of at the 101 level -- I did
take engineering thermodynamics, but in terms of a theoretical
argument that is worthless, being practical "plug and chug"
that didn't stick anyway.

There being some clear expertise here this might be a good
occasion to learn something. In terms of classical thermo,
entropy is heat transfer divided by absolute temperature.
What Boltzmann brings to the party is a detailed underlying
statistical analysis that doesn't really change the picture
so much as it takes it down to the nitty-gritty detail level
and adds insights.

Where I really get puzzled is in information theory and
entropy. From what I can tell, it was invented as a set of
formalisms with some resemblances to thermodynamic analysis
for problems in communications and the like -- but it really
brought little or nothing to thermodynamics as such.

Of course, it is transparent that the Darwin-bashers are
milking the information-theory cow for all it's worth.
I think over at OBJECTIVE: MINISTRIES one of the "staff"
supposedly has a combined degree in divinity and information
theory.

White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

There being some clear expertise here this might be a good occasion to learn something. In terms of classical thermo, entropy is heat transfer divided by absolute temperature. What Boltzmann brings to the party is a detailed underlying statistical analysis that doesn’t really change the picture so much as it takes it down to the nitty-gritty detail level and adds insights.

Of course classical mechanics came before the details of kinetic theory and statistical mechanics were worked out and then expanded to bring in the ideas of quantum mechanics. The beauty of classical thermodynamics is that it depends only on macroscopic properties of a system (e.g., temperature, pressure, volume, resistance, magnetic susceptibility, etc.) and does not require knowledge of the microscopic details of the working medium. It makes use of partial differentials to deal with the relationships among the various macroscopic properties which are often determined empirically. On the other hand, this is also its primary weakness. Without an understanding of how microscopic details manifest themselves at the macroscopic level, the ideas often seem murky and mysterious and without motivation. Kinetic theory and statistical mechanics are used to connect the microscopic level to the macroscopic level. Kinetic theory is more detailed but harder to do actual calculations with. Statistical mechanics simplifies the calculations by using the properties of large distributions of particles, energies, and momenta to derive the macroscopic properties from the underlying microscopic behaviors. Bringing in quantum mechanics simply adds another layer of enumeration techniques that take into consideration the rules of Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics. Other than that, the statistical methods are pretty standard.

Where I really get puzzled is in information theory and entropy. From what I can tell, it was invented as a set of formalisms with some resemblances to thermodynamic analysis for problems in communications and the like – but it really brought little or nothing to thermodynamics as such.

Entropy has nothing to do with “information”. The confusion probably got started when Von Neumann came up with an expression for information that looked a lot like the Boltzmann expression for entropy (S = k_Bln(Omega)), except it had a negative sign and log to base 2. Further confusion is added when those who attempt to popularize the ideas of entropy start referring to messy rooms and disorganization (i.e., the spatial distribution of matter) as an analogy. But entropy is about the multiplicity of energy states and how they change as physical process take place. While it is sometimes the case that energy states can be associated with “positions” of matter (e.g., “orbitals” in atoms), in general the distribution of matter is a misleading way to think of entropy. When looking at thermodynamics from the microscopic perspective, all energy channels must be accounted for, including those that carry energy away (such as photons, phonons, particles, etc.). What one learns from this is why the second law holds; energy gets carried to places where it gets dissipated by scattering, absorption, or by simply going off to infinity. It can’t “turn around” and come back; the process is irreversible. Certainly those of us who try to defend science must put more effort into clearing up the deliberated confusions introduced by the ID/Creationists. We can start by not adopting the confounding of entropy, information, and order and clarifying our own uses of these concepts. Entropy is not information is not order. Keep the concepts clearly separated even when the mathematical formulas look similar. Matter falling into patterns is not decreasing entropy. There are underlying physical processes in which energy is being dissipated as this happens. Thermodynamics is the bookkeeping of energy, not of information or organization. There are plenty of abuses of terminology out there. The ID/Creationists love this kind of confusion.

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: Kinetic theory and statistical mechanics are used to connect the microscopic level to the macroscopic level.

That's kind of what I was thinking. Sort like the way that kinetic theory of gases details the combined gas law.

Entropy has nothing to do with “information”.

HANG on ... this is where the confusion comes in, since from Shannon on the term was incorporated into information theory. From what I can see, Shannon simply thought it was a convenient handle and never intended to link his work to thermodynamics in any serious way. It seems that entropy in terms of information theory can be regarded in practical terms as equivalent to saying: what is the maximum theoretical non-lossy compression of a data file (or, absolutely equivalently, a message over a communications channel)? Now the idea of linking this to, say, the efficiency of heat engines gives me a headache. Also from what I've seen, whether there actually is any connection between the information theory concept of entropy and its usage in thermodynamics is hotly (no pun intended) disputed. I suspect Shannon never realized how much trouble his usage would cause.

Thermodynamics is the bookkeeping of energy, not of information or organization.

From my elementary engineering viewpoint of the matter, that makes perfect sense in the analysis of heat engines and their natural analogues -- fun stuff. There's no need to even have too much of a clue about Boltzmann to follow such arguments. I get the impression that even working at that coarse level gives enough to ask a Darwin-basher: "So what does the necessary increase of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature have to do with evolutionary theory?" However, this would be asking a lunatic fringer a question, which is always a mistake, since they will give you answer for as long as you can stand to listen to it. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

HANG on … this is where the confusion comes in, since from Shannon on the term was incorporated into information theory. From what I can see, Shannon simply thought it was a convenient handle and never intended to link his work to thermodynamics in any serious way.

One has to be careful about what is being talked about here. In signal processing, one can transform signal voltages (potential energy per unit charge) to a Fourier transform domain in which the square of the frequency distribution of the signal can be analyzed in terms of its energy content as a function of frequency (This relates to Parseval’s Theorem). In that domain, one can begin accounting for added noise, energy loses, and the remaining signal components in terms of where the energy resides along the frequency spectrum. So it is not out of line to associate entropy with information theory, but proper use requires we be talking about energy if we want to use the laws of thermodynamics. If bits can be equated with energy, then we are still talking about energy and the mechanisms by which energy gets parsed, accumulated, and dissipated. It is important to recall that many of the concepts in electromagnetic theory are referring to energy and energy rates. But the gradual increase in sloppiness that occurs if people don’t keep the ideas clear in their minds leads to associating entropy with “information” contained in an arrangement of matter.

Henry J · 7 July 2008

It is important to recall that many of the concepts in electromagnetic theory are referring to energy and energy rates.

Yeah, and the number of bits needed to describe the energy state of a DNA molecule is way larger than the number of bits needed to describe the sequences of bases in that molecule. Henry

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

Yeah, and the number of bits needed to describe the energy state of a DNA molecule is way larger than the number of bits needed to describe the sequences of bases in that molecule.

:-) Bingo!

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: One has to be careful about what is being talked about here. In signal processing, one can transform signal voltages (potential energy per unit charge) to a Fourier transform domain in which the square of the frequency distribution of the signal can be analyzed in terms of its energy content as a function of frequency (This relates to Parseval’s Theorem). In that domain, one can begin accounting for added noise, energy loses, and the remaining signal components in terms of where the energy resides along the frequency spectrum.

' So there is a connection, but it's pretty tenuous if the term "entropy" is being used to effectively refer to the minimim compressed size of a file. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

iml8 said:
Mike Elzinga said: One has to be careful about what is being talked about here. In signal processing, one can transform signal voltages (potential energy per unit charge) to a Fourier transform domain in which the square of the frequency distribution of the signal can be analyzed in terms of its energy content as a function of frequency (This relates to Parseval’s Theorem). In that domain, one can begin accounting for added noise, energy loses, and the remaining signal components in terms of where the energy resides along the frequency spectrum.
' So there is a connection, but it's pretty tenuous if the term "entropy" is being used to effectively refer to the minimim compressed size of a file. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

If the minimum size of the file can somehow be related to the energy required to make it, then one can make a connection. The connection with energy will often be related to a frequency spectrum which, in turn, gives hints about where energy goes (i.e., the "channels: by which energy enters and leaves the system). I suspect that if this is done, one will ultimately discover that energy is dissipated in compressing a file in a manner analogous to what happens when atoms condence into regular arrays. You get a file that is simpler to describe (fewer bits) at the expense of dissipating energy. Again, the distinction between "order" or "information" and energy must be maintained. For example, losses or gains at particular frequencies point to "resonant coupling" perhaps caused by capacitive or inductive coupling. However, once one gets to this level of file compression, it becomes more appropriate to use terms that don't prompt people to attribute what is being done to the laws of thermodynamics. There are other concepts that are better used for comparing patterns and for pattern recognition.

