I am not a One-on-One contestant, but since Enyart has referred to my arguments in support of his position, I would like to respond. My initial reaction is to wonder how Enyart managed to misconstrue what I said, but Dan Styer’s recent posts show he is also of the opinion that Enyart is misconstruing his position as well.
Recently Stripe spoke of energy turning into information, and I simply commented that was outside of the scope of Styer’s paper. Enyart quotes that exchange as evidence there is confusion about the issue of entropy and evolution. He’s right, but that confusion was not on my part, nor on Styers.
I have no idea on what basis Enyart then says I “wrongly conflated” the two types of entropy. From my first post in this thread I have maintained, along with Johnny (and Styer himself just confirmed this) that Styer’s article was about Thermodynamic entropy, and no other form of entropy.
Then Enyart claimed that I “indicated that there are no known unintelligent means by which energy can be turned into information other than the means addressed by Styer.” Wow! I don’t where that came from. I don’t know what it means to turn energy into information. Is that like turning modern dance into the color red?
In Enyart’s zeal to show that the creationist community is addressing the confusion of thinking that information entropy and heat entropy are fundamentally related, he mentions a recent article in the Sept/Oct 2008 Creation Matters, written by the creationist Timothy Stout. I absolutely concur that such clarification is to be commended. But the real irony is that in this debate Enyart himself recently said in the 1-on-1 (and Styer picked up on this):
Entropy has to do with the move from order to disorder in any organized system, whether it is organized by energy states, ergonomics (arrangement of utensils in your kitchen, etc), aesthetic values, information content, etc.
Thermodynamic entropy in fact has nothing to do with most of the things in this list. Enyart reaffirmed this misunderstanding in his “Real Science Friday” BEL radio show with Fred Williams just a couple days ago. Here is the dialogue, starting at 10:37 into the program:
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Bob: And this is an informal debate. It’s two weeks. And it has to do with evolution, and entropy. And entropy is the idea that things tend to break down. That’s a very layman’s way of saying it.
Fred: Exactly, deteriorate over time. You leave your room to, you know, to your son, and a week later, it’s a mess.
Bob: Yeah, your kids clean their room, and what happens? You have a nice garden. Even your driveway. If you leave a drive… or a parking lot of a shopping center that gets abandoned, and if it’s not maintained, and you look at it 15 years later, it could look almost like a park. It’s like, what’s going on out there, it’s a parking lot. So things tend to break down, and even stars burn out and die.
Fred: That’s right. And you make a good point though on this debate, Bob.
Bob: Well, it’s fun because it started with a American Journal of Physics article that was just published, November 2008 by Dan Styer. And he claimed, after doing a few calculations that there’s no problem for evolution from entropy. There’s no problem. The fact that things break down, and here creatures are evolving from molecules up to man. No problem, the fact that everything tends to break down, that’s not a problem for evolution, where it’s supposed to go the opposite direction. Well I point out that these guys are guilty of confusing thermodynamics, heat, and energy, with information. They’re mixing the two. And when you talk about entropy, and that things tend to break down, you’ve got to separate heat from information, because they’re different.
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Notice that Enyart points to rooms getting messy and parking lots deteriorating as illustrative of entropy. Then he turns right around and mocks the claim that evolution thinks it can go in the opposite direction. He even quotes from part of Stout’s paper (published in a religiously motivated journal) saying the same thing, that the trend must be towards disorder.
Well, with all due respect to the creationists Stout and Bob, the physicist Frank Lambert (who Yorzhik likes), some 9 years before Stout’s article was published, addressed the issue in a journal that is focused solely on the scientific merits of the arguments.
This is what he said there:
The thermodynamic entropy change from human-defined order to disorder in the giant Egyptian stones themselves, in the clothing and books in a room or papers on a desk, and in the millions of cards in the world's casinos is precisely the same: ZERO. (my bold and caps) ... There is no more widespread error in chemistry and physics texts than the identification of a thermodynamic entropy increase with a change in the pattern of a group of macro objects.
Lambert goes on to say that whatever information change may be in such rearrangements, it is not a change in thermodynamic entropy. If Bob wants to speak to messy rooms, then he is obligated to make it very clear that any associated mention of entropy is not speaking of the Second Law. Nowhere does Styer confuse the two, but in two places now Bob, and his cohort Fred Williams, have been guilty of confusing the two, the very thing that Styer (and I and Johnny) stand accused of.
