This is my attempt to understand what happened in my discussion with Tim Wallace. My final conclusion was a surprise!
After much hullabaloo Mr. Wallace finally agreed in a single, clear, direct statement (with only one typo) that the Second Law does allow for a decrease of entropy:
| > Are you willing to make a clear positive statement about the | > Second Law? | | I have already stated unequivocally that my understanding is that the | entropy of an unisolated system can decrease, at the expense of it[s] | surroundings. That this phenomenon routinely takes place as an | integral part of observable biological processes is also quite | apparent.
However as of 1999 September 8, Mr. Wallace's
web page
still states that:
The second law presents an insurmountable problem to the concept of a
natural, mechanistic process ... by which biological life could have arisen
and diversified (also spontaneously) from a non-living, inanimate world.
Since he has not removed or corrected this quote, (and the entire web page for that matter) Mr. Wallace still does not understand that since the Second Law does not prevent decreases of entropy, it cannot be an impediment to evolution. When the going got hot in our discussion, he avoided the question by terminating our conversation.
In our conversation Mr. Wallace first attempted to avoid an agreement on rules of web publication by ignoring it. When I pointed this out he agreed. Later he blatantly violated our written agreement by giving an incomplete posting. He corrected his web site immediately, however. On small points he will be honest but only when forced by law or logic.
HOWEVER
Mr. Wallace violated rule 1 of
our written agreement
which states that
"My complete messages are to be posted, without any modifications."
by
He claims his web site is "intellectually honest", but he is an expert at quoting out of context, as this example demonstrates. His quote was:
| "One problem biologists have faced is the apparent | contradiction by evolution of the second law of | thermodynamics. Systems should decay through time, | giving less, not more, order..." | [Lewin, Roger, "A Downward Slope to Greater Diversity," | Science, vol. 217 (September 24, 1982) p. 1239I went back to the original paper on microfilm and discovered that this quote is incomplete. It should not have ended with an ellipsis, since it is the end of a sentence and the end of a paragraph. The next paragraph begins:
One legitimate response to this challenge is that life on earth is an open system with respect to energy and therefore the process of evolution sidesteps the law's demand for increasing disorder with time.Thus he extracted only the part of the quote that he wanted, and deleted the remainder. The use of ellipsis (where there was a period originally) leads the reader to feel that Lewin was going to continue in the same line. Use of ellipsis and truncating the quote is intellectually dishonest because it (probably intentionally) fools the reader into thinking that Roger Lewin thought there was an unresolvable issue here.
Mr. Wallace claimed to understand that the Second Law does not have any contradiction with evolution or living processes but he at the same presented this quote. He repeatedly refused to clarify how there was a problem, and then came back and said there was a problem. This makes him inconsistent. I would understand this if it had happened only one time, but the entire conversation was waffling on his part.
At his web site one can see that (as of 1999 Sep 8 11pm) he says:
It isn't clear to me what has given you the impression that I do not understand that the entropy of an unisolated system can decrease, at the expense of its surroundings, or that I am ignoring the fact. [my emphasis]the original message said increase.
In other words, Mr. Wallace altered the conversation to make it appear that neither of us had made a mistake. When I saw the mistake I pointed it out. Although he agreed it took numerous rounds to get him to clarify his statements, and until the very end he kept implying that he thinks that entropy decreases are rare events.
Mr. Wallace consistently refused to respond to simple scientific questions. He was unwilling to say what would happen to a hot jar of water. He was unwilling or unable to answer a simple question about how to determine when two DNA sequences are of the same "kind" (24). (Notably this is not a concept in modern biology.) His claim is that he does not want a teacher/student relationship, which immediately implies to me that he is unwilling to learn anything new.
Mr. Wallace attempted several times to redefine terms to suit his purposes. The most blatant attempt was to assume that mutations are always deleterious. This is a clear case of assuming what he wants to prove (that information gain is impossible because genetic sequences would always decay). He avoided acknowledging this by attacking me personally.
I have had plenty of scientific arguments over the net. The discussion with Mr. wallace was strikingly different because of his (I infer) intentional lack of focus (ie redirecting the conversation away from his weak points) and his personal attacks. I have yet to meet a real scientist who does this. It does no service to his cause.
Tim Wallace's tactics:
Mr. Wallace kept changing his statements and I could not get clear statements from him. It is for this reason that I would not agree about his understanding, which he bitterly complains about several times on his web site. I have no idea what a person is thinking without them making a clear statement. Mr. Wallaces statements were anything but clear and he waffled numerous times. Do entropy decreases occur frequently? Mr. Wallace said:
I do not (to my knowledge) deny the thermodynamic *possibility* of the entropy decrease you describe.When I said that was vague and thought he meant by the asterisks that it is unlikely he responded:
Sorry, I don't mean to be vague: I mean to emphasize that by being a "possibility" it is not also ipso facto an "inevitability," or "spontaneous," or a likely "causeless event." There is a significant difference between the two, and there is no basis for taking for granted that something that is thermodynamically possible is ipso facto highly probable, inevitable, or spontaneous in nature.This verbiage did not address the point, and further implied that he thought it unlikely. I said:
I'm interpreting your statements to mean that you think that entropy decreases don't occur often.How did he respond? He ignored this statement and said:
Let's cut to the chase...so he avoided the issue. His very next statement was:
I do indeed understand that the entropy of an unisolated system can increase, at the expense of the rest of the universe.which was the same error we had just spent several messages clearing up! So by his 6th message he still had not made a clear statement!
Of course, under these circumstances I was not willing to agree to a statement about what he thinks. (Notably, not a statement of facts about the world!)
Mr. Wallace seems to have made a classical abusive mistake here. After being vague and inconsistent, he demanded that I should now understand what he is thinking (as opposed to what the science is!) and then he jumped on me for not agreeing that I knew what he was thinking. That is, he demanded mind reading and when I "failed" he became verbally abusive.
Well. That certainly cleared the air. Having had personal experiences with an abusive personality, I can attest that Mr. Wallace is verbally abusive.
For those interested, the book The Verbally Abusive Relationship : How to Recognize It and How to Respond by Patricia Evans is an excellent exposition of verbal abuse. One reader said: "The more I defend myself and speak the truth, the more abusive he becomes". This is exactly my and other people's experience with Mr. Wallace.
Mr. Wallace, please read the book.
Sincerely yours,Dr. Thomas D. Schneider
National Cancer Institute
Laboratory of Experimental and Computational Biology
Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201
toms@ncifcrf.gov
permanent email: toms@alum.mit.edu
http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/
Getting to the point again, Mr. Wallace apparently now agrees that entropy decreases can occur, although he continues to hedge in his verbose way about the probability of decreases. In fact, such decreases occur continuously in many situations, one example being the formation of rock candy, which he refused to have a complete and clear discussion about. In any case, this means that this major creationist objection to evolution is untenable, not only (as generally stated) because of the solar/heat flux on the earth but rather because entropy decreases do occur. (Note that it does not mean that evolution has to occur, as Mr. Wallace incorrectly stated, just that it is possible.) However, in his response he still claims that there is a problem. Mr. Wallace has yet to state clearly and concisely the problem he claims that the Second law creates for evolution.
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