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: However, once one gets to this level of file compression, it becomes more appropriate to use terms that don't prompt people to attribute what is being done to the laws of thermodynamics. There are other concepts that are better used for comparing patterns and for pattern recognition.

The problem is that information theorists still use the term. From what I know about Kolmogorov-Chaitin entropy -- as per Mark Chu-Carroll -- the only considerations in the calculation of a value for the entropy are the minimum size of the file given a particular compression scheme, plus the size of the programs needed to perform compression or decompression. There may be a connection to energetics but nothing in the scheme as described establishes it, and nothing in the scheme suggests the information theorists are attempting to establish such a connection. My major concern is being able to say that this particular definition of entropy (or those similar to it) has nothing to do with thermodynamic entropy, and I am now more confident that is the case. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html compression scheme

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

There may be a connection to energetics but nothing in the scheme as described establishes it, and nothing in the scheme suggests the information theorists are attempting to establish such a connection.

Yeah. And once a tradition gets started in a legitimate area of research, it becomes almost impossible to buck it. This is partly due to the proliferation of disciplines and the specialized language that comes from increased isolation from other areas. People begin using terms in ways that have completely different meanings to others in other disciplines. Then when someone tries to work across disciplines, one has to develop a type of schizophrenia to keep jargon separated. It becomes the perfect opportunity for exploitation by charlatans bent of confusing the public. You then get things like "genetic entropy". Barf!

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: It becomes the perfect opportunity for exploitation by charlatans bent of confusing the public. You then get things like "genetic entropy". Barf!

Yeah, I got into the Amazon listing for John Sanford's book of that title and, reading the comments and reviews, pretty quickly figured out it was "there ain't no such thing as a constructive mutation." Deja moo. There was also a bit of "monkeys & typewriters" in it, that there was no way random changes in a "message being sent over a communications channel" could improve the message. Sigh, let's ignore selection ... It did have a point. Once selection goes away, genes almost inevitably break. But this is observed: "Give me back my vitamin C gene!" White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Henry J · 7 July 2008

People begin using terms in ways that have completely different meanings to others in other disciplines.

Like when mathematicians decided that i = sqrt(-1), but electrical engineers were already using i for something else so they decided (iirc) to use j for sqrt(-1), rather than change their (already established) usage of i? (Although I've forgotten what they use it for.) Henry

Mike Elzinga · 7 July 2008

Henry J said:
People begin using terms in ways that have completely different meanings to others in other disciplines.
Like when mathematicians decided that i = sqrt(-1), but electrical engineers were already using i for something else so they decided (iirc) to use j for sqrt(-1), rather than change their (already established) usage of i? (Although I've forgotten what they use it for.) Henry

Electrical engineers use i for instantaneous current. Physicists use j (actually the vector j) for instantaneous current density, i.e., current per unit cross-sectional area.

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Henry J said: Like when mathematicians decided that i = sqrt(-1), but electrical engineers were already using i for something else so they decided (iirc) to use j for sqrt(-1), rather than change their (already established) usage of i? (Although I've forgotten what they use it for.)

CURRENT! When you're doing phasor analysis (circuit analysis involving phased current-voltage relationships) you use complex arithmetic and using "i" for both current and SQRT(-1) would be impossible. It's sort of a running gag between the math folks and the EEs, doesn't really cause any problems though. Sigh, I believe Walt Remine's an EE. Don't blame me. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html The old "i" versus "j"

iml8 · 7 July 2008

Another eccentricity of EEs is that current flows from "+"
to "-" when (as a strong but not invariant rule) it's the
other way around. Ben Franklin could have guessed either
way and he lost the toss.

White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

I don’t know if mharri is still lurking here or is still interested in how a temperature scale is obtained from the zeroth law, but I thought of another point about temperature scales that I neglected to mention. I had said in a previous comment

Then it is simply a matter of scribing numbers to make a “temperature scale” along the mercury column to allow for different amounts of “hot and cold”.

Another important feature needed by a “temperature scale” is that the temperature readings must be either a monotonically increasing or a monotonically decreasing function of the physical behavior of the system being used as a thermometer over the range for which this behavior is to be used as a thermometer. It doesn’t have to be linear (in fact, many temperature scales aren’t), but the monotonic property is essential. The monotonically increasing or decreasing function assures that two different thermodynamic states of the system being used as a thermometer are not represented by the same “temperature reading” on the scale. If a thermodynamic property being used to construct a temperature scale begins to reverse itself as the internal energy changes, then one simply restricts the use of the thermometer to the range where it is monotonic. Such behavior can occur if a competing phenomenon within the system overcomes another phenomenon. For example, the resistance of a semiconductor device can be affected by the number of charge carriers that become available as the internal energy changes but also by the mobility of these charge carriers as lattice vibrations (phonons) collide with them. Both of these processes are energy dependent and can compete. Another property is sensitivity. One would like the thermodynamic property to be easily detected and “measured” by the “temperature scale”. Choosing and calibrating thermometers is a challenging area. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has a whole division devoted to this, covering ranges all the way from near absolute zero to thousands of degrees. Most of us who have worked in areas requiring good thermometry have had to learn how to bridge gaps whenever the temperatures we have to work with extend over large ranges. This has been off topic, so I should probably quit.

Salvador T. Cordova · 8 July 2008

There are 200 million speciation “events” currently in process

Gentleman, I'm really here to help you all teach the non-Controversy over Darwinism. Can you help me persuade the creationists by giving me ammunition to answer simple questions. If there are 200 million speciation events in process, there ought to be some confirmed cases of natural seleciton causing a speciation in the last 20 years. Can any of you give 4 examples of confirmed, observed speciations where we saw the process from start to finish? I mean, were the changes in Finch beak sizes and example of speciation? How about the Peppered Myth. Are those black moths brand-spanking-new species? How about Lenski's E-coli strains, are they new species? Consider Margulis observation:

I once asked the eloquent and personable paleontologist Niles Eldredge whether he knew of any case in which the formation of a new species had been documented. I told him I'd be satisfied if his example were drawn from the laboratory, from the field, or from observations from the fossil record. He could muster only one good example. Theodosius Dobzhansky's experiments with Drosophila, the fruit fly. In this fascinating experiment, populations of fruit flies, bred at progressively hotter temperatures, became genetically separated. After two years or so the hot-bred ones bould no longer produce fertile offspring with their cold-breeding brethren. "But," Eldredge quickly added, "that turned out to have something to do with a parasite!" Indeed, it was later discovered that the hot-breeding flies lacked an intracellular symbiotic bacterium found in the cold breeders. Eldredge dismissed this case as an observation of speciation because it entailed a microbial symbiosis! He had been taught, as we all have, that microbes are germs, and when you have germs, you have a disease, not a new species. And he had been taught that evolution through natural selection occurs by the gradual accumulation, over eons, of single gene mutations... From the long view of geological time, symbioses are like flashes of evolutionary lightning. To me symbioses as a source of evolutionary novelty helps explain the observation of "punctuated equilibrium," of discontinuities in the fossil record. [Margulis, Symbiotic Planet 7-8]

Oops. It appears Darwin doesn't have data to back his theory of the origin of species. So, does any one have data to back this up. How about 4 believable examples to pass on to my creationist brethren. They might find you more credible for doing so. Perhaps if you all spent more time giving beleivable evidence, you won't have to fight the creationists any more.... Look, most creationists believe in gravity....no need to fight them in court over that. Just make the case for Darwinism more believable as gravity, and you'll have less headaches..... So how about it folks? Examples of the observed origin of species via natural selection in the wild or in the lab. Surely if Darwin and Wallace's theories are as obvious as gravity, you should have a few incontestable empirical example... Anyone have any observed speciation examples to cite for the benefit of the edcators trying to teach Darwinism? Anyone? ANYONE? Bueller?

