Just a note regarding;
>DB> ... All it shows is that a particular thermodynamic
>no-go condition is met which merely allows us to further consider the
>subject without rejecting the whole notion of abiogenesis out-of-hand on
>thermodynamic grounds (contrary to many misdirected creationist attempts
>to make a slam dunk on this point).
>
>DNAunion: Let's see. The conversation between Richard and David has been
>about my (well, *supposedly* my) statements, AND I have made statements
>related to problems for the origin of life in terms of entropy. Here David
>mentions "misdirected creationists" in relation to thermodynamic arguments
>centering around abiogenesis. Is David referring to me as a "misdirected
>creationist", or is this just an example of my over-sensitivity to such a
>possibility manifesting itself?
I think it is the latter case. I was not necessarily referring to
DNAunion. As far as I was concerned, I was responding to things that
[Bchard had brought up that he seemed to indicate had come from DNAunion.
My post was a response to Richard's interpretation about the concept of
converting energy into reduced entropy *regardless* of who is or was
ultimately responsible for the concept. He seemed to put words into
DNA's mouth. The characterization seemed to be somewhat of a straw man.
I tried to reinterpret things so that they would seem to be more
plausible if they indeed happened to have come from DNAunion. (I didn't
know for sure because I had ignored and not read much of DNA's previous
"dialog" with others where the temperature of the earlier posts on all
sides had greatly exceeded the flash point.) I did not bother to check
the source, and merely responded to what Richard had said in his post.
When I referred to "many misdirected creationist attempts" I had in mind
a whole industry of related creationist objections, all of which are
quite silly. Since DNAunion's objection only seems to refer to the OOL
and not to biological evolution, and since he doesn't claim that the 2nd
law is violated by biological processes, and AFAIK, by potential OOL
scenarios either, this would suggest to me that DNAunion was not included
in the pool of "many creationist attempts".
My main actual disagreement with DNAunion in this whole thing is minor,
and apparently more a philosophical matter of conceptual esthetics than
of substantive science. The *only* reason I even entered the discussion
in the first place was that DNA had claimed, in response to Chris' claim
(paraphrased here by memory) that matter doesn't have any intrinsic
properties preventing it from organizing itself in complicated ways via
normal natural processes, that, indeed, according to DNA, there *was*
something preventing matter from organizing, and that something was
entropy. I objected (and still object) to this counterclaim that somehow
entropy intrinsically prevents matter from organizing. From further
discussions with DNA I have learned that he sees the situation as there
being intrinsic default "tendencies" that matter has, and one of these
intrinsic "tendencies" is to "tend" toward disorder/disorganization.
Since DNA allows for these "tendencies" to be "overcome" under an
appropriate set of circumstances, so that the matter properly obeys the
laws of nature describing the matter's behavior under the actual
circumstances present, it doesn't make any practical difference as to how
matter ends up behaving in the end. If the behavior in a given
circumstance is opposed to the tendency, then the circumstances have
merely overcome that tendency. If the behavior is not opposed to the
tendency, then the tendency is not overcome. This view of the situation
is effectively that things tend to follow their tendencies--except when
they don't because of the particular circumstances present. So even
though I think this view is a conceptual violation of Ockham's razor, it
has no observational consequences that can make any difference in the
actual scientific description of the behavior of the system, and
therefore is mostly a matter of conceptual esthetics. It's just that I
doubt that Chris had thought of (& I know I didn't think of) the
possibility of such a conceptual picture of the physical situation when
he made his comment about there not being any anything in nature that
prevents matter from oranizing itself in complicated ways.
Since my purpose was not to carefully attribute the source of any extant
concept in Richard's post, but rather to just deal with the concepts
therein no matter *what* the source, I did not try to check up on
Richard's attribution of the phrasing about an "energy conversion
mechanism" to DNAunion.
David Bowman
David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 15 2000 - 15:31:06 EST