As usual, Darwinist blunders are headlines, their retractions buried somewhere inside in very small print
"And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” - Jesus Christ
Logic. The friend of Christians and the foe of Darwinists. Truth. The hope of Christians and the...well, what hope is there for Darwinists? They hope that when they quit breathing they will be erased, gonzo, finished, no more. They don't recognize the eternal nature of mankind and do not care to think about it. So they cast Creationists and Intelligent Design folks out of their organizations and colleges and clubs. Like the "cool kids" in high school dissing the "nerds" and "jocks" who wind up more often actually accomplishing something with life.
A friend recently asked, why do they care what we think, anyway? If they think everything is randomly just here and there is no underlying meaning or purpose, why do Darwinists take any time to oppose Creationists and Christians and even non-religious ID proponents?
I think Jesus made this clear to me when I was listening to John chapter three on CD while working and these words were spoken:
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”
From Facebook, photographer as yet unknown
1) A scientist submits a paper (to Applied Mathematics Papers) and it is accepted for peer review, and I will excerpt it below:
A second look at the second law
Granville Sewell ∗
Mathematics Department, University of Texas, El Paso, United States
a b s t r a c t
It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth
does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system,
and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside
the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define
‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example,
X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, ‘‘X-order’’ to be the negative of
X-entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only
say that the X-order cannot increase in a closed system, but that they also say that in an
open system the X-order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary.
Thus the equations for entropy change do not support the illogical ‘‘compensation’’ idea;
instead, they illustrate the tautology that ‘‘if an increase in order is extremely improbable
when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless
something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable’’. Thus, unless we are
willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of
spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude
that the second law has in fact been violated here.
© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Compensation
It is probably fair to say that the majority view of science today holds that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus, physics alone explains the human mind, and all it does.
In fact, since there are only four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces), this means that these four forces must explain everything that has happened on Earth, according to this majority view. For example, Peter Urone, in College Physics [1], writes ‘‘One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena’’.
In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, ‘‘A Mathematician’s View of Evolution’’ [2], I argued against this view, asserting that the increase in order which has occurred on Earth seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way. I wrote:
I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and
novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and entropy can decrease in an open system, as long as it is ‘‘compensated’’ somehow by a comparable or greater increase outside the system. For example, Isaac Asimov, in the Smithsonian journal [3], recognizes the apparent problem:
You can argue, of course, that the phenomenon of life may be an exception [to the second law]. Life on earth has steadily grown more complex, more versatile, more elaborate, more orderly, over the billions of years of the planet’s existence. From no life at all, living molecules were developed, then living cells, then living conglomerates of cells, worms, vertebrates, mammals, finally Man. And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe. How could the human brain develop out of the primeval slime? How could that vast increase in order (and therefore that vast decrease in entropy) have taken place?
But Asimov concludes that the second law is not really violated, because...Remove the sun, and the human brain would not have developed . . . . And in the billions of years that it took for the
human brain to develop, the increase in entropy that took place in the sun was far greater; far, far greater than the decrease that is represented by the evolution required to develop the human brain.
Similarly, Peter Urone, in College Physics [1], writes: Some people misuse the second law of thermodynamics, stated in terms of entropy, to say that the existence and evolution of life violate the law and thus require divine intervention. . . . It is true that the evolution of life from inert matter to its present forms represents a large decrease in entropy for living systems. But it is always possible for the entropy of one part of the universe to decrease, provided the total change in entropy of the universe increases.
Some other authors appear to feel a little silly suggesting that increases in entropy anywhere in the universe could compensate for decreases on Earth, so they are careful to explain that this ‘‘compensation’’ only works locally; for example in Order and Chaos [4], the authors write:
In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law. . . . Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy.
2. The equations of entropy change
Of course the whole idea of compensation, whether by distant or nearby events, makes no sense logically: an extremely improbable event is not rendered less improbable simply by the occurrence of ‘‘compensating’’ events elsewhere. According to this reasoning, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal—and the door is open.1 (Or the thermal entropy in the next room is increasing, though I am not sure how fast it has to increase to compensate computer construction!)
