Entropy and evolution

American Journal of Physics

Volumn 76, Issue 11, 2008, Pages 1031-1033

  Styer, Daniel F ^a  

^a OBERLIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54149117247     PISSN: 00029505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1119/1.2973046     Document Type: Article

References (24)

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8. Other creationist misconceptions concerning entropy are even more distressing. For example, in a public address titled " Why evolution fails. " (Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, 14 November 2007), Professor John Sanford referred to entropy as a type of force, despite the fact that entropy is a scalar measured in joules/kelvin and force is a vector measured in newtons.
9. Thermodynamics, most often applied to fluids, crystals, and magnets, also applies to radiation in thermal equilibrium. An excellent treatment is by Robert E. Kelly, " Thermodynamics of blackbody radiation.," Am. J. Phys. 49, 714-719 (1981).
10. The calculations in this article, like all calculations, are not exact. In the words of one great scientist, "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." (Albert Einstein, Geometry and Experience, address to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 27 January 1921, Methuen & Co., London, 1922.) For example, these calculations neglect temperature variation over the Earth's surface. Improved calculations such as those of D. M. O'Brien, " A yardstick for global entropy-flux.," Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc. 123, 243-260 (1997), take additional details into account and show that the numbers generated in this article are accurate enough to prove their point.
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19. This is the number of strains listed on 21 December 2007 in the National BioResource Project, 〈 www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/ecoli/strain/top/top.jsp 〉.
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