DaveScot's Weird 2LOT Ideas

Intelligent Design seem to boil down to the idea that intelligence itself is supernatural. After all, if neurologists could successfully explain consciousness and reason as phenomenom which are not "spooky," but built by material processes from the ground up -- there goes dualism. A Disembodied Mind which can create and move matter around soley through causative acts of imagination suddenly conflicts with the scientific evidence.

I suspect the reason DaveScot conflates intelligence with supernatural power is that, in popular intuition, our minds are assumed outside of the natural causal stream.

It get's even more surreal. Later in the thread he says "Life doesnt even require the sun. There are bacteria that get all their energy gradient from heat deep in the earth which is generated largely by radioactive decay and was never due to the sun. " Completely ignoring the fact that radioactive decay produces, you know, energy...DaveScott never ceases to amaze me.

Why can't you Unbake a cake? Neglecting volatiles that evaporate (UMM, the smell of cake), you can break apart all the chemicals and re-constitute the ingredients by adding a bit of energy.

Re-creating the eggshell might require a chicken at this point, but I don't see how unbaking a cake violates the "2LOT".

It appears that what they're talking about is some ethereal "spirit of the law" that is supposed to hold despite the fact that only the letter of the law is scientifically demonstrable. Of course, they fail to demonstrate in any way that the statements applied to the explicit formulation for entropy also apply to their variant.

I did not think the 2LoT said you couldn't unbake a cake. What it says is that cakes don't unbake themselves, and if you want to unbake one you'll have to supply some energy.

Supplying the energy to unbake a cake will increase entropy somewhere else, which means a given supply of energy will only be able to bake and unbake a cake a limited number of times (even though the energy itself is conserved).

Intelligence alone is insufficient, and is not part of the 2LoT.

It's easier to see how to unscramble eggs than to unbake a cake, but thermodynamically it's the same thing. To unscramble eggs, of course, all you have to do is feed them to a hen. Maybe a hen is a sufficiently intelligent agent to "create" this information.
DaveScott badly misunderstands energy and entropy exchanges in life processes, as revealed in such statements as "There are bacteria that get all their energy gradient from heat deep in the earth which is generated largely by radioactive decay and was never due to the sun." Living organisms are not heat engines, such as Carnot cycles, and they do not derive energy from heat gradients, either from the sun or from deep in the earth. They work isothermally, by redox (electron transfer) reactions. Anyone who has had a course in biochemistry knows that, but not DaveScott. Electron transfer is a much more "concentrated" source of energy than heat gradients, and consequently can escape the simple entropic degradation of thermal energy he's basing his ideas on. That's just part of the fallacy in his take on thermodynamics.

Chalk this up in another long line of arguments with this totally idiotic form:

1. X is impossible.
2. I think that X has happened.

Conclusion: Jesus did it! (or whatever)

In case you missed it, premises 1 and 2 CONTRADICT EACH OTHER. You can't conclude anything from contradictory premises (or, actually, in logic, you can conclude anything from them, since contradictions) you have to first RESOLVE THE CONTRADICTION.

If DaveScot thinks he's observed violations of the 2LOT, then there are only two possibilities open to him: either he's disproven the 2nd Law (in which case he can hardly object to evolution on those grounds), or else he's mistake about the alleged violation. There's no other way around this. Pretending otherwise can only happen in ignorance of how things BECOME physical laws (i.e. they are always observed to happen in every single instance, allowing us to INFER that they always will or have).

If the 2nd law is true, then intelligent beings cannot violate it any more than anything else. If they can, then there is no 2nd Law.

The bit about "intelligence" is an important one.

Here's a real quote from Rob Crowther from a randomly chosen article that I'm not about to make a blog post about at all:

"Intelligent design theorists argue in favor of design theory based on the recognition of things like the digital information in DNA and the complex molecular machines found in cells," he said. "They do so because invariably we know from experience that complex systems possessing such features always arise from intelligent causes."

Ah, intelligent causes. It all makes sense, or at least it would if we knew what the hell "intelligent causes" is supposed to mean.

Let's take the analogy one step further. Since we invariably we know from experience that complex systems possessing such features always arise from human beings, we can therefore conclude, using Rob Crowther's logic and nothing else, that DNA must have come from human beings. If this sounds silly, it can only be because there is something wrong with Crowther's reasoning.

Let's be a bit more straight-forward about what it really is that the IDists are proposing: DNA (or something) came from a specific intelligent cause that is otherwise known as divine intervention. How often has our experience shown us that complex digital information (or whatever meaningless buzz words they're using) has come from divine intervention? Well, never, actually. We have accounts in ancient texts concering divine intervention, but the reality of these is arguable, and certainly we can't make generalities about divine intervention according to our own daily experience.

So what we've got is this: Lacking any independent evidence for divine intervention, the IDists try to change the subject by pointing to human manufacture as an analogy to certain properties of biological organisms. Yet the notion that humans designed biological organisms is clearly absurd, hence they try to change the subject yet again to a vague and undefined concept they call "intelligence", which could be either divine intervention, or human manufacture, or presumably anything else they want it to mean. It is a mere rhetorical trick to cover for an abysmally bad argument.

