Dembski's Obsessive Complaints of Obsession

Of course, let's remember that they tried to sneak in Dembski's expertise in the amicus that was thrown out: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/dover_judge_str.html

How much of Dembski's writing is smoke and mirrors? It seems to be fooling his hard core fans (others get censored off his site).

I was reading a post of his, "Retrospective Fallacy":
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/442

Miller accused Dembski of a retrospective fallacy, which is like "equating the odds of drawing two pairs in poker with the odds of drawing a particular two-pair hand - say a pair of red queens, a pair of black 10s and the ace of clubs... demanding a particular outcome, as opposed to a functional outcome,..."

Dembski does look like he deals with the substance here: "... charge is unwarranted. In fact, I've explicitly countered this concern in my writings (notably in section 5.10 of No Free Lunch, where I assign probabilities in terms of perturbation tolerance and perturbation identity factors --- these factors take into account variants/perturbations of tokens that belong to the same functional type)."

If I didn't suspect I was getting fooled, I'd believe him.

So, how am I getting fooled by Dembski?

I'm just a suspiciously confused reader trying to make sense of both sides and without enough time to tackle all the relevant writings noted.

I know Dembski has to be wrong about "No Free Lunch" and it's relationship to genetic algorithms because if he were right, then genetic algorithims wouldn't work any better than "brute searches"... but they do work better.

"Among the many posts I've deleted from the previous thread ..."

What an amazing way to begin a sentence.

"... are those vindicating Shallit on the grounds that because the Thomas More Law Center removed me as an expert witness ..."

I'm starting to get the picture here. One, Dembski purges dissent routinely. No biggie I guess. I mean it's his blog, his editorial voice. Two, the disagreement is heavy enough that Dembski removes "many" postings for all kinds of reasons. I don't think he's suggesting that the number was unusual in this particular thread. He gets a lot of stuff he does not like and makes sure to delete it. Three, among the deleted postings were those that addressed a point that he doesn't dismiss as tasteless or irrelevant. He just wants to make sure that only his side is presented.

What else do you need to see? I mean, what a jackass.

Also, if Dembski is indeed interested to see what Shallit might have said in his deposition, it can rather easily be inferred from Shallit's expert report to the court, which is available online on at least two sites, for example at Talk Reason (see the What Is New section there) as well as on the NCSE site here.
Anybody who has read this Shallit's devastating critique of Dembski will conclude that Dembski's supposition regarding ACLU's and Shallit's "embarrassment" is pure fantasy. If somebody should be embarrassed, it certainly is not Shallit. Shallit's well substantiated analysis of Dembski as a scientist or mathematician reveals a picture of a man obsessed with a mania of greatness not supported by any actual achievements. Of course, it is known from experience that Dembski is never embarrassed by any revelation of the emptiness of his output, so his preposterous claim about Shallit's alleged embarrassment adds little new to what is known about Dembski to everybody except for his usual admirers from ID crowd.

"in section 5.10 of No Free Lunch, where I assign probabilities in terms of perturbation tolerance and perturbation identity factors --- these factors take into account variants/perturbations of tokens that belong to the same functional type)."

AR wrote: "Just another example of Dembski's penchant for inventing seemingly meaningful new terms which in fact are often useless. His "perturbation factor" is essentially nothing more that the well known "redundancy" introduced already by Shannon ..."

He didn't make that "perturbation factor" term up. There are "perturbation factors" in my 3D graphics software for creating noisy textures in computer generated images. However, I don't understand his use of the term in regards to denying a "retrospective fallacy." I haven't read his "No Free Lunch" yet and see no value in doing so yet.

Shallit is "obsessed" with Dembski, yet still finds time to publish in the literature.

There are "perturbation factors" in my 3D graphics software for creating noisy textures in computer generated images.

Dembski isn't doing anything on his site that Winston Smith didn't do every day, to make his living. And both Dembski and Smith are doing it for exactly the same reason.

Orwell, though, seemed to think that if *anyone at all* should contradict the Official Story, then it wouldn't fly and the system would collapse - to the point where Smith himself needed to be subjected to torture. Orwell may not have been cynical enough to recognize the "Sal Cordova factor" in all this: in censoring reality entirely away, Dembski has created the sort of shrine True Believers feel comfortable, unthreatened, and uplifted praying at.

