Feedback for January 2003

Once upon a time, Lord Kelvin produced an elegant analysis of heat transfer of the earth in order to estimate its age. He bracketed the earth's age as somewhere between 20 and 100 million years, IIRC. These figures were used to argue against the idea of common descent, since it severely restricted the available time for evolution to occur. However, Lord Kelvin did not include the effects of radioactivity as a heat source in his analysis. (That's not his fault, since radioactivity hadn't been discovered yet.) Because of this, his conclusions were way off the mark.

The reader's analysis similarly fails to incorporate a key concept. In this case, that concept is tidal forces. Tides contribute to an increasing distance between the earth and the moon, which contradicts the premise upon which the reader builds his argument. An interesting exposition can be seen in this essay.

Wesley

Mr. Clark's description of the Earth-moon system is incorrect, see The Recession of the Moon and the Age of the Earth-Moon System.

The truth is exactly the reverse: far from proposing thermodynamics as a problem for the origins of life, the quoted paper is proposing that thermodynamics and the second law is a major contributing factor to the spontaneous formation of complex structures in prebiotic evolution.

It is good practice to identify secondary sources used to obtain such quotes; and to check the quote personally. This may help avoid perpetuating a deceit.

Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for his work in thermodynamics, which was about how dissipative systems form in open systems far from equilibrium. Biological systems are an example.

Most of the article from which you are quoting is on-line; to read it, click on this link. I will give some extracts and discussion here; for more detail please go to the original article.

The article begins with a one sentence summary, as follows:

The functional order maintained within living systems seems to defy the Second Law; nonequilibrium thermodynamics describes how such systems come to terms with entropy.

That is, the article explains how the functional order of biological systems is consistent with the second law.

The article begins by showing a simple case for open systems close to equilibrium in which there is the possibility of the spontaneous formation of low entropy sub-systems. The quote you give appears here, to state that this particular principle does not work for biological systems.

Some more context to your quote:

Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures. The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of the billions of years during which prebiotic evolution occurred.

The conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that the apparent contradiction between biological order and the laws of physics--in particular the second law of thermodynamics--cannot be resolved as long as we try to understand living systems by the methods of the familiar equilibrium statistical mechanics and equally familar thermodynamics.

That is, equilibrium thermodynamics is not what is required. Prigogine developed a theory of non-equilibrium thermodynamics which applies to systems far from equilibrium. There is no violation of the second law required; just the problem of applying thermodynamics to new kinds of systems. The next paragraph in the article considers the order apparent in biological systems a bit further, and concludes with this sentence:

One of our main points here shall be that an increase in dissipation is possible for nonlinear systems driven far from equilibrium. Such systems may be subject to a succession of unstable transitions that lead to spatial order and to increasing entropy production.

The next section addresses Nonequilibrium open systems, and then the section after directly addresses evolution.

What is the thermodynamic meaning of prebiological evolution? Darwin's principle of "survival of the fittest" through natural selection can only apply once pre biological evolution has led to the formation of some primitive living beings. A new evolutionary principle, proposed recently by Manfred Eigen, would replace Darwin's idea in the context of prebiotic evolution. It amounts to optimizing a quantity measuring the faithfulness, or quality, of the macromolecules in reproducing themselves via template action. We here propose an alternative description of prebiological evolution. The main idea is the possibility that a prebiological system may evolve through a whole succession of transitions leading to a hierarchy of more and more complex and organized states. Such transitions can only arise in nonlinear systems that are maintained far from equilibrium; that is, beyond a certain critical threshold the steady-state regime becomes unstable and the system evolves to a new configuration. As a result, if the system is to be able to evolve through successive instabilities, a mechanism must be developed whereby each new transition favors further evolution by increasing the nonlinearity and the distance from equilibrium. One obvious mechanism is that each transition enables the system to increase the entropy production.

For a very brief and non-technical statement of what Prigogine is proposing....

The second law is, roughly, that entropy increases in all processes, or that heat will flow from hot things to cold things. Roughly speaking, entropy measures the extent to which energy is dissipated in a system. Open systems in a state of great energy flux (like the Earth) will tend to remain far from equilibrium. More importantly, Prigogine shows that in these conditions, ordered structures tend to form which facilitate the net dissipation of energy. Such systems help to drive the universe as a whole to states of increasing entropy, while being maintained in ordered state themselves. The paper goes on to give examples.