Salvador T. Cordova · 8 July 2008

This was Darwin's conception of speciation:

In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale Charles Darwin

Do we have empirical evidence suggesting there is no difficulty in transforming a bear into a whale? :-) Is this any more fantastic than the idea of a cow-like creature becoming a whale? First of all cows eat grass, not insects like the bear, nor do cows eat crustaceans like real whales..... Do you all really thing birds evolved from fish and horses from amphibians?

Nigel D · 8 July 2008

iml8 said: Another eccentricity of EEs is that current flows from "+" to "-" when (as a strong but not invariant rule) it's the other way around. ...

Actually, this rule only applies in metals and n-type semiconductors. Although I suppose you could argue that it also applies to p-type semiconductors. Currents passing through aqueous solutions are carried by ions, so you typically have a flow of cations from + to - and anions from - to +. Then you have nerve and muscle cells, that transmit electrical impulses (involving short-term currents) using only +ve ions. In nerve cells, this is typically Na+ and K+, whereas in muscle cells it is typically Ca++.

Nigel D · 8 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: Gentleman, I'm really here to help you all teach the non-Controversy over Darwinism.

Don't suspect, Sal, that anyone here actually believes this.

Can you help me persuade the creationists by giving me ammunition to answer simple questions.

Been there, done that, bored now.

If there are 200 million speciation events in process, there ought to be some confirmed cases of natural selection causing a speciation in the last 20 years.

Why ought there? You really are betraying your ignorance of biology. First, the term "species" is a human contrivance. It does not reflect any intrinsic property of nature. Second, as has been pointed out to you already, speciation "events" can only be identified retrospectively. The reasons for this are several, but consider this example: Anagenesis is the process whereby a species gradually changes so that, eventually, its members are clearly identifiable as a distinct species from their forebears. Throughout this process, change is gradual, and the process takes many generations (in most cases, I estimate >1000 generations will be required). Somewhere upon this continuum of change, you are trying to impose a line that says "speciation event". This is not possible, since the individuals in adjacent generations will always be more similar on average than the variation within each generation. In short, Sal, your question really is impertinent, irrelevant and pointless.

Can any of you give 4 examples of confirmed, observed speciations where we saw the process from start to finish?

There is a page on Talk Origins that lists documented speciations. However, don't go there expecting to find start-to-finish vertebrate speciation "events", because these invariably take a long time. Perhaps, if you are genuinely interested, you should start raising funds to set up a set of observations of several species over several thousand years, so that your descendants will be able one day to look back and say "See! Documented proof of observed speciations from start to finish!". Besides, do you know any creationists that are actually prepared to be swayed by actual evidence? No, neither do I.

I mean, were the changes in Finch beak sizes and example of speciation?

Again you illustrate your lack of comprehension. The short answer is: upon one island, no, since beak size changes back and forth from generation to generation according to the abundance of different food types; but from island to island, yes. However, the finch species diverged from one another before Darwin ever got there.

How about the Peppered Myth. Are those black moths brand-spanking-new species?

No, as you well know, but appear to be denying. The Peppered moth is a good example of polymorphism and of NS in action shaping a population.

How about Lenski's E-coli strains, are they new species?

Some commentators consider them so. It all depends on how one defines a species of bacterium.

Consider Margulis['] observation: [snip] Oops. It appears Darwin doesn't have data to back his theory of the origin of species.

Er, well, yes, he does. Just because Eldredge could not cite a start-to-finish documented speciation event, it does not follow that this is any failure for MET. You are obviously unwilling or unable to delve into the subtle relationships between the various strands of evidence, and see the proverbial big picture.

So, does any one have data to back this up.

Oh, plenty. (1) We know that artificial selection produces large morphological changes in very short time spans (less than 20,000 years in all cases). (2) We know that, in nature, selection occurs by the death of part of each generation of every population of organisms, and that this is directly parallel to the artificial selection practiced by humans. (3) We know that, over the short time span of a research grant, natural selection causes changes in populations of organisms (morphological, biochemical or whatever). (4) There is no known or hypothesised mechanism that can prevent small changes accumulating, over time, into large changes. (5) Universal common descent has been proved beyond reasonable doubt. (6) The fossil record shows thousands of examples of clear transitional forms (Archaeopteryx, Sinopteryx, Ventastega, Ambulocetus, etc. etc. etc.). (7) Fossilisation is a rare event, and transitional forms are fleeting, so it is unreasonable to expect to identify specific transitions (by which I mean species-to-species changes - most of the transitional forms illustrate transition from one family to another, or from one order to another, but they are no less powerful evidence for all that).

How about 4 believable examples to pass on to my creationist brethren.

What evidence would a creobot believe?

They might find you more credible for doing so.

The evidence is there in the public domain if you care to look, Sal. Start at Talk Origins. There are many useful essays, especially the one by Doug Theobald (sp?), where he elegantly summarises the evidence for common descent. But why should jumping through your hoops make me any more credible to a creationist, Sal? My expertise is in biochemistry and protein science. The only creationist of whom I have heard with specialist knowledge that comes anywhere close to this is Mike Behe, and his acceptance of universal common descent makes many creationists reject him. I can't suddenly make evidence that will convince someone against their indoctrination. Where do you stand, Sal? Do you agree with Behe that the evidence for common descent is overwhelming? Do you agree with him that life on Earth is about 4 billion years old? If not, how long do you think life has existed on Earth, and why? What alternative explanation do you suggest for the patterns of similarity and difference that we find in nature?

Perhaps if you all spent more time giving beleivable evidence, you won't have to fight the creationists any more....

It's all a question of viewing the evidence without preconceptions, Sal. No-one can override another person's indoctrination or preconceptions unless that person wishes to change.

Look, most creationists believe in gravity....no need to fight them in court over that. Just make the case for Darwinism more believable as gravity, and you'll have less headaches.....

Actually, the evidence for evolution is better than the evidence supporting our theories of gravity. General relativity (IIUC) has trouble at the very small scale, because it comes into conflict with quantum mechanics. The major difference is that gravity is a phenomenon that fits everyone's preconceptions, and reality bites you if you disagree. Speciation typically occurs over many generations, so it is not commonly observed during a human lifetime. However, those individuals who do take the trouble to examine the evidence of the natural world find themselves inevitable concurring with the biologists.

So how about it folks? Examples of the observed origin of species via natural selection in the wild or in the lab. Surely if Darwin and Wallace's theories are as obvious as gravity, you should have a few incontestable empirical example...

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html Took me all of a minute to find this. There's more than this one essay there, too.

Nigel D · 8 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: ... Is this any more fantastic than the idea of a cow-like creature becoming a whale? First of all cows eat grass, not insects like the bear, nor do cows eat crustaceans like real whales.....

Cklassic argument from personal incredulity. It won't wash, Sal, you need to come up with facts.

Do you all really thing birds evolved from fish and horses from amphibians?

Not in the sense you are implying, no. However, the first true vertebrates possessed characteristics that cause us to classify them as fish, although they resemble modern fish only in certain ways. All other vertebrates are descended from them, including birds, amphibians, horses and us. Similarly, all land vertebrates are descended from something that possessed characteristics that would cause us to classify it as an amphibian, although it resembles a modern amphibian only in certain ways. This is all proven beyond reasonable doubt, Sal. You have been shown this before, yet you persist in denying it. At the same time, you cannot come up with an alternative.

iml8 · 8 July 2008

Nigel D said: Actually, this rule only applies in metals and n-type semiconductors. Although I suppose you could argue that it also applies to p-type semiconductors. Not in electrical engineering. A hole in semiconductors is the absence of an electron in an energy band. It is a "virtual" positive charge. Think of a flat tray filled with ball bearings representing an energy band. Yank out a few ball bearings and the "hole" in the layer of ball bearings will propagate in the opposite direction of the motion of the ball bearings. It's only slightly less a fiction than than the convention of "+" to "-". This is a p-type semiconductor, dope silicon with boron and you get the effect. In an n-type semiconductor it's like tossing a few spare ball bearings on the layer -- the analogy is actually pretty good since the mobility of these "charge carriers" is much better than that of holes. Dope silicon with phosphorus and you get the n-type same effect.
Currents passing through aqueous solutions are carried by ions, so you typically have a flow of cations from + to - and anions from - to +.
Yes, not an invariant rule even in EE. Positive ion flows take place in gas-filled tubes like fluorescents. This is why they tend to get this blacked-off appearance at the ends -- positive ion bombardment near the electrodes. Similarly batteries have a two-way charge transfer. But in the end, in electrical circuit analysis we EEs are bass-ackwards. WAY OT, sorry people. But at least educational ... White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Eric Finn said: Very often, a scientific theory is a collection hypotheses, each of which can be verified individually. A theory typically unites a range of observations in a comprehensible manner. The main purpose of any scientific theory is to present patterns that alleviates the need to count all the observations (my definition).

