User:Duncharris/2LOT

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2LOT attracts these, but this is no reason to exclude an important pseudoscientific claim.
2LOT attracts these, but this is no reason to exclude an important pseudoscientific claim.

1 or 2 paragraphs to add to the Second law of thermodynamics article. Let's try this. Any comments, or trolling to talk.

[edit] Rationale

We note the following:

Creationist claims about 2LOT are significant to the 2LOT. Although not forming any science, it is a significant abuse of science and important socially. It is likely that someone who's heard this argument will search for 2LOT and come to WP for answers. Any content should come after explaining what 2LOT is and the history of research into the idea.

That it attracts cretinist trolls is not a valid reason for its exclusion.

Wording must follow WP:NPOV#Pseudoscience to the letter. This is as we all know is:

represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority (sometimes pseudoscientific) view as the minority view.

In this case, properly understood the claim is nonsense, and should be treated such.

There are two parts to this;

  1. What text to include.
  2. What links to include.

[edit] Wording

hang on a minute, ta.

dum dumdum


[edit] First few lines and some thoughts and quotes

"Many creationists claim that the second law of thermodynamics poses a major problem for biological evolution in that they claim that thermodynamic entropy (wrongly referred to as chaos or randomness) either prevents biological evolution, or would have been violated were biological evolution to have occured. However, as this claim is based on a misreprentation of the 2LOT, the overwhelming majority of scientists, and virtually all if not all physicists, reject reject this claim as pseudoscientific nonsense."


Conflation of 2LOT and quantum theory (second portion of the Heisenberg Principle). Misstatements as to what entropy means. Propensity to treat the Earth as a closed system, ignoring the Sun’s effects.

Notes: first is that the sun continues to provide energy to the Earth while evolution continues, thus increasing the total entropy. Second, is that the sun generates 30% more heat now than it did in its infancy, and over the next 3.5 billion years will generate 40% more than it does today: all this means that the energy increase has been incremental, increasing exponentially the whole time life has been extant on the planet. This energy (and its increase) was necessary for the formation of life. Third, life itself may be entropic: in reassembling matter into living cells the energy required added to the entropy level on earth. Finally, even if life weren't etropic, the total amount of mass-energy represented by life forms is a tiny percentage of the the available mass-energy available in the Sun-Earth system, thus it could never offset the increase in entropy.

Disorder and entropy are not the same. The second law of thermodynamics deals with entropy. There are no laws about things tending to "break down." [1]

Information theory does sort of have a principle of degradation, but it is only applicable in certain situations (which evolution isn't one of). It implies, essentially, that information change is irreversible: information gets more and more different from how it started out, and the more it gets changed, the harder it is to tell how it started out. In a communication or information storage system, where the goal is to transmit or replay the original message intact, change is necessarily bad, so this corresponds to degradation. In evolution, change is not necessarily bad, so this is not a principle of degradation. [2]

Nothing needs to assemble itself. Evolution and abiogenesis do not exclude outside influences; on the contrary, such outside influences are essential. In abiogenesis, it is observed that complex organic molecules easily form spontaneously due to little more than basic chemistry and energy from the sun or from the earth's interior. In evolution, information from the environment is communicated to genomes indirectly via natural selection against varieties that do not do well in that environment. [3]

Formation of the universe from nothing need not violate conservation of energy. The gravitational potential energy of a gravitational field is a negative energy. When all the gravitational potential energy is added to all the other energy in the universe, it might sum to zero (Guth 1997, 9-12,271-276; Tryon 1973). [4] (See GUT and the values of Omega and Lambda – I can explain this if necessary).

Jim62sch 11:12, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Other comments: My primary concern is that putting this claim on a page dedicated to a scientific law is merely another wedge-strategy that would give the claim some publicity. I'd really prefer that it went on a creationism page. Jim62sch 11:14, 7 January 2006 (UTC)