Far from proposing thermodynamics as a problem for the origins of life, this paper is proposing that thermodynamics and the second law is a major contributing factor to the spontaneous formation of complex dissipative structures in prebiotic evolution.

See also

• New Insights into Thermodynamics by Jerry Albert, in the Sept 1978 issue of the Journal of the ASA. The ASA describes themselves thus:

  The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) is a fellowship of men and women in science and disciplines that relate to science who share a common fidelity to the Word of God and a commitment to integrity in the practice of science.

• The presentation speech for Prigogine's Nobel prize.
• Prigogine's Nobel lecture.

[Professor Prigogine has kindly reviewed this feedback at my request, and concurs with my conclusion that the quoted paper is proposing that thermodynamics and the second law as a contributing factor, not a problem. Any errors or defects this response, however, remain my own.]

One of the most famous and thorough examples of direct observation of evolution over an extended period of time is the work of the Grants in observing finches on the Galapagos islands continuously for more than thirty years. A very readable and gripping account of this work is available in

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
by Jonathan Weiner (Knopf, 1994), (paperback reprint by Vintage books, 1995)

See also an on-line review at Jonathan Weiner: The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time.

If one is going to play the arrogance card, it is best to check one's grammar before posting.

Wesley

The particular reference you want is

The ten-percent myth
by Benjamin Radford
in Skeptical Inquirer vol 23, no 2, Mar/Apr 1999

There is another excellent article online at Science Master, on the brain in general, by Kenneth A. Wesson. Part five of the article address the myth. Note that the brain is used for a lot more than just "thinking".

This story is of considerable relevance to evolution, since there is a considerable evolutionary cost to having a large brain. If we did not make full use of it, this would be a real problem for evolution.

As an aside, it is true that many people do not use their thinking hardware to optimal effect. This is not about how much of the brain you use, but how well you use what you have. This also, is perhaps of some relevance to the creationism evolution debate. :-)

2. All mutations occur in individuals at first. Evolution occurs as these mutations (now called "alleles" because they are alternative genes in the population, from the Greek prefix "allo-" meaning "other") spread through the population, changing the frequencies of these different genes.

3. For what value or meaning of "soul"? If by "soul" you mean they are self-aware, surely; but if by "soul" you mean "created personal essence", then consult your local theologian of choice.

4. All bipedal organisms bar one have tails that balance them; many of them can move around quadrupedally, but not well. [The exception is, of course, humans.] Some quadrupedal organisms can stand on their hind legs (e.g., dogs, cats, sloths). Generally, though if an individual has adapted as it grows to being one, it does the other very poorly.

5. Now you ask for a personal opinion. Here's mine. Scientific American is generally very good - it has articles written by specialists in the fields. Discover is popscience, and should be taken as such. Sometimes it will be good, and at other times, not so good. I prefer to read the "discussion" articles in the actual science journals - Science and Nature are both excellent if you can get access, and they explain things for the non-specialist but in a non-patronizing manner.

Next, you say that Hovind "repeatedly queried" us "for the subject matter". I have no idea what that means. To my knowledge, Kent Hovind has never queried the archive at all for any reason, though some of us have individually have had quite a bit of contact with him. Strike two.

Finally, you think we should take him up on his offer. We get at least one letter every month suggesting that we take up his challenge. But as I have pointed out repeatedly, Hovind's challenge cannot possibly be met - not by evolution, but by ANY factual claim. I have offered Mr. Hovind one million dollars time and time again to prove any empirical claim with the same criteria that he sets up for his challenge. He has not responded. Why? Because he knows, as I do, that he has rigged the challenge so that it is impossible to win. I'll go through the reasons why his challenge is a fraud one more time:

1. His definition of "evolution" is ridiculously broad. Evolution is the theory that all modern plants and animals are derived from a common ancestor through descent with modification. That's all it is. Yet Hovind has wrapped up virtually all of cosmology into evolution as well. His complaint is with atheism, not with evolution as properly defined.

