evolutionary theory and statistical thermodynamics are not using the same data to test their hypotheses.

To the universe, an eye is not 'nice': it's just one more random configuration.

@Cerberus It's not particularly random or crazy for an eye to have evolved. Eye-like structure have evolve independently something like 40 times among life forms on earth.

Yeah.

I would say, the current state of configurations in existence is caused by, and predictable based on, the configurations that existed before it.

@Cerberus I think the usual rejoinder to that is that evolutionary processes (selection of successful morphology) increases the possibility of order. That is, entropy works for things like gasses, but not at the level of organisms (or selection of traits in organisms' offspring).

@Cerberus choosing which child survives is not the same situation as the possibilities of air molecules in a room.

> I think the usual rejoinder to that is that evolutionary processes (selection of successful morphology) increases the possibility of order.

But only of order as decided by us, humans.

@Mitch Why not?

Entropy might be a reasonable concept to use if you have a whole bunch of -spiders- in a room and you want to know the likelihood that your side o the room will be left alone.

(spoiler alert: not likely)

Still, it seems to depend on human judgement as to what's nice and what isn't. Nice in the sense of ordered.

So I wonder how usable that is with respect to concept like the expanding universe.

I'm still stuck in the definition phase.

@Cerberus Because the rules for probability of positions of molecules in a room is not the same as which morphological feature of a genetic mutation child will allow it to survive as opposed to another mutation.

two very different mechanisms

@Cerberus It is unclear to me how expansion of the universe and time are ...

@Cerberus Well, first off, just because it's high on the table and not on the ground, it has this potential energy it can give off to the universe and increase entropy that it doesn't. Entropy is the number of random configurations of interacting matter. Say, imagine gas molecules as balls. O2 would be two balls of oxygen, and N2 would be two balls of nitrogen. You could measure entropy if you could measure all the ways an O2 and an N2 molecule could collide [...]

I get that one can -define- time to be the increase in entropy.

But then that is a slightly different idea of time than @M.A.R.'s 1st concept of time, the human perception of it.

[...] (both from the rear ends, or one colliding with the middle of the other molecule like a T-shape, are two of these possible 'pre-collision' arrangements) These are important really because they tell you in how many ways can one molecule transfer energy to another.

Now, if they reacted to produce the same amount of NO molecules, two NO molecules would have way more ways of colliding with each other, because the balls the molecules consist of are different, they're no longer symmetrical

Also, even if the universe starts to shrink, you'd still locally drop a cup and shatter it, it still ain't gonna magically form a nice cup out of a thousand shards.

@Mitch Yeah it's a very simplistic look at entropy

I think we should move on to enthalpy.

Entropy bores me

Entropy is like a gin and tonic

Oh yeah? Well I wanna talk about Gibbs and Helmholtz!

@Mitch Anything is different from anything else. But both can be praedicted if you know the earlier configurations of particles.

Enthalpy is like a margarita, with salt on the rim, a little umbrella, riding a bucking horse, as you're parachuting from a helicopter.

@M.A.R. Gibbs? That guy can go to hell!

@M.A.R. But why is that significant?

@Cerberus OK. Sure. But those are only two very broad similarities of many scientific concepts. But there are many other details that are very different.

@Cerberus There are more ways for things to be not symmetrical than there are to be symmetrical.

@Cerberus Only because we saw some reactions happen, and they seemed to get this 'energy to happen' from somewhere: They weren't supposed to be spontaneous, yet they were, because apparently the universe prefers the processes that end up making things more random

@Mitch So?

@Cerberus Your skepticism seems a bit superficial.

There more ways for a phone number to be not 4651 than there are for it to be 4651

@Cerberus yes

This drive to add to the possible combinations seems an inherent part of the fabric of the universe AFAIK; you can't explain it with stuff that agrees more with common sense

@Mitch No, I am trying to get past a possible problem in the definition phase (call it circularity).

