A response to Tovrose regarding entropy

Tovrose feels that evolution and the second law of thermodynamics cannot both be true. Below is a comment I left at that blog post.

You are wrong and I will try to explain why that is. The second law of thermodynamics describes a tendency. A tendency is not an effect that occurs 100% of the time. Although men tend to be taller than women, this is not always the case. Let me attempt an example. When I was conceived I was much less than a gram in mass. That single cell had amazing potential. That single cell had potential but comparatively little complexity. When I was a university student, let's say 23 years old, my body was at its physical peak and probably my mind was too. My body and mind were both much more complex than that single cell. I massed around 65 kg or around 65,000 times more than when I was conceived. And yet the second law was not broken for this to occur. Although I personally became more complex, I was making the world around me more disordered. For those twenty-three years and nine months, I was radiating 37 degrees Celsius. although I massed 65 kg, I ate far more than that in my twenty-three plus years. Indeed, I ate more 65 kg in a single year for most of those years. I exhaled lots of CO2 and expelled other wastes. As this increase in complexity shows, the second law does not forbid such increases. Another example: A block of stone has potential: it can be sculpted into remarkable shapes or it can be melted down with the ores used to make interesting things. In both these cases, the potential is not the same thing as complexity. Yet the tools needed to work the stone release energy and dust in disordered forms so even as complexity increases locally, so does disorder universally. I have not proven that evolution occurs, only that the second law does not prove it cannot. You specifically mention mutations. Do note that duplication mutations have been observed, with changes to one of the copies adding new functions to the lifeform. As a practical matter, information and new functions are known to occur and the process is understood. Again, I have not proven that evolution occurs, only that the second law is not a deal breaker. Finally, you wrote ". You’ll be surprised, for example, how many people have accepted the myth that ‘science has shown there is no God. Of course, evolution is the kingpin of modern atheism and world communism." I have to add some sarcasm here: You’ll be surprised, for example, how many people have accepted the myth that acceptance of evolution = atheism. In the US and Canada -and probably other places - most evolution proponents are religious and most of those are Christian. The Catholic Church is entirely fine with evolution as is the Anglican Church. There is no THE Lutheran Church, but at least some sects of Lutherans accept evolution. The church I grew up in, The United Church of Canada, is fully accepting of evolution. Intelligent Design proponents claim (I feel dishonestly) that their position is secular and I suppose that means that atheists could accept ID rather than evolution. Yes, most atheists are evolution proponents but most evolution proponents are Christian.

The odds of life beginning

Sci Am has an article describing an equation measuring the odd of life beginning on a planet.  Considering there is only a sample size of one, I am sure there are a lot of variables with no values offered.

I am about to move house, so read the rest at the link.

I had some fun answering this Quora question on evolution

This is not meant to be a serious response, but then the questions can't be said to be all that serious either.

Read Brian Dean's answer to

What do you say to someone who says that everything that Darwin said is nonsense?

on Quora

Top ten things to say to someone that says all that Darwin said is nonsense:

10 “Goodbye.”

9 “Quote or read two full continuous paragraphs that Darwin wrote.”

8 “Tell me three things that Darwin wrote about.”

7 “Ha, ha, ha, ha”

6 “Which is untrue or nonsense in the following three premises?

1. Offspring show variation and this variation is at least partially hereditary.
2. More offspring are born than can survive
3. Different characteristics will show different rates of reproductive success.”

5 “Are you aware that there are many feathered dinosaurs (Top 10 Feathered Dinosaurs)?” Don’t actually say the link - that’d be weird in conversation.

4 “Are you aware of the fine grained transitional fossils between fish and amphibians (List of transitional fossils)?” Don’t actually say the link - that’d be weird in conversation.

3 “Were you home schooled?”

2 “Here is The Origin of Species. It is not the most exciting writing but it is entirely readable for a layperson. (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2...)”

1 “If Darwin bothers you, read the work of any of the thousands of scientists since then who have confirmed and expanded his theory into one of the best supported theories in all of science.”

Written 9h ago · View Upvotes · Answer requested by

Three types of creationist arguments

These types of arguments might be common in many fields but creationist/evolutionist discussion is where I spend my leisure time so that's where I know they are.

"Find a few pieces of evidence that fit your argument

and ignore all the others."