Dembski understands intuitively that if HE only hears what he wants to hear and it works for him, it will work for many others for the same reason. I do hope, though, that the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has discovered cordless microphones.

Every piece of information I discover about Dembski, including the contents of his own blog, convinces me even more that the guy's ego is the size of a small planet but has little more resilience than an over-fried poppadum. The exceptional defensiveness over perceived personal slights reminds me of the story of the U.S. senator back in the 1970s who was called the "dumbest man in the Senate" in a magazine article -- and who promptly called a press conference to deny the accusation.

Metanexus We offered Rob Pennock the opportunity to publish his own statement in response to Bill Dembski, but he has chosen to "turn the other cheek."

According to Pigliucci and Pennock, intelligent design proponents are not scholars to be engaged on the intellectual merits of their case. Rather, they are charlatans to be discredited, silenced, and stopped. That's the whole point of _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_.

...but has little more resilience than an over-fried poppadum

Oh, it's just what's happening at the various UFO conventions, this carping about obsessive gov't and scientific bad-guys keeping the evidence and the truth down. What are you going to do when you have no evidence, actually admit to the rank and file that we're just hoping something will come along some time? One needs a reason to go on, both for oneself and for the sheep, and that reason is that Jeff Shallit, et al, "are so concerned about the threat of ID that they are actually obsessed with ID and with Dembski".

No point in psychoanalyzing it, without a willing subject. Is Dembski monomaniacal, or just backed into a desperate little corner from which he hopes vainly to come out triumphant? Both? We don't know, the fact is that scientifically there is little difference between the two, with Dembski's empirical vapidity being the real issue.

Poor Raymond Dart, a genuine victim of elitist scientists in the first half of the 20th century, was beaten down by the system. What did he and his few supporters do? Science, including science supporting the Taung baby as being nearly on the ancestral line to humans (still not certain, but a good model at least). Likewise, J. Harlen Bretz with his Missoula Flood went on to do more science in the face of opposition. If these guys could have hit back more at the establishment they may have done so, but the crucial thing is that they worked on corroborating their concepts rather than on honing their PR.

That Dembski does little but repeat himself and whine puts him solidly in the pseudoscience camp. Nothing new, that, but his response to his nonsense does identify him closely with the losers who can do nothing except carp, whine, and blame others when their widely-known ideas manage to convert almost no one in the science community (btw, why does he want the approval of such "close-minded" people anyhow?). He writes what works, and what works is avoiding all sound criticisms of his claims.

Little wonder that even National Review has taken to noting that one can write little about ID without confronting the fact of its pervasive dishonesty.

William Dembski has this odd habit when someone publishes a criticism of his writings. Rather than engage in substantive refutation of those criticisms, he often claims either to be the victim of some cosmic unfairness by the Darwinian Inquisition, or he claims that the person criticizing him is obsessed with him. As an example of the first, I point you to his frantic complaints of copyright violation and ethical mistreatment by Rob Pennock in early 2002, after Pennock had included a couple of essays of his in an anthology he edited called Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics. He accused Pennock of copyright infringement, but in fact he had the written permission of the actual copyright owners, Metanexus. The owners of Metanexus published a public exoneration of Pennock in the matter.

Pennock has just published _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ with MIT Press. It includes two essays by me. Pennock never contacted me about their inclusion. Indeed, I only learned of their inclusion after his volume was published and became available to the public last week. It appears that Pennock and MIT Press are legally in the clear -- Pennock selected pieces for which he was able to obtain copyright permissions without having to consult me.

Pennock chose a popular 2,000 word essay of mine titled "Who's Got the Magic?" and followed it with a 9,000-word rebuttal by him titled "The Wizards of ID." For the other essay of mine, Pennock chose "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information," which was a popular piece on information theory that's now five years old. I've written much on that topic since then, and the essay itself is now outdated. Moreover, Pennock followed that essay with three critical responses. One of those responses, by Elliott Sober, was a lengthy technical review (from the journal _Philosophy of Science_) of my technical monograph _The Design Inference_ (Cambridge University Press, 1998). No portion of that monograph or anything comparable from my work was included in Pennock's book. Finally, I was given no chance to respond to my critics.