@M.A.R. My problem is that "more random" and "more orderly" seem to exist only when viewing through human spectacles.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in link text in answer, pattern-matching website in answer, potentially bad asn for hostname in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (161): Which is correct, "sales price" or "sale price"? by Jaybliss on english.SE

@Cerberus In the cup example, yes. When it comes to reactions and molecules, not really because they're colliding all the time, nothing is stopping them from colliding

Then I think bringing evolution into it is going to make the explanation of definitions a lot harder. You might as well bring orbital dynamics into it.

I don't care about evolution.

A shattered cup could simply lose entropy by getting colder

@Cerberus Then let's ignore it.

But perhaps this topic is too complex for treatment in a chat room.

It doesn't have to be coming back together to make a nice-looking cup

@Mitch OK I'll convert to ID.

@M.A.R. That sounds awful

@Mitch eh, no it doesn't

@Cerberus There are other ...what's the opposite of a defense... of ID. other ways to refute ID.

@Cerberus Not sure, you're just saying that you might be missing something because lots of things can happen to shattered cups to lose entropy, and coming back to a whole is very unlikely compared to all the alternative scenarios

To which I say, YES!

@M.A.R. Oh it does. If you have hot tea in it. The tea is ruined.

@Mitch No, thanks to you I'm now a staunch believer.

Cold tea is as depressing as...

@Mitch evolution doesn't have tea in it

as depressing as LOSING A FULL HOUR OF EFFING SLEEP

@Mitch Make it two, it's 2 a.m. here

@Cerberus What is it they say... you can't help someone reason out of a bad idea that they didn't reason themselves into.

@M.A.R. when did it happen to you? For me it was two days ago and I wish I had you universal entropy reverser to go back and stop them.

@Cerberus So yeah, shattered cups coming back together are the layman's idea of decreasing entropy, "nice" means nothing to the universe

@Mitch Hmm.

@Mitch Losing sleep? All the time

@M.A.R. But does "order"?

@Cerberus There's only faith in ID because their reasoning is: evolution seems improbable (like all these entropy arguments, the eye is too complex to have been randomly assembled, etc etc) (I find this argument at a very loose level, sightly compelling, but I've already said quite enough to show you that evolution is sufficiently different fron entropy). But let's say for the moment that yes, the eye is way too complex to be predictied (or explained) by evolution...

@Cerberus "order" and "disorder" are also laymen interpretations of entropy, as I said, it's about the number of possible energy transfers in a system. And when you're looking at a system, you're looking at so many particles that statistical analyses are always about probabilities (in addition to the inevitable "probability" aspect of quantum mechanics for the particles themselves). I mean, look at the Boltzmann distribution. We're saying gases behave probabilistically [...]

@Mitch I do not find it compelling at all.

[...] because there are so many particles that you use probabilities to show their behavior overall

And if you're saying these increasingly random possible energy transfers are favorable, it's because they're happening to the molecules right there

@M.A.R. Okay the number of possible energy transfers in a system.

The ID argument then follows...'Then it must have been designed. And that design must have been by a deity. And that deity is the father of Jesus. Also Jesus is a deity. And his mom is a saint. Literally. I mean she said that she had this dream... anyway it's complicated'

Are you kids talking about thermodynamics again?

What counts as a single transfer, and how do you distinguish one transfer from a different transfer?

I just turn my back for a few hours...

@M.A.R. Tip: use a shift-enter in your message to bypass the character limit (but markdown won't work in your message any more, like bold and italics).

@Cerberus A collision, a reaction, the different sorts of movements of molecules and the atoms in molecules

Just that first step is a non-sequitur. The reasonable scientific approach would be to come up with an alternative hypothesis that explains the eye and fits other data too. Saying there has to be a designer just doesn't follow.

@Cerberus I know, but muitiline requires two paragraphs, and when you write one that's too long you can't just shift+enter because the system won't accept it that way

@Mitch Yeah I don't think that theory is even worth considering.

@Cerberus You're the one that brought it up. Are you just trying to extract from us a good reason why it should not be compelling?