I too agree, with what you said in your comment. I would amend that to an interdependent set of hypotheses though, with a boundary identified by some process and its definition. Case in point would be gravitation theories, elementary particle theory, QM theory (quantum processes), evolution theory, ... Hmm. I still think the main effect (or purpose, in agent speak) of a theory is to present a means to test whether explanatory mechanisms are wrong. The main effect of a mechanism would be something along the lines you propose. Then again, it is an effect of theories to spawn ideas for new experiment and theory. I'll have to think about this...

Eric Finn said: Historically, scientific theories tend to be rather persistent. They are not abandoned until a better one is at sight. They are used even when problems have already been identified. On the other hand, no scientist is claiming that any theory represents the absolute truth.

Agreed. But if you follow Popper's logic, each accepted change of a theory would be a new theory, because you rejected the old. Say when you change the value of the gravitational constant. It's when mechanisms change that it gets iffy. Todays evolution theory isn't the same as the initial, but the initial mechanisms wasn't abandoned. (Well, I believe selection was, for a time, testing or no testing.) But scientists are aware of these things of course. It is worse when you start to interrogate new areas, it can be very difficult to ascertain their experimental status for an outsider. Maybe that was why psychoanalysis was entertained for so long. Now so with Darwin's theories. It was the genius of the man to thoroughly ascertain what experimental validity was possible at the time from the get go. And that is in my eyes why we celebrate him today!

iml8 · 8 July 2008

Nigel D said: Actually, this rule only applies in metals and n-type semiconductors. Although I suppose you could argue that it also applies to p-type semiconductors.

Not really. A "hole" is the absence of an electron, a "virtual" positive charge. Imagine a flat tray neatly filled wil ball bearings as an energy band. Yank out a few ball bearings and the "holes" left behind will propagate in the opposite direction to the motion of the ball bearings. This is a p-type semiconductor, dope silicon with boron and you get the effect. In an n-type semiconductor -- phosphorus and silicon -- it's like tossing a few spare ball bearings on top of the layer. This is a pretty good model, BTW, since the mobility of the charge carriers is better than it is for holes.

Currents passing through aqueous solutions are carried by ions, so you typically have a flow of cations from + to - and anions from - to +.

Correct, like I said, a strong but not invariant rule. In batteries you have currents going in both directions. Same as in gas-filled tubes like fluorescents. This is why fluorescents tend to get "blacked out" at the ends -- positive ion bombardment around the electrodes. However, in general we EEs do things bass-ackwards. OK, way OT, sorry, but at least there's some substance here. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

sparc · 8 July 2008

This is all proven beyond reasonable doubt, Sal. You have been shown this before, yet you persist in denying it. At the same time, you cannot come up with an alternative.

Don't forget that Sal has access to a written report about how all species have been designed in a single day. BTW Sal, seems like youngcosmos is not running well and you have to find other places to find relief: No blog post since June 24. The last comment on June 30 was written by John A. Davison (sic). Like two of the other ten comments appear in your blog's sidebar. Three others came from Rude and the rest had to be written by yourself. Must be quite frustrating. But why the hell do you have to masturbate publicly here?

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

mharri said: Yeah, I guess I thought about how systems that aren't thermally insulated take on the temperature of its surroundings, and compared it to the environment shifting a population's genetic distribution. And went too far with the comparison.

Don't be too hard on yourself. J. Maynard Smith had a chapter on "The Statistical Mechanics of Populations" in his "Models in Ecology" (1975 reprint). He does point out that what other researchers do is an analogy, and he does rely on original (but simplified) predator-prey (PP) DEs, but he also describes the difficult as the difference between conservative (TD) systems and non-conservative (PP) systems. Naively I think Mike Elzinga's warning is more on target - what variables are we dealing with here, what is the statistical ensemble? But anyway we cut it, here we are 30 years later, and ∅ resulted.

Henry J · 8 July 2008

Aren't whales closer to hippopotamus than to bears?

iml8 · 8 July 2008

Henry J said: Aren't whales closer to hippopotamus than to bears?

A hippo is closer to a whale than it is to a cow. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: In some cases, researchers can attribute several temperatures to the constituents of a thermodynamic system by selectively referring to each degree of freedom. Usually they do this when the system is far from equilibrium.

A typical case is ambipolar diffusion in plasmas where electrons and ions have different temperatures. As electrons preferentially leak out at the boundaries, due to different mass (mobility), they will be retained in smaller numbers by the ions positive charges. Moving along with the ions, but still "hot" as they have no way to equilibrate. Another more common case is crystals, where electrons in the conduction bands can have different temperatures than the lattice, say when you accelerate the electrons by applying an electric potential to a metal or semiconductor. When your computer goes hot, the electrons are hot! Um, like 10-20 kK, IIRC; I'm too lazy to figure it out today. But see Sze "Physics of Semiconductor Devices". And low temperature cooling IIRC. It is often easier to cool the atom nucleus than the electron cloud, by using spin coupling.

iml8 · 8 July 2008

Torbjörn Larsson, OM said: Todays evolution theory isn't the same as the initial, but the initial mechanisms wasn't abandoned. (Well, I believe selection was, for a time, testing or no testing.) But scientists are aware of these things of course.

Very much along the lines of the fact that a modern A330 jetliner isn't the same as the Wright Flyer. Could the Wrights have built an A330? No. Were there a lot of false steps and dead ends between the Wrights and the A330? Yes. Were the Wrights on the wrong track? No. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

Then again, it is an effect of theories to spawn ideas for new experiment and theory. I’ll have to think about this…

Good theories change perspectives and generate productive questions and fruitful lines of research. One often sees this in the flurry of active research and rapid progress that occurs once such a breakthrough in insight occurs. It’s the rewarding part of research that comes after a period of puzzlement and frustration; the “Ah-Ha moment”. And then there follows long periods of routine development and elaboration.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

iml8 said: "So what does the necessary increase of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature have to do with evolutionary theory?"

I've seen that definition many times, but it isn't quite correct. See "Thermal Physics" by Morse for some classical derivations and definitions of entropy. The best definition is directly coupled to the second law: "Entropy is a measure of the unavailability of heat energy." (p 58). Then of course it turns out that the change in S, dS is bounded by the above measure, dS ≥ dQ/T. The equality sign, and your definition, is only valid for reversible processes. Perhaps you mean that the necessary (minimum) increase in entropy is dQ/T? But it still seems clunky or off point to me... Also, note that dQ is an improper differential, which is another expression of the potential for irreversibility by losses in heat transfer.

Mike Elzinga said: However, once one gets to this level of file compression, it becomes more appropriate to use terms that don't prompt people to attribute what is being done to the laws of thermodynamics. There are other concepts that are better used for comparing patterns and for pattern recognition.

My take on it is exemplified right there - if energy and entropy (see above) are absolute measures, and information is a measure that is relative to the system, the chosen observer and the chosen information measure, what is the general connection between these two? AFAIU: none.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: Good theories change perspectives and generate productive questions and fruitful lines of research.

What goes without saying, as a proverb that goes without saying says. :-P But yes, one needs to be careful in definitional descriptions (my "... main purpose..."). Btw, that also pertains to good methods all by themselves. So what looks like routine from the perspective of a theory can mean a lot of good data collection. IIRC Terence Tao (?) described his cycle of a few rapid and easy method papers (i.e. he had learned or developed a new math method to explore an area) and then a more difficult theory paper.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: How about Lenski's E-coli strains, are they new species?

I answered you on this the very other day. Really, what are you doing here if you have nothing to argue, and don't want to learn?