For an example of the second strategy, I point you to his having called Richard Wein, Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit his "internet stalkers" because they - gasp! - read and criticized his work. And in public. The nerve of these people, actually analyzing and critiquing the work of a scholar! He hasn't done much to actually answer their critiques, mind you, but he's called them "obsessed" and it appears that he thinks that actually defeats their arguments.

Martin: Ooh, I think I understand ... [takes a pencil and starts writing] the potential for mischief varies inversely with one's proximity to the authority figure!

Dembski, unable to escape his religious convictions, can't abandon his delusion that he can SEE obvious design in nature, and can't abandon his delusion that he is merely expressing that truth mathematically. It is his intuition that he is expressing a plain truth which informs his opinion that his mathematics cannot be wrong, and prevents him from being able to address the possibility that a dissenter has seen a flaw in his reasoning.

Just to get this bit clear, I belatedly realized that NCSE does have Jeff Shallit's deposition, along with 30 other depositions (I counted) that have been taken in the Kitzmiller case. I think we didn't put them all online (except for a few key fact witness depositions) because each deposition is hundreds of pages long, and often the PDFs we have are just flat scans of paper copies, which can end up being quite large.

As for Dembski's cries about "Let Shallit and the ACLU make his deposition public" (emphasis original) -- the deposition is part of the public record, and has been since August 2005, when it was filed as part of the plaintiffs' brief opposing summary judgement! (specifically, Appendix III, Tab O).

Nick

Nick, I did not find that appendix as part of the linked PDF. Obviously at some point a complete seet of files will need to be created as in some of the other key losses by creationists.

It's interesting that a prominent member of a group which is touting academic freedom and the need for all sides to be heard is a person who routinely deletes from his site anything that he happens to think is incorrect for whatever reason. All sides have a right to be heard as long as they don't disagree with Bill Dembski, apparently. I suppose that'll be the standard for peer review when "design theory" triumphs. Something to look forward to.

(long-time lurker, first time comment-poster, easy on the noob)

The revelation that struck me as I read the comments to that thread was that the sycophancy on display at Demski's blog would make me want to be violently ill even if I agreed with him. The fact that I don't gives me the same impulse - but tempers it with a bit of relief, that the other side seems to consist chiefly of megalomaniacal idols and fawning idolators, rather than anyone interested in any actual discourse.

It seems to me that Demski enables comments on his blog not for discussion, but for adulation. If your comment doesn't soothe his ego, you're outta there. I'd like to think that even if I was so spectacularly scientifically misinformed as to reject evolution, I'd still recognize Demski as a disgusting prick.

It's interesting that a prominent member of a group which is touting academic freedom and the need for all sides to be heard is a person who routinely deletes from his site anything that he happens to think is incorrect for whatever reason.

What is more interesting is: why don't pro-science organizations work diligently to make this unfavorable unflattering fact about Bill "Professional Hypocrite and Liar" Dembski widely known to the media and public?

No one cares what Dembski obsesses about. And no one should care. That's not what makes Dembski a profoundly disturbing human being.

There's seems to be a misunderstanding of some facts here. Dembski did not accuse Pennock and the publishers of Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics of copyright infringement. In his article How Not To Debate Intelligent Design he writes: Pennock has just published _Intelligent Design Creationists and Their Critics_ with MIT Press. It includes two essays by me. Pennock never contacted me about their inclusion. Indeed, I only learned of their inclusion after his volume was published and became available to the public last week. It appears that Pennock and MIT Press are legally in the clear --- Pennock selected pieces for which he was able to obtain copyright permissions without having to consult me.

Perhaps ID critics would be happier if Dembski and others would just roll over when the likes of Pennock play the kind of games they play with Dembski's work. The issue with the Pennock volume was one of fairness and ethical (read professional) treatment. In the same article referenced above, Dembski notes that: Pennock chose a popular 2,000 word essay of mine titled "Who's Got the Magic?" and followed it with a 9,000-word rebuttal by him titled "The Wizards of ID." For the other essay of mine, Pennock chose "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information," which was a popular piece on information theory that's now five years old. I've written much on that topic since then, and the essay itself is now outdated. Moreover, Pennock followed that essay with three critical responses. One of those responses, by Elliott Sober, was a lengthy technical review (from the journal _Philosophy of Science_) of my technical monograph _The Design Inference_ (Cambridge University Press, 1998). No portion of that monograph or anything comparable from my work was included in Pennock's book. Finally, I was given no chance to respond to my critics.