I've seen this image many times.  I saved the above from Twitter but when I searched for "the data how scientists see it how creationists see it", this was the first result. No idea who to properly attribute it to.
The best example of this type of argument for me is Carl Wielands's Glacier Girl article that shows how snow falls rapidly on the coast of Greenland so inland Greenland's ice sheets are young. In doing so, he ignores - and does not offer locations -the fact that the two locations are hundreds of kilometers apart and in different climatic zones.  He also ignores all the ways the ice core layer ages are confirmed - two layers=one year, volcanic ash deposits match historic eruptions, isotope ratios...

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"We can't trust the experts!"

This argument definitely crosses borders.  I was reminded of it on Twitter by arguments over Brexit.

#Gove's battle against the experts. Explained. https://t.co/QmBGNloenS pic.twitter.com/oKIiZFaFmn

— Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) July 2, 2016

The link goes to: Britain's greatest enemy, the experts
In creationism circles, this argument often displays itself in strawmen arguments. but it also a common place to find lists of supposedly unanswerable questions.
This claim is made about the eye in various forms (the claim is given in various forms, the different forms of eyes is usually ignored). From Harun Yunha

For an eye to be able to see, the 40 or so basic components which make it up need to be present at the same time and work together perfectly. The lens is only one of these. If all the other components, such as the cornea, iris, pupil, retina, and eye muscles, are all present and functioning properly, but just the eyelid is missing, then the eye will shortly incur serious damage and cease to carry out its function. In the same way, if all the subsystems exist but tear production ceases, then the eye will dry up and go blind within a few hours.
The theory of evolution's claim of "reducibility" loses all meaning in the face of the complex structure of the eye. The reason is that, in order for the eye to function, all its parts need to be present at the same time. It is impossible, of course, for the mechanisms of natural selection and mutation to give rise to the eye's dozens of different subsystems when they can confer no advantage right up until the last stage.

An expert, even an interesed bystander, will see the problem. Fish, some amphibians and some reptiles don't have eyelids.  Clearly the specific example given is one of poor research and eyes are not irreducibly complex.

I spent ten minutes looking for this argument in the form of a list of fifteen or so questions for students to ask their biology teachers.  The question about eyes had, probably not 40 parts, but ten or so. It went something like, "5 Eyes need to be fully formed to work. a) When did the nerve to the eye form? b) When did the eyelids form? c) When did the cornea form?.... x)What did the animal with half formed eyes do?"  Couldn't find it.

I guess the "Why are there still apes?" attempt at a stumper question fits here, too.

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We don't know, therefore Creationism

Or in this case, therefore Intelligent Design:

...none of them have the slightest clue as to how it actually happened, and (B) The obvious and most significant conclusion that can be drawn from all their splendid work in the lab is that the only reasonable explanation for the emergence of life is Intelligent Design!

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Are there arguments that fall outside these categories?

Something for all those creationists to remember!

Hey, you stupid creationists, the 'Other Side' isn't dumb!

When will those frickin' idiots learn?

Alright, on the off chance you didn't follow the link, it goes to a general article describing 'the other' in any argument and so the lessons it offers are presumably just as applicable to evolutionists.

*

As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them, you don’t truly grasp the issue. We can bemoan political gridlock and a divisive media all we want. But we won’t truly progress as individuals until we make an honest effort to understand those that are not like us. And you won’t convince anyone to feel the way you do if you don’t respect their position and opinions.

I think this paragraph makes a big jump from "understand" to "respect".  I try to understand various arguments for creationism and to respect the individual but I don't see that every argument automatically deserves respect. As a blogger who has deliberately focused on creationism's worst (but common) arguments, I see the ones displaying the least amount of research.

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*Image is shrunk a little. More of Tom Gauld's work can be found here.

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Darwin and particle physics

Darwin had little or nothing to do with particle physics but some of his conclusions inspired at least one physicist.  From Reciprocity Blog, Has Evolution been proven?

It's a little-known fact that the earliest objections to Darwin's work didn't come from the religious, it came from a different quarter entirely, and a surprising one at that: Physicists.

The big problem was that, since Newton, it was thought that the universe was just like a big clockwork machine. Pierre-Simon Laplace famously stated that, with Newton's work, all we needed to know was the position and velocity of every particle in the universe and we could predict with perfect accuracy any past or future state.
This is now known as Laplacian determinism. All the physicists of Darwin's day were Laplacian determinists. They couldn't countenance the idea that there were random elements at play in the universe. But what do we actually mean by random here?