To understand where this argument comes from, we need to look at the equations for entropy change, as given in Appendix D of my 2005 John Wiley book [5], and previously in my 2001 Mathematical Intelligencer article [6], ‘‘Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?’’.
1 It may be noted that something must actually be entering or leaving a system before it can be considered ‘‘open’’, but if you can see into the next room, electromagnetic radiation at least is entering, and that is what makes the Earth an open system!
The rest of the paper is found here.
∗ Tel.: +1 915 747 6762; fax: +1 915 747 6502.
E-mail address: sewell@utep.edu.
0893-9659/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aml.2011.01.019
[1] Paul Peter Urone, College Physics, Brooks/Cole, 2001.
[2] Granville Sewell, A mathematician’s view of evolution, The Mathematical Intelligencer 22 (4) (2000) 5–7.
[3] Isaac Asimov, In the game of energy and thermodynamics, you can’t even break even, Smithsonian, August 1970, p6.
[4] S. Angrist, L. Hepler, Order and Chaos, Basic Books, 1967.
[5] Granville Sewell, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
[6] Granville Sewell, Can ANYTHING happen in an open system? The Mathematical Intelligencer 23 (4) (2001) 8–10.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2) Then the editors are alerted to the anti-Darwinist evidence presented in the paper. Derisive attacks immediate assail the organization by Darwinist Propagandists like Panda's Thumb and the paper is retracted!
3) But the detractors are full of baloney and Sewell rightly takes action to sue the Applied Mathematics Papers, and they realize they are in trouble as they cannot argue with the content of the paper!!! Now the story unfolds...
Ivan Oransky is a doctor, the executive director of Reuters Health and founder, along with Adam Marcus, of Retraction Watch, a blog that scours scientific journals for retractions and investigates the stories behind them. Retraction Watch recently celebrated its first birthday, and so we asked Ivan to pick out some of the year's most noteworthy or outrageous retractions.
To quote from the interview on Retraction Watch:
Applied Mathematics Letters, which agreed to apologize to Intelligent Design-friendly Texas professor Granville Sewell and have its publisher, Elsevier, pay $10,000 in legal fees, has posted the text of its apology (Of note: Elsevier has the apology behind a paywall. So if 318 people fork over the $31.50 fee, they’ll have their $10,000 back.): Read the rest of this entry »
Elsevier, the publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters, which retracted a paper questioning the second law of thermodynamics earlier this year, will issue an apology and pay $10,000 in legal fees.
Have you read yesterday’s post on a retraction in Applied Mathematics Letters yet? (If you haven’t, you’ve missed the explanation of how “Both science and spirituality came from space,” along with other oddities. We’ll wait while you go read it.) But for those of you who have, it turns out that this wasn’t the first retraction of a bizarre paper in the journal this year.
Logic. The friend of Christians and the foe of Darwinists. Truth. The hope of Christians and the...well, what hope is there for Darwinists? They hope that when they quit breathing they will be erased, gonzo, finished, no more. They don't recognize the eternal nature of mankind and do not care to think about it. So they cast Creationists and Intelligent Design folks out of their organizations and colleges and clubs. Like the "cool kids" in high school dissing the "nerds" and "jocks" who wind up more often actually accomplishing something with life.
A friend recently asked, why do they care what we think, anyway? If they think everything is randomly just here and there is no underlying meaning or purpose, why do Darwinists take any time to oppose Creationists and Christians and even non-religious ID proponents?