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said: Do we have empirical evidence suggesting there is no difficulty in transforming a bear into a whale? :-) Is this any more fantastic than the idea of a cow-like creature becoming a whale? First of all cows eat grass, not insects like the bear, nor do cows eat crustaceans like real whales.....

Yes, todays bear can't transform to todays whale. Yes, it is conceivable that during some circumstances a bear population can transform into a new species. Even in the far future some of its descendant species transforming into a whale like creature. But it won't have the exact same traits as todays whales, which derives from your "cow-like creature" way back (and we woulnd't call it a whale). Um, the suspected ancestors pakicetids looked more like "dogs with hoofed feet and long, thick tails". You see, todays traits constrain tomorrows, as well as the contingency of pathways means that we can't predict if, when and how speciation occurs. But a firm prediction besides that speciation happens is that no unrelated biological species will precisely acquire all the traits of another. What happens during speciation is evidently environmentally contingent modifications of species separating traits, not a search for exact convergence by addition and/or loss of traits. And creationist exact convergence by contingency by well separated species is quite as unlikely as a 747 suddenly assembling from a junkyard by a sudden gust of wind.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 8 July 2008

Nigel D said:
Look, most creationists believe in gravity....no need to fight them in court over that. Just make the case for Darwinism more believable as gravity, and you'll have less headaches.....
Actually, the evidence for evolution is better than the evidence supporting our theories of gravity. General relativity (IIUC) has trouble at the very small scale, because it comes into conflict with quantum mechanics. The major difference is that gravity is a phenomenon that fits everyone's preconceptions, and reality bites you if you disagree.

You can say that again. Try to take the typical science denialist like a creationist, and describe black hole physics of gravity. If they don't already deny relativity by claiming that Earth is 6 ka, like IIRC YEC Cordova, they certainly will when you describe clocks in black holes. And travel into black holes stands for exactly the same kind of irreversibility in the here and now like speciation stands for. The difference is that speciation more easily fits everyday preconceptions. Except for reality denialists, who are equal time science deniers. I think that creationists "believe" in the fact of gravity as much as they "believe" in the fact of species. It is the processes of gravitation respectively speciation (evolution) they can't cope with, and even less comprehend that we can make science (theories) as it is yet another process. They are frozen in time. (Say, 2 ky back.) Cordova misrepresents science denial as much as he misrepresents science. Why am I not surprised?

hamstrung · 8 July 2008

" Yes, todays bear can’t transform to todays whale. "

why not? how do you know there is a barrier?

Shebardigan · 8 July 2008

hamstrung said: why not?

Note to moderators/proprietors: Seriously, honestly, based upon more than two decades of experience with the dynamics of electronic discussion forums, I state that failure to apply adequate amounts of insecticide early in the infestation cycle results in a formerly useful and congenial gathering point being converted into the equivalent of the iconic Old West ghost town with tumbleweeds pirouetting down Main Street. PLEASE enforce your own policies and hose these noxious critters into the nearest storm drain.

PvM · 8 July 2008

Did you read what was actually written. Sigh...

hamstrung said: " Yes, todays bear can’t transform to todays whale. " why not? how do you know there is a barrier?

iml8 · 8 July 2008

PvM said: Did you read what was actually written. Sigh...
hamstrung said: " Yes, todays bear can’t transform to todays whale. " why not? how do you know there is a barrier?

WHOA. "My cousin can't be my great-great grandmother." "Why not?" OK, my sarcasm is used up. I can't top this. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

WHOA. “My cousin can’t be my great-great grandmother.”

However, if you play it right, you can be your “own grandpa”. It looks like hambone here thinks this is biologically possible.

iml8 · 8 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: It looks like hambone here thinks this is biologically possible.

Comments about "severe inbreeding" come to mind but I will be on my good behavior. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

Btw, that also pertains to good methods all by themselves.

:-) I think you are one of the very few persons I have ever heard articulate that. It is such a subtle idea that, even if people are aware of it, they don’t know how to express it; or how to explain it. It’s one of those things that “gets into the bones” but doesn’t often manifest itself in articulate consciousness. Almost like kinesthesia or "muscle memory", or a blind intuition of where to go.

Science Avenger · 8 July 2008

Salvador T. Cordova said:
There are 200 million speciation “events” currently in process
Gentleman, I'm really here to help you all teach the non-Controversy over Darwinism. Can you help me persuade the creationists by giving me ammunition to answer simple questions. If there are 200 million speciation events in process, there ought to be some confirmed cases of natural seleciton causing a speciation in the last 20 years. Can any of you give 4 examples of confirmed, observed speciations where we saw the process from start to finish?

Yeah, and while you are at it, I'd like you to help me persuade the mountainists that your geological theories are correct. So, if there are thousands of mountain range creation events in process, there ought to be some confirmed cases of geology causing a mountain in the last 100 years. Can any of you give 4 examples of confirmed, observed mountainings where we saw the process from start to finish? And help me persuade the blackandwhitists that your color theories are correct. Since you claim to be able to discern "blue" from "green", surely you must be able to give me the precise wavelength that separates blue from green. It's a very basic part of your theory, and you ought to be able to state it with mathematical precision. And help me persuade the Starists about your stellar theories. You claim there are billions and billions of stars being created out there, so why can't you show us even one example of that process from start to finish? And about this supposed aging process, when, EXACTLY, does one become "old"? Why don't you all agree?

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

if energy and entropy (see above) are absolute measures, and information is a measure that is relative to the system, the chosen observer and the chosen information measure, …

I would offer a cautionary note here. One can indeed refer to relative changes in entropy. Recall that entropy is about the number of available energy states (S = k_Bln (Omega)), often referred to as the “multiplicity of energy states”. A good example comes from adiabatic demagnetization, which is often used for cooling into the microkelvin ranges. Here one puts “constraints” on a magnetic material by aligning its magnetic domains in a magnetic field. This reduces the number of available magnetic energy states. After the system is further cooled by extracting energy from this system (usually by conduction, i.e., phonons), one cuts off the path for any energy to enter or leave the system (hence adiabatic) and then carefully removes the magnetic “constraints” by removing the magnetic field. The magnetic domains can now align more randomly, in other words, the number of available energy states (degrees of freedom) has increased, and the remaining total energy is distributed among these additional states; the temperature (average kinetic energy per degree of freedom) drops. Then momentum transfers to any attached experimental system drops so that the attached experimental system cools also by momentum transfers toward the colder demagnetized material. Entropy has increased relative to where it was when you started with the applied magnetic field, but now the temperature is lower. There are many, many other examples that can be given (e.g., the ice cream maker, the formation of crystals, etc.). One can also talk about relative “simplicity” or “complexity” or “information content” when comparing before and after conditions in studying organization or spatial arrangements of matter. But this is not thermodynamics. (I am now beginning to hear “simplexity”!; WTF? What next; “complicity”?)

… what is the general connection between these two? AFAIU: none.

Yes; keep the concepts of entropy, order, and information separate. Use separate words if you have to, or at least openly acknowledge the schizophrenic use of the term “entropy”. But do not connect thermodynamics and the second law to “organization” just because the term “entropy” is used. That trick probably got started with Henry Morris and Duane Gish and has spread like a deadly virus ever since. If it ain’t counting energy it ain’t thermodynamics, and a big red flag should go up.

Henry J · 8 July 2008

See “Thermal Physics” by Morse for some classical derivations and definitions of entropy. The best definition is directly coupled to the second law: “Entropy is a measure of the unavailability of heat energy.” (p 58).

Ergo, using energy will waste some of it. Henry p.s. - saved by the preview!

Mike Elzinga · 8 July 2008

Henry J said:
See “Thermal Physics” by Morse for some classical derivations and definitions of entropy. The best definition is directly coupled to the second law: “Entropy is a measure of the unavailability of heat energy.” (p 58).
Ergo, using energy will waste some of it. Henry p.s. - saved by the preview!

1st law: You can't win 2nd law: You can't break even 3rd Law: You can't get out of the game.