Richard Wein wrote some 37,000 word "rebuttal" to Dembski's book No Free Lunch.(it is my understanding that that article is now archived somewhere on Talk.Origins.) In response, Dembski wrote Obsessively Criticized but Scarcely Refuted: A Response to Richard Wein. And The Fantasy Life of Richard Wein. To say that Dembski "hasn't done much to answer their critques" and that he only calls them "obsessed" is simply false. Dembski's website has a long list of articles with detailed responses to several of his critics.

This is not the actions of a scholar, they are the actions of an egomaniac who hates to be questioned.

I agree that Billy is an ego freak. I don't think he "hates to be questioned", however. Rather, he is simply thrilled when he gets to pull the plug on his critics or when he gets the chance to poot in their faces and run away. He has learned that he gets attention this way and he's not picky about what kind of attention he gets as long as his base of True Fans doesn't drop below a certain level.

My advice to genuine professionals: if you see Billy spouting b.s., let him know that we know he is a professional b.s. artist and end it. Attempts to respond substantively to Billy's drivel runs the risk of confusing others into believing that Billy has recited a string of facts worthy of a substantive response -- something that never happens.

All hail "The Great Leader" Kim il Dembski

actually, if you look at the history of posts on billyboy's site, you will see essentially "0" interest in anything that even remotely sounds like science. all of his sycophants only have the wit to post on his obsessive rants.

that, in and of itself, paints "uncommon descent" as more of a kiddies-corner than any significant site.

what gets me is the sheer "weight" he has gained in sycophants simply by being a complete asshole.

otoh, isn't howard stern "the king of all media"?

insert your own joke here...

To say that Dembski "hasn't done much to answer their critiques" and that he only calls them "obsessed" is simply false. Dembski's website has a long list of articles with detailed responses to several of his critics.

Panda's Thumb is no bastion of free speech. Quite a few people are banned there including myself and University of Vermont Professor Emeritus of Biology John Davison. Before they outright banned John and I they were arbitrarily erasing and/or disemvoweling our comments without warning, rhyme, or reason. At least Dembski will tell you why you're banned and won't childishly mangle your comments into gibberish by removing all the vowels. [The way WordPress works, I personally have to sign off on the first post someone makes. If I find that first post unhelpful, I will delete the post. If I find the person who makes such an unhelpful post also annoying, I'll remove him/her from the user list. If someone has made it past this first line of defense and then starts posting things that I find unhelpful, I'll usually ban this person. If the post has already appeared, I'll ban the person publicly. If not (sometimes WordPress asks me to approve posts by people who in the past have already been approved), then I'll often ban the person, and notification of the ban won't be made public. I appreciate your sentiments DaveScot, and in a world with more time I would be more gentle and courteous in banning people.]

Oh Dembski, he's a never ending source of paranoid hillarity. He's like the survivalist that's been trapped in his basement by the ATF with nothing but ammunition and some preserved jams left.

Pennock chose a popular 2,000 word essay of mine titled "Who's Got the Magic?" and followed it with a 9,000-word rebuttal by him titled "The Wizards of ID." For the other essay of mine, Pennock chose "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information," which was a popular piece on information theory that's now five years old. I've written much on that topic since then, and the essay itself is now outdated. Moreover, Pennock followed that essay with three critical responses. One of those responses, by Elliott Sober, was a lengthy technical review (from the journal _Philosophy of Science_) of my technical monograph _The Design Inference_ (Cambridge University Press, 1998). No portion of that monograph or anything comparable from my work was included in Pennock's book. Finally, I was given no chance to respond to my critics.

Dembski's website has a long list of articles with detailed responses to several of his critics.

If ridicule and simple/formidable challenge doesn't deter Dembski and his clones what will ?

