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The comments in the article from the climate change skeptics hurt to read..... "Are you suggesting that the oscillating ice ages are caused by a slowing and sp
by hanniabu 11y ago
The comments in the article from the climate change skeptics hurt to read.....
"Are you suggesting that the oscillating ice ages are caused by a slowing and speeding up at the earth's core?"
- pc86 11y agoAlways interesting to hear people who openly deny science attempt to reason about science.
- mikeyouse 11y agoI used to work with a young-earth creationist pharmacist who spent a lot of time talking about how evolution was impossible since the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases over time -- so it's impossible for evolutionary complexity to increase. Wasn't sure how to respond to that one.
- rcthompson 11y agoThis is one of the old standbys. Deleting the clause "in a closed system" and pretending the 2nd law is still valid without it. I wonder what this person would say if you asked them why you needed a different flu vaccine each year.
- berntb 11y agoI ask them to Google what a "ring species" is. If they have a technical education, they usually don't bother me again. :-) (There is an idea of the "species" concept as a fixed constant in creationist theory.)
- Caprinicus 11y agoProbably "I don't need a vaccine"
- rcthompson 11y agoWell, given that the person a pharmacist, I would hope that's not the advice they give.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoTell them they are exactly right, only exception possible would be if there is some massive energy source pouring energy into the system. This is best done outside on bright sunny days.
- credit_guy 11y agoWhat is the relationship between energy and entropy? (Genuinely curios, I'm not a creationist, I personally rank Darwin right up there with Newton and Einstein)
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoSimply put, the earth isn't a closed system, so the laws can't be applied just to earth.
- mikeash 11y agoI recommend enthusiastic and intentionally stupid agreement. "You're right! For all this evolution stuff to work, you'd have to have some massive source of energy sitting in the sky or something." <beat> "Sure is hot today."
- joshuaheard 11y agoThat always troubled me until I read an article a couple of months ago about a new discovery with regard to the attempts to recreate the start of life. Basically, it said that biological self-organization and replication satisfies the 2nd law if you count the excess heat that is given off during the process. In other words, the chemical processes that power life are a reduction from a complex form to a simpler form and and the generation of heat. For instance, most organisms eat food, digest the food, which breaks down the complex chemicals to simple ones, and generate heat. So, while an organism may evolve into a more complex form, in the environment, it is creating entropy overall. This satisfies the 2nd law and explains evolution (a higher order life process).
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIf the argument that evolution is impossible because thermodynamics was correct, everything humanity does would also be impossible. When we're not at war, most of the things we do is organizing matter, locally decreasing entropy. The key word is, locally. Our trucks and cranes burn fuel to organize matter. So do our bodies, and so do cells our bodies are made off.
- username3 11y agoAll arguments, for and against, on evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. http://creationwiki.org/Index_to_Creationist_Claims#CF:_Physics_and_Mathematics http://creationwiki.org/Index_to_Creationist_Claims#CF:_Phys...
- anigbrowl 11y agoI read several yesterday on a story about the same topic that made no sense until I realized the commenters were confusing latitude with altitude while patting themselves on the back for being smarter than those elitist Harvard types.