Nigel D · 9 July 2008

(I am now beginning to hear “simplexity”!; WTF? What next; “complicity”?)
— Mike Elzinga

Mike, I think these are related in the same way that susceptance is related to susceptibility... ;-)

Nigel D · 9 July 2008

You know, all this discussion of entropy and thermodynamics is making my brain dribble out through my ears. Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before, and getting into arcane regions of calculus. There's a reason I stopped doing physical chemistry after my second undergrad year (although I have to admit that the consequences of thermo theories are very useful in normal organic chemistry - e.g. if I want to make that reaction happen instead of this one, should I heat it or chill it or subject it to high pressure?).

Stanton · 9 July 2008

Still, Nigel, if Mr Cordova attempts to mention that moronic chestnut of how "the second law of thermodynamics forbids evolution," would it be possible if you could verbally eviscerate him from head to toe? I mean, if Mr Cordova is dense and dim enough to make the head-stuck-in-the-sand assumption that people still think that whales evolved from bears even though fossil evidence now shows that bears first appear in the fossil record 5 to 20 million years after whales became totally aquatic marine predators, and that the first mesonychids were described as creodonts, later removed from Creodonta to be placed in their own order, "Acreodi," have the order renamed as "Mesonychia," have the family Mesonychidae split into three, Mesonychidae, Triisodontidae, and Hapalodectidae, and have several genera removed from Mesonychia because they were reidentified as being primitive whales, I mean, honestly, is it wrong of me to think that Mr. Cordova had surgical help in becoming that malevolently stupid.

Nigel D said: You know, all this discussion of entropy and thermodynamics is making my brain dribble out through my ears. Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before, and getting into arcane regions of calculus. There's a reason I stopped doing physical chemistry after my second undergrad year (although I have to admit that the consequences of thermo theories are very useful in normal organic chemistry - e.g. if I want to make that reaction happen instead of this one, should I heat it or chill it or subject it to high pressure?).

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

iml8 said: Another eccentricity of EEs is that current flows from "+" to "-" when (as a strong but not invariant rule) it's the other way around. Ben Franklin could have guessed either way and he lost the toss.

Well, no, it isn't "the other way around" actually. Current is the charge flow, by definition measured from positive voltage to negative. The particle flow is irrelevant - in ionic currents the current and the particle flow is parallel, while in electronic currents they are contraparallel. Dunno if I like Wikipedia's article here, but at least it got the direction right. What Maxwell et al didn't know was the structure of atoms. If chemistry had been a little more advanced they would probably made a sound guess on how to make the common electron currents parallel, as the periodic table (and the electropotentials) is asymmetric due to the shell configurations.

iml8 said: Not really. A "hole" is the absence of an electron, a "virtual" positive charge.
The concept of current flow clears that up. The current always flows according to the rule, and holes can be seen as charge carriers so mediate a hole current.
iml8 said: This is a pretty good model, BTW, since the mobility of the charge carriers is better than it is for holes.
True - for silicon. Both electron and holes acquires an effective mass in conductors due to band bending, in effect a resistive "friction" due to collisions with the crystal lattice. [See for example "Introduction to Solid State Physics", Kittel, pp 212-219 on equations of motion in semiconductors for an easy introduction.] The charge carriers, electrons as well as holes, collide and momentum transfer slows them down. Thus the effective mass decides the charge carriers mobility. So there are materials where holes have higher mobility than electrons. AlSb and PbS are practical examples. [See for example "Physics of Semiconductor Devices", Sze, App G on "Properties of Important Semiconductors.] [In fact, you can have several different massed carriers, "light holes" as well as "heavy holes" for example, depending on which bands are occupied. Also "transverse" and "longitudinal" effective mass depending on IIRC current vs lattice orientation. Also direct vs indirect band gaps, which indicates how easily excitations may occur or relax in the form of photons (and phonons) or not, in the bulk crystal.] And, while quantum field theory isn't my forte (read: I don't know it), I take it that collective quasiparticles, like holes and phonon lattice vibrations, are quite as relevant quantum mechanically as composite or fundamental particles. So I guess there are curiouser charge carriers than holes.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

iml8 said: Another eccentricity of EEs is that current flows from "+" to "-" when (as a strong but not invariant rule) it's the other way around. Ben Franklin could have guessed either way and he lost the toss.

Well, no, it isn't "the other way around" actually. Current is the charge flow, by definition measured from positive voltage to negative. (In classical EM theory one doesn't care for keeping track of (different) types of currents and force vectors, so one simplifies.) The particle flow is irrelevant - in ionic currents the current and the particle flow is parallel, while in electronic currents they are contraparallel. Dunno if I like Wikipedia's article here, but at least it got the direction right. What Maxwell et al didn't know was the structure of atoms. If chemistry had been a little more advanced they would probably made a sound guess on how to make the common electron currents parallel, as the periodic table (and the electropotentials) is asymmetric due to the shell configurations.

iml8 said: Not really. A "hole" is the absence of an electron, a "virtual" positive charge.

The concept of current flow clears that up. The current always flows according to the rule, and holes can be seen as charge carriers so mediate a hole current.

iml8 said: This is a pretty good model, BTW, since the mobility of the charge carriers is better than it is for holes.

True - for silicon. Both electron and holes acquires an effective mass in conductors due to band bending, in effect a resistive "friction" due to collisions with the crystal lattice. [See for example "Introduction to Solid State Physics", Kittel, 5th ed pp 212-219 on equations of motion in semiconductors for a good introduction.] The charge carriers, electrons as well as holes, collide and momentum transfer slows them down. Thus the effective mass decides the charge carriers mobility. So there are other materials where holes have higher mobility than electrons. AlSb and PbS are practical examples. [See for example "Physics of Semiconductor Devices", Sze, 2nd ed App G on "Properties of Important Semiconductors.] [In fact, you can have several different massed carriers, "light holes" as well as "heavy holes" for example, depending on which bands are occupied. Also "transverse" and "longitudinal" effective mass depending IIRC on current vs lattice orientation. Also direct vs indirect band gaps, which indicates how easily excitations may occur or relax in the form of photons (and phonons) or not, in the bulk crystal.] And, while quantum field theory isn't my forte (read: I don't know it), I take it that collective quasiparticles, like holes and phonon lattice vibrations, are quite as relevant quantum mechanically as composite or fundamental particles. So I guess there are curiouser charge carriers than holes.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

hamstrung said: " Yes, todays bear can’t transform to todays whale. " why not? how do you know there is a barrier?

There isn't a barrier (at least none in evidence AFAIU), there is an exceedingly low probability as I explained in the very same comment. You can lead a creationist to facts, but you can't make it think.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: I think you are one of the very few persons I have ever heard articulate that.

[I have my moments.] We should say this more often IMHO.

iml8 · 9 July 2008

Nigel D said: You know, all this discussion of entropy and thermodynamics is making my brain dribble out through my ears. Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before, and getting into arcane regions of calculus.

There was a fellow I used to work with ... not such a bad guy, but I always avoided asking him questions, because when he was done answering I'd know less than I did when I started. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: I would offer a cautionary note here. One can indeed refer to relative changes in entropy.

Agreed. Also, my chosen classical definition ("a measure of the unavailability") admits a relative measure. I was thinking of the entropy bounds, such as the putative holographic entropy bound, where one accounts for all possible energy states and thus have an absolute measure. Seems like your preferred explanation of the difference is a lot more solid. And it has the added advantage of addressing the side of entropy physics instead of the side of information mathematics as mine.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 9 July 2008

Nigel D said: Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before,

iml8 said: There was a fellow I used to work with ... not such a bad guy, but I always avoided asking him questions, because when he was done answering I'd know less than I did when I started.

Um, sorry, but iml8 was the one referring to entropy as "necessary increase of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature". I have seen it before and it looks like a deficient definition to me. And the concept of defining entropy as heat transfer instead of unavailability of heat energy (say losses in heat transfer) is confusing to me, i.e. I'd know less than I did when I started, so I wanted to hear what you guys thought. [The electronics comment is over the top - but I started out with a PhD in electronics, even if I worked more on thin film material production processes, so I was taking old knowledge out for a spin. My excuses.] What I was saying is that it looks to me as in thermodynamics the change in entropy is at least as large as the "change (increase) of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature". That makes the necessary (minimum) increase in entropy equal to the "increase of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature". In summary, it looks to me like it was a confusion between entropy and a way to measure it (for reversible processes). Do you agree, or can you explain how the originally proposed definition is derived?