@M.A.R. What do you mean "not accept"?

@Conrado Look man I tried to get them to talk about enthalpy but no takers.

@Mitch Yeah, it's skipping quite a few steps, best-case scenario

@Cerberus What?

all these years

@Mitch I just mentioned it because it uses a flawed type of argument, which I might call circularity and/or anthropocentrism.

I had no idea

for real?

@Cerberus try it with a lorem ipsum. If you put a full paragraph there and then just shift+enter, it'd still give the 500-character limit error message

@Mitch I mean the ID theory. It's not worth our time.

@M.A.R. Sure, you need some text after the shift+enter.

@Cerberus but you're the one who brought up ID. Do you think they have -other- arguments?

I usually just add the shift-enter at some random place between two sentences.

@Cerberus Well I can type 600 characters but don't expect me to put a filler there! Too lazy

@Mitch I don't know? What do you mean by other, and why should we care about their arguments?

@Cerberus Also too lazy to do that

@M.A.R. Oh. So what good does it do me?

But...you're not too lazy to type [...] and then [...] again.

@Cerberus I'm having a hard time following your objections.

@Mitch sure they do, but a lot of it is in Arabic and Sanskrit and designer knows what else and never got translated or gained traction during the Renaissance

@Mitch To what?

@Cerberus yeah

The natural sciences progressed rapidly and the humanities have always stagnated in comparison. Not that there hasn't been progress, but it's been sooo slow

Progress...

...

DRAMATIC ECHO

Like I still don't know if I should litter biodegradable materials

Do we want the carbon cycle to continue or what

I mean, progress is a concept of the natural sciences.

I guess you could say that, but I really wish the philosophers could at least agree on something

And how do you determine the speed of progress.

For example, the things we know about the subjects of the humanities have increased and increased, at ever increasing speeds.

But is that progress?

No for the most part because there are competing schools of thought

That depends on the topic.

Even so, are two valid perspectives not better than one?

So unless you mean the parts that do resemble the natural sciences, like finding a correlation between one human behavior and the other and making that part of the future discussions, I guess not

Don't you mean the social sciences?

Both I guess

They've seemed hard to distinguish for me sometimes

The humanities are not sciences.

Even though some try to appear that way.

And I'm not sure to what extent a concept of linearity (x comes after y and x is better than y) even fully applies. It does apply to a limited extent at least.

Meh, I'm not sure either, so I'm not gonna say anything further so I won't make an idiot of myself

For example, we have a better etymological etymological dictionary of Latin now than a couple of years ago.

Now, entropies and cups, I can go on about that for hours

And a ton of articles have appeared to understand certain poems by Catullus better.

And attitudes of the Ancients towards sexuality.

How was it?

Different!

But we can infer things about the nature of human sexuality from it.

I think they were both laxer and firmer with it than today

What things may be universal, what things seem universal but only appeared in the Middle Ages.

@M.A.R. Depends on what place you compare them with.

Compared to modern Europe, I would say they were stricter in almost all respects.

Except sex with minors.

I mean, whenever and wherever I've read about this stuff it seemed that this community and that had it better worked out than we have today

Sometimes, in some ways.

But that may be survivorship bias

I think their architecture was better than 21st-century architecture, aesthetically.

You probably hear mostly about ideas that did make sense, which is why they stood the test of time?

Yes.

But, don't worry, we also have a lot of nonsense.

thumbs up

I still wonder how they will think of us in the near and far future when they discover people willfully got themselves in harm's way

Or maybe they will be still so decadent as to have such attitudes rampant

@M.A.R. In harm's way?

You mean things like drugs and driving cars?

OK, this is weird. There's a place called "La Margarita", in Russian (Ла Маргарита), in a Mexican town called Las Vacas ("The Cows").

google.com/maps/place/…

Whoosh.

Has its own airstrip.

Can such things be?

Umm, teacher? Are we supposed to know what Prof. Lawler is talking about?