DaveScot has quite a store of esoteric scientific facts, but seems to have an abysmal means of connecting them together into anything coherent. He said that dye spread out in water could not be recollected without intelligence. All you need are a few bacteria that sequester the dye in question inside their cells and sink to the bottom. they expend energy in this process, so 2LOT is not violated. 2LOT states that this will not happen on its own, not that unintelligent causes cannot make it happen. Granted, he could claim that the bacteria are the result of design, but this is assuming what he is trying to prove - that life was designed.

His whole post is such a pile of flung feces, I can hardly believe he has 23 pairs of chromosomes. He claimed that the Sun only adds heat to the Earth. Yeah, um, no. Eventually, through many reactions, the X-rays, Ultraviolet, and visible light the Sun plasters the planet with decays into heat, and life does a good job creating temporary order at the expense of this increase in entropy that manifests itself as this decay and dissipation of energy.
Either there's an extra couple of chromosomes in his cells, or he's been staring at the Sun a leetle too long.

The layman's expression is "You can't relive the past."--But you can, if you're very (supernaturally)Intelligent.

The layman's expression is "It's just common sense!"--unless you're intelligent.

Perhaps others have noticed that "layman's" expressions and explanations can be very wrong. Not all things are intuitively obvious. A layman's understanding of entropy and the 2LOT can be very very wrong, especially if learned from Creationists who don't understand these concepts themselves. DaveScot's layman's-level of understanding of the 2LOT gives the impression that he equates "intelligence" with "god-like powers" which is, after all, the strategy of Creationists who have hopped on the ID bandwagon.

The best source of info on the SLOT on the web in my opinion is Frank Lambert's site. Needless to say, no amount of applied intelligence can violate the 2nd law. And despite rank equivocation to the contrary, there is nothing 'unnatural' about intelligence.

However, equivocation (e.g. between thermodynamic and "information" entropy) can easily be accomplished by application of intelligence coupled with a dogmatic mind, as we see in this UD thread from DaveScot.

The poster Valerie seems to have a good head on her shoulders and knows what's she talking about. DaveScot could learn a thing or three.

But he won't.

She'll probably get banned sooner rather than later if she keeps talking sense. She posted just 3 times over the span of the first 16 posts and already Blogczar DaveScot the Terrible is threatening to ban her for her "torrid pace".

Another counter example of a homogeneous solution "unmixing" itself is simply to cool down a solution (of certain solutes) and they will crystallize out giving two distinct phases. Remember those chrome alum crystallization kits? No internal or external information required. The decreased entropy of the crystallized solute is paid for by the decreased enthalpy of bonding between the molecules (producing heat). Of course, the global entropy increases as heat is dissipated into the cold "bath". Voila! Order arises "spontaneously" and the disorder appearing somewhere else, which is how a refrigerator works. Of course, you can't do that with a baked cake, but the example shows just that DS is full of BS and a highly unreliable authority on thermodynamics.
Crystallization is an example of macroscopic order arising in open systems in the absence of an external information source (or intelligence, if you will). Why could that not have happened in a (proto)biological system? If a random aggregation of molecules (a string, perhaps) should arise by chance, even a very small one, that has the feature of serving as a template for its own copying from a pool of related precursors, then that chance copying (replicating) device will soon drive the composition of the population preferentially to resemble itself. Apparent order will arise without troubling the 2nd law. You could say that the order lies in the eye of the beholder, which of course is focused on the local, not the global, scene. The key here is kinetics: things that happen faster happen first and become more prevalent in the population. Sound familiar?
There is nothing theoretically impossible about this idea, and although the odds of it happening are small they are not as astronomically small as Dembski and Sewell would have you believe. These guys, whose aim is to get you to believe otherwise, are harping on examples of "greedy self-assembly", as when a plane assembles itself from a pile of parts. That's a false analogy to what reasonably may occur via "modest self-assembly" at the molecular level, where the only requirement is that something arises as a template for self-replication from an enormous reservoir of simpler components.

Maxwell's Demon used to be thought of as a way for intelligence to violate the 2LOT, until Leo Szilard pointed out the energy requirements of the Demon and his measurement process...

There's a great saying I heard recently that is especially appropriate for DaveScot.

It goes something like: "Anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about."

Another obvious example that guys like DaveScot seem to miss is self-organizing weather systems. Granted, a tornado or hurricane is probably not as complex as the human brain, but they are nonetheless relatvely highly ordered systems that arise spontaneously given the right conditions.

There are 2 possibilties then: 1) Tornados are violations of the 2nd law and are divinely created. This means that every time one occurs, Big G is pissed off at someone (probably some homo or ACLU lawyer) and is opening a can of whoop-ass on them. This also means that meteorologists are atheists and deserve to burn in hell, alongside the Darwinists. 2) DaveScot and the other IDiots don't know s**t about the 2nd law.

One, "sufficiently intelligent" doesn't mean anything. Maybe we're way above being "sufficiently intelligent" enough to unbake a cake ... we just zigged when we should have zagged and missed something.

Second, why would you want to unbake a cake? I mean really, why go to the trouble of getting all of your ingredients together, mixing them all up, preheating, greasing, flouring, and then baking ... just to unbake it? Doesn't make sense to me. Mmmm, chocolate...

He said that dye spread out in water could not be recollected without intelligence. All you need are a few bacteria that sequester the dye in question inside their cells and sink to the bottom.

Or evaporation.

What a genius this guy is, doesn't think it's possible to concentrate solutes without a chemist. Maybe he can explain to us where salt deposits come from.