Mike Elzinga said: 1st law: You can't win 2nd law: You can't break even 3rd Law: You can't get out of the game.

0th law: All casinos plays the same game.

iml8 · 9 July 2008

Torbjörn Larsson, OM said: Um, sorry, but iml8 was the one referring to entropy as "necessary increase of heat transfer divided by absolute temperature".

That's okay. I have no questions. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 9 July 2008

iml8 said:
Nigel D said: You know, all this discussion of entropy and thermodynamics is making my brain dribble out through my ears. Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before, and getting into arcane regions of calculus.
There was a fellow I used to work with ... not such a bad guy, but I always avoided asking him questions, because when he was done answering I'd know less than I did when I started. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

I didn't remember that we worked together. ;-) I have probably been babbling too much, but I just got fed up with that "genetic entropy" crap being added to Dumbski's crap added to Morris and Gish's crap. They just keep recycling it and reinforcing the same misconceptions.

Mike Elzinga · 9 July 2008

…I mean, honestly, is it wrong of me to think that Mr. Cordova had surgical help in becoming that malevolently stupid.

This is pretty much the way I see him. He actually works hard at being an idiot. That’s not normal.

iml8 · 9 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said: I didn't remember that we worked together. ;-)

Points again, Mister Elzinga.

I have probably been babbling too much, but I just got fed up with that "genetic entropy" crap being added to Dumbski's crap added to Morris and Gish's crap.

Ditto, I was babbling a bit myself. That "genetic entropy" stuff was a bit rich. "Oh, PLEASE!" I am wearying of sniping even at the Darwin-bashers. In some cases they seem to be at least marginally disturbed personalities. It's unsporting and also somewhat endlessly repetitious. White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 9 July 2008

Nigel D said:
(I am now beginning to hear “simplexity”!; WTF? What next; “complicity”?)
— Mike Elzinga
Mike, I think these are related in the same way that susceptance is related to susceptibility... ;-)

LOL! Thanks. Now I don't feel quite so awkward about my long screed. Your responses don't betray any damage I may have inflicted on your brain. :-)

Eric Finn · 9 July 2008

Nigel D said: You know, all this discussion of entropy and thermodynamics is making my brain dribble out through my ears. Torbjorn is using mathematical symbols I've never seen before, and getting into arcane regions of calculus.

I feel a bit guilty of starting an exchange of messages that might appear off-topic. My original question, however, was an innocent one to start with. In the following, I will try to describe what I have learned. The technical details of calculating a change of entropy in a given system may, indeed, be challenging to perform. Anyway, the concept of entropy in thermodynamics is well defined, as explained by our competent physicists. Entropy always involves studying energy flows between available energy states (including translational, rotational and vibrational modes to store kinetic energy, as well as quantum mechanical energy states). Naturally, we should also pay attention to the possible mechanisms that can transfer energy in or out of the system under study. In special cases, we can make a connection between information and entropy (information described as negative entropy), but generally, that connection can't be made. The concept of information does not have a general definition, although it can have a well-defined meaning in special cases. One of my questions was about Genetic Entropy, and the way it is connected to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. It was an open question in the sense that I thought that some sort of connection might exist. One of the answers to my question was that it only describes a change from a "more functional" state. Some commentators pointed out that it is not common practice to use concepts in contexts, where they do not have their original meaning. Also, that particular answer involves another concept: "functional" that was not defined, and it is not clear to me how to measure it. The other question I asked was about "entropy barriers" that are sometimes claimed to invalidate the current theory of evolution. Most certainly, some reactions in biochemistry are improbable, and can be judged improbable by studying the molecules involved and calculating changes in entropy (or, most likely, just studying the energy states, i.e. ways of storing energy). I have seen claims that "complexity" and "order" should always decrease, since we can not decrease entropy in a closed system. Again, several examples were presented showing that at least intuitively "complexity" and "order" does increase quite easily even in our everyday life. I guess presenting examples was the best our physicists could do, since no well-defined question had been asked. Personally, I feel that this discussion about entropy has not been off-topic all together, since entropy has been, and is still being used against the theory of evolution, now 150 years old, although often as a soundbite without real contents. Anyway, I have enjoyed reading about different approaches to the concept of entropy. Regards Eric

iml8 · 9 July 2008

Eric Finn said: One of my questions was about Genetic Entropy, and the way it is connected to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. It was an open question in the sense that I thought that some sort of connection might exist.

GE is a sham, it's just effectively a hifalutin' way of pushing the old (aren't they all?) Darwin-basher fable of "there ain't no such thing as a constructive mutation", which the boys and girls in the genetics department shoot right between the eyes the instant it comes in the door. There is some "information theory" subcontext to it, it seems, in that there's some musings about the fact that noisy transmission of a message can only degrade the message. This is reasoning by analogy and riding it off the rails: in Darwinian evolution we're not supposed to get perfect fidelity, we get variations -- and we can (playing the Grim Reaper, hopefully the nice one in the Terry Pratchett books) then select those variations that give a better result. "SELECTION! Repeat after me, SELECTION!" White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html

Mike Elzinga · 9 July 2008

Personally, I feel that this discussion about entropy has not been off-topic all together, since entropy has been, and is still being used against the theory of evolution, now 150 years old, although often as a soundbite without real contents. Anyway, I have enjoyed reading about different approaches to the concept of entropy.

I particularly enjoy the details and particular examples given by the biologists (but then I have always been a science nerd). I may have an overall picture but, in the biological and related sciences, I don’t have the store of particular details to pull up as examples. And it is always the details that the ID/Creationists mangle in order to sew confusion. I like to watch a knowledgeable biologist rip these pseudo-scientific arguments apart, because I recognize the game that the ID/Creationists are pulling in other areas, and these are the same games they play with physics. One doesn’t have to be a specialist in a particular area to recognize expertise in that area. One can always do cross checks to verify. But having expertise in even one area allows one to recognize expertise in another. And you will notice that Sal-of-Several-Shallow-Degrees doesn’t appear to recognize expertise in any area. He even demeans Darwin.

Nigel D · 10 July 2008

Torbjörn Larsson, OM said: [The electronics comment is over the top - but I started out with a PhD in electronics, even if I worked more on thin film material production processes, so I was taking old knowledge out for a spin. My excuses.]

You're forgiven, Torbjorn. Just wait until someone mentions enzyme kinetics or the Cytochrome P450 hydroxylation reaction mechanism ...

Nigel D · 10 July 2008

Eric Finn said: In special cases, we can make a connection between information and entropy (information described as negative entropy), but generally, that connection can't be made.

More specifically, that connection cannot be made in a meaningful way in a biological context. The reason for this is that information theory largely appears (to my limited understanding) to apply to digital information, particularly when transmitting it in a binary form. Biological "information" is often not digital, and is never binary, and is never "transmitted" except by the physical movement of the molecules that "contain" the "information".

The concept of information does not have a general definition, although it can have a well-defined meaning in special cases. One of my questions was about Genetic Entropy, and the way it is connected to the concept of entropy in thermodynamics. It was an open question in the sense that I thought that some sort of connection might exist. One of the answers to my question was that it only describes a change from a "more functional" state.

"Genetic Entropy" is a meaningless invention of the creobots. It is a way of disguising an argument from personal incredulity in technical-sounding language. Sal's "definition" of his use of the term "entropy" was an evasion, not a definition. In essence, he defined entropy as a lack of function.

Some commentators pointed out that it is not common practice to use concepts in contexts, where they do not have their original meaning. Also, that particular answer involves another concept: "functional" that was not defined, and it is not clear to me how to measure it.

Well, and that's the whole point. The creationists use entropy as a red herring, to divert attention away from the fact that their argument has neither any logical basis nor any intellectual rigour.

The other question I asked was about "entropy barriers" that are sometimes claimed to invalidate the current theory of evolution.

This is an invention of Philip Bruce Heywood, who appears to sincerely exist in an alternate reality. It is a concept that he has repeatedly refused to define, and judging from his use of the term it is either another argument from personal incredulity or a feeble attempt at justifying dogmatism.

Most certainly, some reactions in biochemistry are improbable, and can be judged improbable by studying the molecules involved and calculating changes in entropy (or, most likely, just studying the energy states, i.e. ways of storing energy).

