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Origins Mini-Series Airs Tonight
SeaDour writes "The much-anticipated NOVA mini-series Origins begins tonight on PBS (check local listings for time). Hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the ambitious show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again, "blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself." MSNBC has an interesting write-up on the show that's been four years in the making."
> It's not just the "ultra religious" who have concerns about the feasibility of macroevolution resulting in the world as we know it. Take a look at Darwin on Trial or Darwin's Black Box, both written by credible scientists, not religious fanatics.
FYI, Phillip E. Johnson is a retired law professor, not a credible scientist.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You should be able to find in on torrent sites like suprnova.org within a few days.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
If you miss the show, you can still get it on DVD and VHS sometime around November 15th from here.
Increasing numbers of scientists are rejecting Darwinian macroevolution due to lack of evidence.
And two of them are biologists.
Real biologists other than the fabulously foolish punctuationalist (and Marxist character assassin of E.O. Wilson) Stephen Jay Gould don't distinguish "macroevolution" from "microevolution". The "Cambrian explosion" is a mere artifact caused because organisms existing before the Cambrian didn't have shells that readily fossilize.
The explanatory power of neo-Darwinism has the potential to finally give us power over our own lives, and predictably, Michael Behe and his ilk are still making the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": "I can't conceive how an eye ^W^W a partial rotor could be favored by natural selection, so, since I can't figure it out, there must be a God ^W^W an Intelligent Designer."
Two hundred years ago William Paley couldn't conceive of how such an instrument of perfection as an eye could be formed by the blind processes of natural selection -- and he had a decent excuse, he lived before Darwin; but today we have the Darwinian model and today we have credible computer model of precisely how an eye could evolve, and how even rudimentary and partial eyes can be advantageous to an organism. There's no longer a credible excuse to prefer superstition.
So the "Intelligent Design" crowd waves their hands and says, well, ignore those eyes, but what about free-spinning rotors powering bacterial flagella? What about them? A partial rotor able to rotate through only, say, 180 degrees is still advantageous to any bacterium that needs to move.
Three billion years of evolution gives plenty of time -- and plenty of trials that didn't work out so well, to explain the variety of life of earth.
If you need the security blanket of a God, well, enjoy it. But don't pretend your emotional needs are science.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I actually know Mr Johnson through his son...and I would say he falls into the 'religious fanatic' area.
James Ussher (1581-1656) Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, etc. established the first day of creation as Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. He did this through calculation of the many "begats"in the Bible as well as correlation with Middle Eastern history. His calculations were actually incorporated into an authorized version fo the Bible published in 1701. If you google his name be sure to spell it "Ussher".
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The Earth is not a closed system. We are part of a driven out-of equilibrium system, with the sun's energy hitting our planet in a directed way and re-radiating in an isotropic way. Out of equilibrium process can create local regions of increasing order at the expense of dumping their entropy elsewhere.
Forget evolution for a minute and ask how anything grows at all. From a thermodynamic perspective, how does an acorn+soil+water+air become an oak tree? Can it be possible without appealing to the supernatural? Yes. The sun's energy comes in, and performs useful work, some energy becomes chemically stored through combinations of water and carbon dioxide in cellulose and carbohydrates plus oxygen, before the rest of the energy is re-radiated as mostly infrared back out to the environment. Overall this process increases the entropy of the universe (even though locally the oak tree becomes more ordered than soil+water+air), but most of that entropy is radiated away from the earth.
This is a coarse-level thermodynamic description, not a biological description, but your question was on the thermodynamic possibility. You'll notice that none of what I said here directly addresses where the genetic information and enzymes, etc. in the acorn came from, but it should show you an example where natural physical dynamics produce local order in an out-of equilibrium system. This can, in principle, be used to support the theory of evolution.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
This is an old canard; there is no conflict between the 2nd law and evolution. As you stated, entropy increases in a CLOSED system. The earth is not closed as energy is constantly streaming into it from an external source--the Sun.
o ns .html#thermo
Think about development. When a single-celled embryo differentiates into an adult multicellular creature--does this contradict the 2nd law? I suppose you might say something about the developmental program requiring the information in the DNA...
OK, a better example is quoted here: "Order from disorder is common in nonliving systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightning are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system."
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconcepti
And of course, talkorigins has plenty of other good links on this topic:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/thermo.html
I have been through those arguement a lot. Knowing a lot of fundies from being in a baptist congregation. I'd have to say none of them have a single clue about science. The ones who argue for creationism here are more intelllegent but have no idea how ludicrous their arguments sound to 1- a statician 2- a biologist 3- logistician 4- geneticist. I am a little of each and it sounds liek utter BS even though I'm a baptists.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
This is not practiced by the catholic church.
Your definition of creationism being something like "God created / is the cause of the universe etc." is not in conflict with science.
Fundamentalists believe that everything was created exactly (not figuratively) as it says in Genesis. If you believe in the Big Bang or that the Earth is more than 5000 years old etc. then you are not a fundamentalist.