I think Jesus made this clear to me when I was listening to John chapter three on CD while working and these words were spoken:
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”
1) A scientist submits a paper (to Applied Mathematics Papers) and it is accepted for peer review, and I will excerpt it below:
A second look at the second law
Granville Sewell ∗
Mathematics Department, University of Texas, El Paso, United States
a b s t r a c t
It is commonly argued that the spectacular increase in order which has occurred on Earth
does not violate the second law of thermodynamics because the Earth is an open system,
and anything can happen in an open system as long as the entropy increases outside
the system compensate the entropy decreases inside the system. However, if we define
‘‘X-entropy’’ to be the entropy associated with any diffusing component X (for example,
X might be heat), and, since entropy measures disorder, ‘‘X-order’’ to be the negative of
X-entropy, a closer look at the equations for entropy change shows that they not only
say that the X-order cannot increase in a closed system, but that they also say that in an
open system the X-order cannot increase faster than it is imported through the boundary.
Thus the equations for entropy change do not support the illogical ‘‘compensation’’ idea;
instead, they illustrate the tautology that ‘‘if an increase in order is extremely improbable
when a system is closed, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless
something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable’’. Thus, unless we are
willing to argue that the influx of solar energy into the Earth makes the appearance of
spaceships, computers and the Internet not extremely improbable, we have to conclude
that the second law has in fact been violated here.
© 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Compensation
It is probably fair to say that the majority view of science today holds that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus, physics alone explains the human mind, and all it does.
In fact, since there are only four known forces of physics (the gravitational, electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces), this means that these four forces must explain everything that has happened on Earth, according to this majority view. For example, Peter Urone, in College Physics [1], writes ‘‘One of the most remarkable simplifications in physics is that only four distinct forces account for all known phenomena’’.
In my 2000 Mathematical Intelligencer article, ‘‘A Mathematician’s View of Evolution’’ [2], I argued against this view, asserting that the increase in order which has occurred on Earth seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way. I wrote:
I imagine visiting the Earth when it was young and returning now to find highways with automobiles on them, airports with jet airplanes, and tall buildings full of complicated equipment, such as televisions, telephones and computers. Then I imagine the construction of a gigantic computer model which starts with the initial conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago and tries to simulate the effects that the four known forces of physics would have on every atom and every subatomic particle on our planet. If we ran such a simulation out to the present day, would it predict that the basic forces of Nature would reorganize the basic particles of Nature into libraries full of encyclopedias, science texts and
novels, nuclear power plants, aircraft carriers with supersonic jets parked on deck, and computers connected to laser printers, CRTs and keyboards? If we graphically displayed the positions of the atoms at the end of the simulation, would we find that cars and trucks had formed, or that supercomputers had arisen? Certainly we would not, and I do not believe that adding sunlight to the model would help much.
Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and entropy can decrease in an open system, as long as it is ‘‘compensated’’ somehow by a comparable or greater increase outside the system. For example, Isaac Asimov, in the Smithsonian journal [3], recognizes the apparent problem:
You can argue, of course, that the phenomenon of life may be an exception [to the second law]. Life on earth has steadily grown more complex, more versatile, more elaborate, more orderly, over the billions of years of the planet’s existence. From no life at all, living molecules were developed, then living cells, then living conglomerates of cells, worms, vertebrates, mammals, finally Man. And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe. How could the human brain develop out of the primeval slime? How could that vast increase in order (and therefore that vast decrease in entropy) have taken place?
But Asimov concludes that the second law is not really violated, because...Remove the sun, and the human brain would not have developed . . . . And in the billions of years that it took for the
human brain to develop, the increase in entropy that took place in the sun was far greater; far, far greater than the decrease that is represented by the evolution required to develop the human brain.
Similarly, Peter Urone, in College Physics [1], writes: Some people misuse the second law of thermodynamics, stated in terms of entropy, to say that the existence and evolution of life violate the law and thus require divine intervention. . . . It is true that the evolution of life from inert matter to its present forms represents a large decrease in entropy for living systems. But it is always possible for the entropy of one part of the universe to decrease, provided the total change in entropy of the universe increases.