Their empty content will not convince the rational their over-bloated self importance will suck in the rest so how are the Great Unwashed to be persuaded ?

A charter perhaps ?

I think Lenny is the best example. Don't get sidetracked into philosophical debate. Hammer home the awkward questions. Point out the hypocracy and sophistry. Repeat as necessary and remain watchful.

Hypocrisy. (That was spelling error, not typo.)

Donald M:

Perhaps Dembski could avoid all these "misunderstandings" regarding copyrights and name-calling by coming up with a f***ing theory of ID that is testable using the scientific method.

He hasn't done much to actually answer their critiques,

Sal "I will take a grenade for Bill anytime", thanks for the good laugh... 'Inexcusable'... You're a riot. I am sorry to hear that you were confused by science.

But are you not surprised that Bill was unfamiliar with the history of Shallit's role in the Dover case?

Nice diversion attempt :-) YOu're a riot.

PaulC writes, "One, Dembski purges dissent routinely. No biggie I guess. I mean it's his blog, his editorial voice. Two, the disagreement is heavy enough that Dembski removes "many" postings for all kinds of reasons. I don't think he's suggesting that the number was unusual in this particular thread. He gets a lot of stuff he does not like and makes sure to delete it."
Some of the stuff he decides not to delete:
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The Karl Rove of Information Theory?
William Dembski continues to avoid answering my detailed criticisms of his work.  Instead, he continues his personal attacks.  Ever more desperate, he now resorts to quoting anonymous e-mail messages attacking me.  I guess this is yet an...
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taken from:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/155

I quit digging up any more errors because I personally got tired of dealing with the misrepresentations. Perhaps Elsberry and Shallit will explain why they didn't use Dembski's definitions of his own terms, but rather described CSI in a way that would confuse the readers?

— Salvador T. Cordova

if non Christians are elected to become [IDEA club] officers, the club can continue under it's constitution, but it can no longer be a recognized as sanctioned chapter by the IDEA center in San Diego, but rather would have to delcare itself a renegade ID chapter.

— Salvador T. Cordova

Salvador T. Cordova wrote: if non Christians are elected to become [IDEA club] officers, the club can continue under it's constitution, but it can no longer be a recognized as sanctioned chapter by the IDEA center in San Diego, but rather would have to delcare itself a renegade ID chapter.

Perhaps Elsberry and Shallit will explain why they didn't use Dembski's definitions of his own terms, but rather described CSI in a way that would confuse the readers?

Some of the stuff he decides not to delete: [cut to chorus of Vikings]

Why should Bill Dembski waste time responding to misrepresentation after misrepresentation...

Just curious here -- is there a single logical fallacy which Dembski has not committed? Are there any he has ceased to commit after having them pointed out to him?
Has he ever been known to tell the truth about anything non-trivial?

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Dembski's critics do not use his terminology in their critiques because ID terminology has the unfortunate property of changing its meaning to suit the proponent's goals of the moment. (For example, is tractability a necessary component of detachability? Is DELIM a necessary part of specification? Dembski asks that we accept his argument that they are, but then, in a subsequent book, asserts without explanation that they aren't. For Humpty Dembski, the words mean what he says they mean, even if that meaning changes without warning from one paper to the next.)

Furthermore, the field of evolutionary biology is rich in concepts and language. Dembski chooses not to bother to learn any of it, but persists in coining his own idiosyncratic jargon. Biologists shouldn't have to slog through his ever-shifting terminology in order to demonstrate that it's wrong.

(I'd point out in passing that, while they certainly USE his terminology, it's not clear that Demsbki's most ardent supporters understand what it means. Or would Mr. Cordova care to straighten out the TRACT/DELIM controversy for us all?)

Why should Bill Dembski waste time responding to misrepresentation after misrepresentation?

I don't understand his use of the term in regards to denying a "retrospective fallacy."

— Norman Doering

I know Dembski has to be wrong about "No Free Lunch" and it's relationship to genetic algorithms because if he were right, then genetic algorithims wouldn't work any better than "brute searches"... but they do work better.

"The NFL theorems refute teleology, not evolution."

Sorry, the NFL theorems refute diddly.

