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From: js2j@mhuxt.UUCP (sonntag)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: Now more than ever.  PART I
Message-ID: <884@mhuxt.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 23-May-85 09:46:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: mhuxt.884
Posted: Thu May 23 09:46:30 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 24-May-85 23:42:37 EDT
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
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Martin Taylor writes:
> I haven't seen this newsgroup in more than a month, an the first time I
> look, I see a new idea!
> 
> >     All right then, please provide a rigorous definition of entropy 
> >along with your source, which allows the concept to be applied quantitatively
> >to things like evolution (or any other non-thermodynamic process).
> >Jeff Sonntag
> 
> How come evolution is not a thermodynamic process?  Doesn't it conform
> to the laws of nature, then? 

    Of course it does.  What I meant was that the definition of entropy which
I posted (from "University Physics" by Sears, Zemansky and Young) is a 
quantitative formula involving the heat and temperature distribution within
a system.  Just how would you go about applying that to the concept of
evolution?  As long as we were using the fuzzy english language definition of
entropy as 'disorder' it was easy enough for creationists to say that evolution
violated the second law (always ignoring that little detail about 'in a closed
system'.)  
    When I say that evolution is a non-thermodynamic process, I don't mean
that it is somehow exempt from thermodynamic laws.  I just mean that *I*
don't see any way to apply thermodynamics to study the process of evolution.
*You* are welcome to try it, of course, but please use real, quantitative 
definitions of entropy, heat, temperature, etc, if you expect your results
to have any validity.  The second law is only a law when you use the real
definitions of the terms it uses.
     While a closed system consisting of a pool player and table obeys
the second law of thermodynamics, the second law would be useless to describe
the motion of the balls (except to predict that at some indeterminate time in
the future they would all be stopped.)  Similarly, the second law can be
applied to evolution only insofar as evolution can be described in terms of 
heat concentration and temperature distributions *or* if entropy can be
defined somehow in terms which are more descriptive of biological systems.
-- 
Jeff Sonntag
ihnp4!mhuxt!js2j
    "Time has passed, and now it seems that everybody's having those dreams.
     Everybody sees himself walking around with no one else." - Dylan