Some other authors appear to feel a little silly suggesting that increases in entropy anywhere in the universe could compensate for decreases on Earth, so they are careful to explain that this ‘‘compensation’’ only works locally; for example in Order and Chaos [4], the authors write:
In a certain sense the development of civilization may appear contradictory to the second law. . . . Even though society can effect local reductions in entropy, the general and universal trend of entropy increase easily swamps the anomalous but important efforts of civilized man. Each localized, man-made or machine-made entropy decrease is accompanied by a greater increase in entropy of the surroundings, thereby maintaining the required increase in total entropy.
2. The equations of entropy change
Of course the whole idea of compensation, whether by distant or nearby events, makes no sense logically: an extremely improbable event is not rendered less improbable simply by the occurrence of ‘‘compensating’’ events elsewhere. According to this reasoning, the second law does not prevent scrap metal from reorganizing itself into a computer in one room, as long as two computers in the next room are rusting into scrap metal—and the door is open.1 (Or the thermal entropy in the next room is increasing, though I am not sure how fast it has to increase to compensate computer construction!)
To understand where this argument comes from, we need to look at the equations for entropy change, as given in Appendix D of my 2005 John Wiley book [5], and previously in my 2001 Mathematical Intelligencer article [6], ‘‘Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System?’’.
1 It may be noted that something must actually be entering or leaving a system before it can be considered ‘‘open’’, but if you can see into the next room, electromagnetic radiation at least is entering, and that is what makes the Earth an open system!
The rest of the paper is found here.
∗ Tel.: +1 915 747 6762; fax: +1 915 747 6502.
E-mail address: sewell@utep.edu.
0893-9659/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.aml.2011.01.019
[1] Paul Peter Urone, College Physics, Brooks/Cole, 2001.
[2] Granville Sewell, A mathematician’s view of evolution, The Mathematical Intelligencer 22 (4) (2000) 5–7.
[3] Isaac Asimov, In the game of energy and thermodynamics, you can’t even break even, Smithsonian, August 1970, p6.
[4] S. Angrist, L. Hepler, Order and Chaos, Basic Books, 1967.
[5] Granville Sewell, The Numerical Solution of Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
[6] Granville Sewell, Can ANYTHING happen in an open system? The Mathematical Intelligencer 23 (4) (2001) 8–10.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
2) Then the editors are alerted to the anti-Darwinist evidence presented in the paper. Derisive attacks immediate assail the organization by Darwinist Propagandists like Panda's Thumb and the paper is retracted!
3) But the detractors are full of baloney and Sewell rightly takes action to sue the Applied Mathematics Papers, and they realize they are in trouble as they cannot argue with the content of the paper!!! Now the story unfolds...
Ivan Oransky is a doctor, the executive director of Reuters Health and founder, along with Adam Marcus, of Retraction Watch, a blog that scours scientific journals for retractions and investigates the stories behind them. Retraction Watch recently celebrated its first birthday, and so we asked Ivan to pick out some of the year's most noteworthy or outrageous retractions.
To quote from the interview on Retraction Watch:
"...BROOKE GLADSTONE (interviewer):
Let's move on to a journal called Applied Mathematics Letters, which published a paper by a professor named Granville Sewell, who suggested that the theory of evolution actually violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says the quality of energy deteriorates over time in a closed system, or something like that.
IVAN ORANSKY(interviewee, of Retraction Watch:
More or less –
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Entropy.
IVAN ORANSKY:
Exactly. It, it involves entropy and I will tell you that no matter how I describe it now, someone will write in and say that we've gotten it wrong.
[BROOKE LAUGHS]
In the somewhat oversimplified sense, it is that in a closed system entropy increases. So he's saying that if you have evolution, that it’s violating that because you're having sort of more order.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It was roundly condemned.
IVAN ORANSKY:
What happened [LAUGHS] with that paper was quite remarkable. It was published and then very quickly, almost the moment it was published, the editor ended up retracting this but then Sewell sued. That’s someone unusual.