But even the most improbable chemical reactions still happen a little bit (and a bacterial cell might contain about 10^7 molecules of, for instance, glucose at any one time so even reactions that only happen a little bit are still going on). This is because a small portion of any population of molecules will possess sufficient energy to engage in a reaction that has a high activation energy or has a thermodynamically unstable product. Then there is catalysis by enzymes, which serves to reduce the activation energy of many reactions, and to constrain the outcome of some. Rule 1 of enzyme function is that all enzyme-catalysed reactions are reversible. This means that a small portion of the chemistry happening in a chloroplast is the generation of CO2 from glucose and O2. But the kinetic relationships between various metabolic pathways and the concentrations of the metabolites means that the net effect is in a direction that is useful for the cell. In this example, the net effect is the conversion of CO2 and H2O into glucose and O2.

I have seen claims that "complexity" and "order" should always decrease, since we can not decrease entropy in a closed system.

Yes, isn't it a shame that the creationists never bother to define complexity or order as technical terms (except Billy D, who has defined both as the inverse of probability - but a probability that cannot be calculated without some huge assumptions). Also, no organism is a closed system. If entropy decreases within a cell, entropy increases elsewhere, as energy is transferred. Where available energy states within the cell might decrease, they are concomitantly increased externally to the cell.

Again, several examples were presented showing that at least intuitively "complexity" and "order" does increase quite easily even in our everyday life. I guess presenting examples was the best our physicists could do, since no well-defined question had been asked.

Additionally, the concepts Sal was using have no technical meaning, so their meaning was very vague, subjective and colloquial.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 10 July 2008

iml8 said: That's okay. I have no questions.

Okay, thanks, entropy restored. This means my book shelf won't suddenly get organized, I assume. *SIGH!*

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 10 July 2008

Nigel D said:
Eric Finn said: In special cases, we can make a connection between information and entropy (information described as negative entropy), but generally, that connection can't be made.
More specifically, that connection cannot be made in a meaningful way in a biological context. The reason for this is that information theory largely appears (to my limited understanding) to apply to digital information, particularly when transmitting it in a binary form. Biological "information" is often not digital, and is never binary, and is never "transmitted" except by the physical movement of the molecules that "contain" the "information".

Well, yes and no, i think. Information theory isn't something I have studied, but math and signal theory is old friends, so I try to slowly dig into this. From my limited view point, for the same reason that there is no one specific information measure, information theory is no monolith. We have two large areas, Shannon theory that describes communication over a channel between a sender and a receiver, and algorithmic information theory (of Kolmogorov, Chaitin et al) that describes information in strings. The latter is relative a coding of strings, and seems to be digital. The former is relative ensembles of messages. What is a message? According to Shannon it is any function, including continuous, as he worked out in his original paper:

In this final installment of the paper we consider the case where the signals or the messages or both are continuously variable, in contrast with the discrete nature assumed heretofore. To a considerable extent the continuous case can be obtained through a limiting process from the discrete case by dividing the continuum of messages and signals into a large but finite number of small regions and calculating the various parameters involved on a discrete basis. As the size of the regions is decreased these parameters in general approach as limits the proper values for the continuous case.

Practically, we are not interested in exact transmission when we have a continuous source, but only in transmission to within a certain tolerance.

Note that though Shannon define a so called Shannon entropy by analogy, it can't be compared to thermodynamical entropy. Therefore Nigel is correct. But it is apparently not quite correct to think that information theory, not really interesting in a biological context of functional traits, can't apply at all. Evidently it applies when we look at heredity. People have used information theory to describe and analyze selection. Tom Schneider has a program, ev, wherein he shows how selection gathers information from the environment, using a biologically based model for the genetic mechanism. Note the figure - it is specifically selection, not variation as such, that increases information. It does so in the Shannon sense and for example Dawkins analyzes how this works.

If natural selection feeds information into gene pools, what is the information about? It is about how to survive. Strictly it is about how to survive and reproduce, in the conditions that prevailed when previous generations were alive.

Torbjörn Larsson, OM · 10 July 2008

Nigel D said:
I have seen claims that "complexity" and "order" should always decrease, since we can not decrease entropy in a closed system.
Yes, isn't it a shame that the creationists never bother to define complexity or order as technical terms (except Billy D, who has defined both as the inverse of probability - but a probability that cannot be calculated without some huge assumptions).

They should heed physicist Weinberg's (IIRC) warning: no single complexity measure can ever describe all possible features. Intuitively this makes biology a difficult case for creationists, because they recognize 'design' in all possible biological configurations. Their form of pattern 'recognition' (pattern invention, more likely) is way too complex [sic!] to be captured by a simple function. [Biologists may make sense out of it though. I have seen "functional complexity", where functionality of specific traits such as protein functionality seems to be described.]

Stuart Weinstein · 10 July 2008

Mike Elzinga said:
Henry J said:
See “Thermal Physics” by Morse for some classical derivations and definitions of entropy. The best definition is directly coupled to the second law: “Entropy is a measure of the unavailability of heat energy.” (p 58).
Ergo, using energy will waste some of it. Henry p.s. - saved by the preview!
1st law: You can't win 2nd law: You can't break even 3rd Law: You can't get out of the game.

Or: 1st law: No Free Lunch 2nd law: You can't get it wholesale 3rd law: You must pay tax too.

Nigel D · 11 July 2008

Torbjorn, I stand corrected - there are occasions when information theory can legitimately be applied in a biological context.

Ray Martinez · 19 July 2008

Salvador Cordova has a long history of being egregiously wrong. We have another example here now.

Does Cordova accept natural selection as causing evolutionary change? Ray

Stanton · 20 July 2008

No, he does not: in fact, in a previous thread, he made an unsubtle hint that he apparently finds the Biblical account of Noah's Flood to be a more plausible explanation for the origin of the diversity of all terrestrial life.

Ray Martinez said:
Salvador Cordova has a long history of being egregiously wrong. We have another example here now.
Does Cordova accept natural selection as causing evolutionary change? Ray

Frank J · 21 July 2008

No, he does not: in fact, in a previous thread, he made an unsubtle hint that he apparently finds the Biblical account of Noah’s Flood to be a more plausible explanation for the origin of the diversity of all terrestrial life.
— Stanton

But a lot of people who claim that also concede that "RM + NS" causes "microevolutionary" changes. Unfortunately they get quite silent when asked exactly where "microevolution" leaves off, and what else happens (saltation? new origin of life events?) instead of "macroevolution." But all those and other irreconcilable differences (age of life, Earth, etc.), and efforts to cover them up by the "don't ask, don't tell" ID community, will finally be put to rest when Ray - an Old Earth, Young Life Creationist - publishes his long-awaited paper.

Ray Martinez · 21 July 2008

Stanton said: No, he does not: in fact, in a previous thread, he made an unsubtle hint that he apparently finds the Biblical account of Noah's Flood to be a more plausible explanation for the origin of the diversity of all terrestrial life.

. What does the Flood have to do with causation (accepting or rejecting natural selection)? Cordova accepts God-Divine causation to explain the existence of species, like any given Creationist? Ray Martinez, species immutabilist.

Wesley R. Elsberry · 25 July 2008

Ray Martinez said:
Salvador Cordova has a long history of being egregiously wrong. We have another example here now.
Does Cordova accept natural selection as causing evolutionary change? Ray

I don't know what Sal does or doesn't accept; I just have to work from what he writes:

Darwin and Wallace got it wrong.

Given the context, Sal is egregiously wrong whatever he "accepts".

PvM · 25 July 2008

Sal is funny, in a sad sort of way. He craves approval and attention and pretends to be interested in science while at the same time showing an incredible unfamiliarity with it.
Combine this with a dual personality and we come to understand why some see him as funny, in a sad sort of way. Then again Sal and Denyse would make a great couple.

Stanton · 26 July 2008

PvM said: Sal is funny, in a sad sort of way. He craves approval and attention and pretends to be interested in science while at the same time showing an incredible unfamiliarity with it. Combine this with a dual personality and we come to understand why some see him as funny, in a sad sort of way. Then again Sal and Denyse would make a great couple.

Oh, won't someone think of the children!!!

Henry J · 8 August 2008

Oh, won’t someone think of the children!!!

Of course, the serious answer to that is that pushing for good science education is thinking of the children! ;)