2. Not satisfied merely with defining evolution so broadly as to make it impossible, he then demands that we show that evolution is "the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence". Now I ask you, is it possible to prove ANYTHING if one must prove that it is the only POSSIBLE way it could have happened? By this reasoning, we could never convict anyone of a crime regardless of the evidence. There are always hypothetical alternatives. One could not prove that the planets are held in their orbits by gravity, for example, because it's POSSIBLE that they are instead pushed around by angels in a manner which happens to mimic the predictions of gravity.

3. He leaves the determination up to a handpicked committee that he controls.

Given these restrictions, I will - once again - offer Kent Hovind a million dollars to prove any empirical claim. My money is quite safe. And so is his. And he knows it.

Now, if you want evidence for evolution, the archive is full of discussions of innumerable lines of evidence that can only be explained by evolutionary theory. There is no explanation for the observed biostratigraphy of the fossil record, for example, other than evolution. The only alternative that creationists have come up with to explain that phenomena is flood geology, which fails miserably for about a hundred different reasons, and there are several files in the archive which explain this in great detail.

Strike three. You're out.

Beware of creationist misunderstandings about what the woodpecker's tongue actually does. It is attached to an elongated hyoid bone, as you can see in the first reference, and does not itself pass around the skull or through any nostrils. In fact, according to the Chaffee Zoological Gardens of Fresno site, it is a cartiliginous process of the bone, not the bone itself, that extends over the head. In John James Audubon's classic Birds of America he notes that the hyoid varies within the (American) species of the order Picidae. He says:

There is a very curious gradation in the degree of elongation of the horns of the hyoid bone in the different American Woodpeckers, some of which consequently have the power of thrusting out their tongue to a much greater extent than others. Thus:

In Picus varius, the tips of the horns of the hyoid bone reach only to the upper edge of the cerebellum, or the middle of the occipital region.

In Picus pubescens, they do not proceed farther forward than opposite to the centre of the eye.

In Picus principalis, they reach to a little before the anterior edge of the orbit, or the distance of 1/2 inch from the right nostril.

In Picus pileatus, they extend to half-way between the anterior edge of the orbit and the nostril.

In Picus erythrocephalus, they reach to 3 twelfths of an inch from the base of the bill.

In Picus tridactylus, they reach the base of the ridge of the upper mandible.

In Picus auratus, they attain the base of the right nasal membrane.

In Picus canadensis, they curve round the right orbit to opposite the middle of the eye beneath.

Lastly, in Picus villosus, they receive the maximum of their development, and, as represented in the accompanying figures, curve round the right orbit, so as to reach the level of the posterior angle of the eye.

Lest you think this is an evolutionist conspiracy, note that John James Audubon wrote in the 1830s. There is variation in the woodpecker hyoid bone and structures, and intermediate forms are not so impossible as creationist sites claim.

Here is a site with more information on the evolution of woodpeckers.

[Note: Since John Wilkins wrote his reply this Archive has posted Anatomy and Evolution of the Woodpecker's Tongue on this very subject.]

If you want more information on this, I recommend the following books:

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1959. The Copernican revolution: planetary astronomy in the development of Western thought. New York: Vintage Books.

Dreyer, J. L. E. 1953. A history of astronomy from Thales to Kepler formerly titled History of the planetary systems from Thales to Kepler. New York: Dover. Original edition, 1906 Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.

Whatever you do, do not believe the works by John William Draper or Andrew Dickson White from the 19th century; they are full of misrepresentations.

Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus by Rudolf Simek, translated by Angela Hall, (Boydell and Brewer, 1997)

However, there is an implicit assumption in most discussion of this subject that we are speaking of Europe and specifically of regions under the influence of the church. This is because the notion of the flat earth is so often brought up in discussions of whether or not the church promulgated flat earth views.

In fact, the cosmology of the medieval church was solidly related to the philosophy of pagan Greeks, such as Aristotle. Their religious views were expressed in relation to the Hebrew bible, but their scientific views (in so far as science existed) tended to be from the other sources, just as it is today for the mainstream church. The church was also largely resonsible for spreading the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, and their cosmology prior to Galileo was basically that of Ptolemy: a spherical and stationary Earth with heavenly bodies in motion around it.