Elsevier, a major publisher who publishes his journal, settled with Sewell for 10,000 dollars. They also really lawyered the retraction notice which appeared. And what the retraction notice says is it wasn't about the quality. That’s not why we retracted this paper. We retracted this because it was inappropriate for our journal.
So they really gave the intelligent design community – it’s a pitch down the middle, because they could just say, no, no one’s questioning the result. They’re just saying it was inappropriate for our journal.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This seems to be extremely worrisome for the scientific community. If you can defeat what you’re implying are facts by legal fiat, then we’re in big trouble..."
4) The peer-reviewed journal has to apologize, pay Sewell ten thousand dollars and admit that they did not have an argument with the content of the paper, thereby calling into question the integrity of the organization and those who rallied the witch-hunt in the first place.
5) Despite having to admit Sewell's paper could not be rejected on content, there are cheap shots taken at it anyway by snarky Darwinists. Like the beaten fighter shouting insults at the winner from the canvas, his bloodied face swollen and his eyes beginning to shut, Darwinists get clobbered by logic time and again and declare their superiority from the horizontal position...or as they hand over their wallet.
Listen to the linked video! Sewell takes the time to try to make the argument clear to the scientists who were apparently listening and perhaps the most intelligent thing said is that methodological naturalism cannot be applied here and will not work. Science cannot artificially inject naturalism (a religious viewpoint) into science and expect good results. He also agrees that the science of statistics tells mankind that computers and airplanes do not fall out of the sky and the scientific community does not respect this viewpoint, even though it is the most scientific and logical conclusion. The Second Law precludes evolution.
Breaking, breaking: ID-friendly math prof Granville Sewell gets apology and damages from journal
5) Despite having to admit Sewell's paper could not be rejected on content, there are cheap shots taken at it anyway by snarky Darwinists. Like the beaten fighter shouting insults at the winner from the canvas, his bloodied face swollen and his eyes beginning to shut, Darwinists get clobbered by logic time and again and declare their superiority from the horizontal position...or as they hand over their wallet.
Listen to the linked video! Sewell takes the time to try to make the argument clear to the scientists who were apparently listening and perhaps the most intelligent thing said is that methodological naturalism cannot be applied here and will not work. Science cannot artificially inject naturalism (a religious viewpoint) into science and expect good results. He also agrees that the science of statistics tells mankind that computers and airplanes do not fall out of the sky and the scientific community does not respect this viewpoint, even though it is the most scientific and logical conclusion. The Second Law precludes evolution.
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Archive for the ‘granville sewell’ Category
Applied Mathematics Letters posts apology for retracting Intelligent Design-friendly paper
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Applied Mathematics Letters, which agreed to apologize to Intelligent Design-friendly Texas professor Granville Sewell and have its publisher, Elsevier, pay $10,000 in legal fees, has posted the text of its apology (Of note: Elsevier has the apology behind a paywall. So if 318 people fork over the $31.50 fee, they’ll have their $10,000 back.): Read the rest of this entry »Elsevier apologizes for Applied Mathematics Letters retraction, pays author’s legal fees
Elsevier, the publisher of Applied Mathematics Letters, which retracted a paper questioning the second law of thermodynamics earlier this year, will issue an apology and pay $10,000 in legal fees.
According to John West at the Discovery Institute’s blog, which broke the story: Read the rest of this entry »
More on Applied Mathematics Letters: Journal retracted paper questioning second law of thermodynamics
Have you read yesterday’s post on a retraction in Applied Mathematics Letters yet? (If you haven’t, you’ve missed the explanation of how “Both science and spirituality came from space,” along with other oddities. We’ll wait while you go read it.) But for those of you who have, it turns out that this wasn’t the first retraction of a bizarre paper in the journal this year.
In January, Granville Sewell, of the University of Texas, El Paso’s math department, published a paper there called “A Second Look at The Second Law.” Its abstract: Read the rest of this entry »