Gardeners delight - 2nd law of thermodynamics negates weeds!

After a while you get tired of trying to explain biology and especially evolution to people outside of the field, and this includes mathematicians like Granville Sewell. In a recent publication GS argues that the 2nd law of thermodynamics negates evolution because order increases and the 2nd law says entropy, disorder, must increase. Ah, but as has been pointed out to the critics of evolution every single time this comes up, the Earth is not a closed system which this law refers to. There's a constant input of energy. But Granville gets clever and says he's done the math to show that when "…all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments,[and] it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here."
Now the Phactor isn't a physicist or a mathematician, but let me have a crack at explaining this. Life itself has the ability to capture energy and grow which decreases entropy, locally, for a relatively short (on a cosmic scale) period of time. Life doesn't violate the 2nd law, it just slows down the increase in entropy, and no law says you can't do that. Eventually all the energy captured dissipates as heat increasing entropy. What Granville is arguing is that life is not possible, let alone evolution. Since he sees nothing entering the Earth that can increase order, evolution must be invalid. Let’s simplify things. Granville doesn’t understand biology or how life works at all, so he’s going to reject the whole thing. When a mathematician tries to unexplain biology, 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4, it equals baloney.
But as the Panda's Thumb pointed out this is great news for gardeners because weeds can't grow and increase in numbers in your garden. And Granville's got the mathematical proof! But here’s what will happen. This foolish paper, even after being thoroughly sliced and diced by better and more mathematical minds than mine, will become the darling citation of creationists and it will be touted as “science” demonstrating why evolution is invalid.

What did sauropods have for breakfast?

One of the more creative presentations at this year's recent botanical meetings was a study on sauropod herbivory by Dr. Carole Gee. Since sauropods were the most massive animals to ever live on land, they had to eat a lot (hundreds of kilos a day) and they were strict vegetatians (herbivores). Presently the largest land animals either eat grass, e.g., bison, or browse tree leaves, e.g., giraffes, and these are all flowering plants now. But back in the Late Jurassic (152 million years ago) the choices were very different and no body had ever thought about the different energy contents of the plants sauropods had to choose among.

Many of the prominent groups of plants from the Late Jurassic survive today, horsetails, ferns, ginkgoes, diverse conifers, and cycads, so assuming modern members of these groups still retain the basic characteristics of their ancestors, the energy content per unit of plant mass can be compared.

Rather surprisingly horsetails had the highest energy content, even higher than modern grasses. Next came Araucarias (monkey puzzle trees and Norfolk Island pines) and ginkgoes, both actually better food than the leaves of modern forest trees. Another talk provided us with a view of the rather open savanna-like forest structure of araucarias based on large numbers of fossil tree stumps preserved in volcanic ash. A perfect place for large sauropods to graze among the tree tops.

Cycads with their tough, hard foliage had the least energy content, and since they are also slow growing, they simply don't produce much leaf material. Today cycads are minor elements of tropical and subtropical communities, but back in the Jurassic they made up about 20%. A couple of ferns with ancient lineages, like cinnamon fern, were pretty good sauropod food, but other more modern ferns have pretty low nutritional levels.

So what good is this? Well, curious minds want to know how ecology worked in the past.