Re: Origin of life, design & thermodynamics

Paul Brown (pdb@novell.uidaho.edu)
Sat, 29 Mar 1997 09:30:05 PST8PDT

Thanks, Pim for your comments.
Regarding the following:

>Pim: Okay, at least we have narrowed the issue to origin of life. I
>am really interested in how the second law should have been violated
>for the creation of original life.

Yes. I believe, given my current understanding, that thermodynamics in
principle only poses a problem for the chemical origin of life. I
suspect that many naturalistic evolution types make valid objections
to abuses of thermodynamic arguments by creationists, but then
go on to assume that there is no problem of any sort
relating thermodynamics and life. I think you had in mind some
typical arguments used by creationists, and I was probably not clear
enough at the outset.

>Pim: RNA is a
> chemical which shows self-reproducing, coded, information and it is
> just chemistry.
>Paul: The second statement is self-contradictory. By definition a
>code is not just chemistry.
> Pim: It isn't ? I would consider DNA a coded chemical.

DNA may be a coded chemical, but this is not the same as
just a chemical, or just chemistry, as the first statement says. This
is an area that I think is very interesting, and probably more
important than chemical thermodynamics in the long run of the origin
of life and evolution. However, my little pea brain can only juggle
so many items at once. Can we put this aside for a while and get back
to this later? I will try and continue a thermodynamic argument in
following posts.

Regards, Paul
Paul D. Brown
Dept. of PSES, University of Idaho
Moscow, ID 83844