In other parts of the world flat earth views were still around. For example, the Edda, from Northern Scandanavia, presents a flat earth model. But as the church gained influence in Scandanavia, the knowledge of the Greeks came along as well and the old models lost influence.

Douglas Theobald's essay contains an "Other Links" box that links to Ashby Camp's "rebuttal" on the "trueorigins" site and also to Theobald's response to Camp.

Wesley

I think that making sure that science is taught in science classes, and that non-science is not taught in those classes, counts as making the world a better place.

Wesley

Many scientists classify organisms according to phylogenetic taxonomy, which organizes groups of organisms (called "clades") according to their shared characteristics. A good discussion of this can be found at the Dinosauria.com site, as well as a cladogram of the clade Dinosauria. You might also check out the Dinosauria page on the Tree of Life site.

According to phylogenetic taxonomy, the clade Reptilia contains all diapsids (animals with two holes in the temporal region of the skull). The diapsids are divided into Lepidosauromorpha (lizards, Sphenodon, and their extinct relatives) and Archosauromorpha (crocodiles, birds, dinosaurs, and their other extinct relatives). In fact, most paleontologists now agree that birds are actually classified as theropod dinosaurs.

Suppose religion did evolve say around 10,000 years ago, and that before that we had no religion (although the Neandertals conceivably might have - the evidence is sparse). So what. If God was not apparent to humans until five minutes ago, and only then in a case of drug-induced hallucination, that does not make the revelation more or less meaningful (although one might think that it is likely not to be revelation).

Each religion has a "back story", as the scriptwriters say, to explain why their religion was unknown until a certain date (although some do this by denying there was ever a period that it was not known). As to the truth, credibility or plausibility of that, science cannot tell, and philosophy can only ask to be self-consistent.

Alpha particles from a thin layer of natural uranium in the form of oxide U₃O₈ were allowed to pass through a grid of known geometry into an ionization chamber. The electrical impulses there produced were amplified and applied to an electromechanical recording system. By this means the specific alpha activity of natural uranium was observed to be 1486 disintegrations per minute per milligram.
[Kovarik, A.F., and N.I. Adams, Jr., 1955. "Redetermination of the Disintegration Constant of U²³⁸" in Physical Review 98, No. 1, p. 46]

The half-life can be computed directly from the measured rate of disintegration. It doesn't actually require waiting around for half of the atoms to decay, as some might think. The uncertainty in the measurement is related to the number of decays counted, so scientists compensate for slow-decaying isotopes by measuring the decays among a large number of atoms. (Even one milligram of U²³⁸ contains over 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.)

The modern value used by geologists for the U²³⁸ half-life, based on more recent and more accurate experiments, is 4.47 billion years. That's less than 1% different from the value reported in 1955. If you wish to argue for a U²³⁸ half-life in the thousand-year range, you'd have to explain why measurements of that half-life by many different researchers were all in agreement on a value that's off by a factor of a million.

Isotopic dating methods don't tell us the age of atoms themselves. Rather, the methods depend on predictable chemical behavior of radioactive atoms, in order to compute the elapsed time since certain significant events in the history of things that are made of such atoms. For example, an isotopic dating method might be used to compute the time since a given mineral cooled enough that a certain radioactive isotope's atoms could no longer move into it or out of it easily.

Since cutting a stone doesn't reset the isotopic clock, no geologist would expect to obtain the age of the pyramids from dating the stone blocks. Creationists often use this analogy ("an isotopic age of a tombstone won't tell you the year of burial"), but geologists are aware of the sorts of events that reset isotopic clocks, and the sorts of events that do not. There is little room to suggest (as that line of argumentation does) that there is universal confusion among geologists on the interpretation of isotopic data.

It is generally supposed to denote the cerastes, or "horned viper," a very poisonous serpent about a foot long. Others think it to be the yellow viper (Daboia xanthina), one of the most dangerous vipers, from its size and its nocturnal habits

The same word is translated "cobra," "asp," "adder," or "viper," in more modern Bible translations. Since none of the verses describes the creature's appearance, an identification as Archaeopteryx seems unjustified.