Random, in the way that I employ it, and in the way that it arises in evolutionary theory, means 'statistically independent'. It does not mean, as some suppose 'uncaused'. It simply means that, of a range of possible outcomes, any one outcome is statistically as probable as any other outcome.
To give a concrete example of something random, we can look at the decay of a single atom. The moment of decay of, say, an atom of caesium, is entirely random. It can happen any time from the moment the atom first arises to the heat-death of the universe. There's absolutely no way to predict when it will decay. Each of those moments, and thus the time of decay, is statistically independent.
So, Darwin had introduced the random and the probabilistic, and the physicists weren't too happy about it. Ludwig Boltzmann, father of thermodynamics, cites Darwin as one of his major influences in the formulation of statistical mechanics, and describes him, having laid the groundwork that would ultimately result in quantum mechanics, as the greatest physicist of the 19th century.

By the way, the blogger feels that evolution has been proven, at least in a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' way.

AiG's Dr Boyd on birds

Via the Sensuous Curmudgeon, I learned that AiG has worked to clarify its position on kinds. To be maximally sympathetic to creationists, lots of mainstream classification terms are ambiguous or difficult to rigorously pin down. Are lions and tigers two different species? Dogs, wolves and coyotes comprise one, two or three species?  When we look at modern extant animals, it is pretty easy to see different orders or classes. Mammals are clearly different from birds.  Songbirds are clearly not raptors. Rabbits are ....not all the clearly different from rodents ? It's definitely messy.

The YEC term, 'kind', is even messier. Humans are the only member of our kind. Some creationists limit 'kind' to mean species, or very nearly that and almost never reaching the level of genus.  AiG accepts 'family' as kind. They accept all felines -house cats to sabre tooth tigers and all in between - as one kind.

This is probably a good time for a refresher on Linnaeus's classification chart. Image from desire to learn (and shrunk slightly. To see it full size, follow the link):

Wikipedia lists the orders of birds here.

Now let's dig into Dr Boyd's article: Bird Speciation from the Flood to the present.

In Genesis 6:1–20 we read that Noah was commanded to take two of every animal kind into the Ark. Verse 20 makes clear that those animals would include two of every kind of bird. Later, God clarified that seven individuals of the clean animals, including some birds, would be on the Ark (Genesis 7:2–3). Does that mean that Noah had two (or seven) of all 10,380 extant bird species (more if you count extinct species)? If a biblical kind and a species were equivalent, then yes. But they are not the same; many species are categorized under each biblical kind.

Already we run into trouble. He does introduce the concept Kind is Bigger than Species, but he apparently misquotes the Bible. Hmmm. A bit of Googling tells me this is a messy translation problem.  Some translations specify seven pairs, others just seven but add "male and his female". It isn't relevant to this discussion but God didn't say seven individuals of clean animals, but seven pairs. Boyd links to NKJV which states, "You shall take with you seven each of every dclean animal, a male and his female" which is terrible math.  My partial apologies to Dr Boyd; some copies of the Bible agree with his quote.

...where did all these different species of terrestrial animals that we see today come from? For our consideration here, we are going to narrow the question to, where did all these bird species that we see today come from?

I often claim that Creationists try to use big sweeping statements to hide local flaws so I am grateful for his attempt to narrow things down.

Boyd graciously links to an article detailing the current evolutionary position, that birds evolved and radiated from South America.  The full text of this article available online. I might discuss it in a later post.

Scientists who accept the biblical account of creation and the worldwide Flood compile evidence from Scripture, genetics, the fossil record, hybridization data, and morphological characteristics to suggest that God created many kinds of birds that began radiating and diversifying over the world after the worldwide Flood destroyed the earth about 4,500 years ago. These birds included both flying and non-flying birds. The two answers given by evolutionary scientists and creation scientists are so far apart from one another that it seems almost impossible to think that they are looking at the same data.

I continue to admire his clarity and respect for the evolutionary position.

A scientist with a materialistic worldview has to account for the first bird; it would have to be the ancestor of all birds. Models of speciation and radiation for events like that would need millions of years.

A scientist with a biblical worldview has to account for the different species of birds found today in each created bird kind from the Flood to the present. Models of speciation and radiation for those events would only need thousands of years.

Boyd links to  AiG's Dr Jean Lightner's study on avian kinds.  I plan to read it but have not yet.(I have now read it and the article consists only of conclusions- "There are the 196 kinds" without much detail)  Boyd describes Lightner's work as suggesting just under two hundred kinds leading to the current 10,000+ species of bird. Such a number could be reached, he works out, if each of the two hundred original species doubled every 750 years and this happened six times (200-400-800-1600-3200-6400-12800).  He then points out an obvious problem. There are only four species of Anhinga but 1,470 species of what he calls "sparrow/finch" kind (or Passeroidea). Clearly, there are challenges even with his suggested rate of new species every 750 years. Also, 750 X six is forty-five hundred years, which I think is a little long for him. (Huh. This link to AiG says that the Flood occurred around that time, giving an estimate of about 4400 years ago.)

He discusses the problems with the term 'species' and we agree.

Robins produce more robins. Bluebirds produce bluebirds. Could a male robin and a female bluebird produce a hybrid like a bluebin? No, they are different biological species. Some birds like the mallard duck and the American black duck are considered different species, but they can mate and produce offspring (unoriginally, they are called the mallard X American black duck hybrid). Does that mean that they are just one species and not two? Not really (though it does depend on who you ask), because the hybrid duck is rare, and most often a mallard mates with a mallard to get more mallards. (When a bird watcher sees a hybrid, he might get either a little too excited or just confused because what he sees does not quite match any pictures in his bird guide.)

He uses bluebirds as an example and finishes with:

However, the ranges of these two species of bluebirds overlap only in a narrow band from West Texas northward—the hybrid zone. Most eastern bluebirds would never even come in contact with a western bluebird because their habitats don’t overlap very much. Because they are from the same bird kind and are obviously very similar (in both appearance and genetics) we can see that they are in the final stages of speciation. Most people believe that they are different enough to call them two separate species. If we include the western bluebird, which also can hybridize with these two species,10 it means that one species is in the final process of a triplet speciation event.

The introduction is over and now we get into the problem  (I've decided to add bolding as I go):

To some people, what I just described sounds too much like evolution. The evolutionary process definitely includes the idea of speciation, but the formation of species in response to geographic (or habitat) differences is consistent with a biblical worldview. Having over 10,000 different species of birds (not to mention mammals, reptiles, and amphibians), especially two of every kind and seven of the clean animals (many of the birds), would have been too much for Noah and his family to care for—not to mention house. The efforts of those involved with the Ark Encounter are providing us with realistic figures about the number of animals on the Ark. Having two of every bird kind and seven of every clean bird kind fits nicely.11

I would suggest, he add "as well as the evolutionary view" to my bolded part.
I note he leaves out dinosaurs from his list. A quick Googling doesn't offer a good (and simple enough for my purposes) list of orders or families for dinosaurs but there were a lot of them.
His solution:

When the birds were released from the Ark, they faced a new environment with quickly developing habitats. Birds could migrate quickly from the location of the Ark in all directions. As they were faced with different environments, their inbuilt genetic variability allowed them to diversify and adapt to these environments, forming different populations of the same bird kind.

I don't know if he solves this problem later in his article, but he is currently leaving out the problems with kiwis here. They are small, flightless birds that currently survive only because they live on an island that historically didn't have predatory mammals on it.  As an evolution proponent I accept that a bird flew to New Zealand millions of years ago and evolved into the kiwi, but that sure looks like a big change of Biblical kind to me.  This simple discussion of kiwi evolution didn't clear things up for me.  Anyway, we are also looking at penguins.  They and ratites like the ostrich and the before mentioned kiwis, only live in the southern hemisphere. This is hard to explain if the original members of the kind began in the northern hemisphere.

The end came suddenly.  Here is an excerpt from the final paragraph:

Evolutionary scientists argue for one ancestor to all flying birds—a descendant of the dinosaurs (that means if you are consistent with the evolutionary worldview, by the way, that birds are reptiles). Creation scientists argue for many different bird kinds that could fly from their creation on Day Four, as Genesis 1 clearly describes.

It sure appears that he ran away from the Passeroidea problem. If we look at a single species of the passeroidea kind and double it until we get to around 1400 species, we need

Boyd offered 750 years, as an average but seems to have pointed out that some kinds would need to evolve faster.  The problem is, we've seen most or all of these birds and known of them for four hundred plus years.  The biggest problem with AiG's conception of micro-evolution is the outlandishly high speed they need. This means that when creationists ask, "Why don't we see evolution happening today?" they are sabotaging their own position. To defend their point here, they paradoxically need to show new species of birds that have evolved and appeared since the 1600s.