To my taste, they're not even interesting intractability results and bear no relationship to self-organization in any physically plausible complex system.

I think that as initially formulated (absent Dembski's misapplication) maybe NFL is a reasonable stake in the ground on what people should not bother to try to do with general-purpose optimization algorithms. But when you consider that the fitness landscapes treated are completely arbitary and include incomputable objective functions, there is nothing very surprising about the result. If the value at one point tells you nothing about the location of nearby optima, then you would not intuitively expect to do better than random probing.

However, the objective functions treated in optimization methods are always somewhat amenable to hill-climbing even if you sometimes need to get out of local minima. If they weren't, no amount of "intelligent" design would get you to an optimum any faster than random sampling. The only reason a human can come up with an allegedly irreducibly complex mousetrap is because it follows from a sequence of incremental improvements. Conceivably, there could be a much better mousetrap in the combinatorial space of all possible mechanisms, but if there is no path to it through incremental improvements, neither human intelligence nor evolution has any advantage with respect to finding it.

Sorry, the NFL theorems refute diddly.

if there is no path to it through incremental improvements, neither human intelligence nor evolution has any advantage with respect to finding it.

For an informed discussion about NFL, Dembski, and evolution, see Mark Perakh's piece at

http://www.talkreason.org/articles/orr.cfm

I'll concede that this article lends no support to my claim about NFL refuting teleology, which I hereby retract. Of course, the much more significant point is that Dembski's claims about NFL are BS and he's wasting his life on such nonsense.

This is an irrelevant tautology: "if you can't get there from here, no one can get there faster than anyone else".

morbius asked: "Then why did you write that 'Dembski does look like he deals with the substance here'? How does claiming that a charge is unwarranted followed by irrelevant gobbledegook 'deal with the substance'?"

I used the word "looked" because I was baffled by exactly how his claim refuted the specific. The specific in this case being the charge of "retrospective fallacy." The specific is the specific charge, not the gobbledigook refutation. I don't know if it's refuted because I haven't read Dembski's "No Free Lunch" book and that's what he wants people to do. His claim is that he dealt with the specific charge in that book. So, you can't know unless you've read "No Free Lunch."

morbius wrote: "Genetic algorithms work better than brute search because the selection criteria reflect the desired outcome;"

Does what morbius wrote make sense to others here? Doesn't a brute search also have "a desired out come"? Isn't that also a selection criteria? An even narrower one?

"...This has no bearing on evolution, because evolution is not a search; it has no predefined goal, no a priori information of any sort about the outcome."

It doesn't have a narrow goal, but doesn't it ultimately search for the "best" survivors in a given environment? Is that not a "Goal"? If not, then how can you have "selection criteria"? Doesn't that word "criteria" imply a goal?

"The NFL theorems refute teleology, not evolution."

Apparently PaulC does not agree. I can't say myself because to me, both of you are using terminology as vague as Dembski's.

"But the simple fact is that humans do come up with a wide variety of mousetraps, because they are motivated to do so, whereas there is no motivation in evolution."

The Venus Flytrap seems to be moving in the direction of a mousetrap.

BTW, I should add that the path to the design may also involve functioning systems that carry out some process other than the final one. This point is often made with respect to evolution. I would claim that it is no less true with respect to human invention, although in the latter case functioning systems may be recorded without building working prototypes, and may be retained out of being merely interesting rather than obviously useful. This probably makes human invention a faster process, but evolution has more time and parallel processors to work with.

You dropped part of my statement. I wasn't saying that you can't get there at all.

In the latter case, humans cannot find the design except by chance no matter how motivated they might be.

So while I agree that NFL proves and refutes various things, I don't see what it has to do with teleology.

Apparently PaulC does not agree. I can't say myself because to me, both of you are using terminology as vague as Dembski's.

morbius wrote: "But designs humans can't find except by chance aren't at issue."

Are you sure about that?

Dembski has a contest going where he's looking for examples of evolution in human inventions.

Here's my entry:
http://www.geocities.com/normdoer/EvoInvent1.htm

Why should Bill Dembski waste time responding to misrepresentation after misrepresentation?

Doesn't a brute search also have "a desired out come"? Isn't that also a selection criteria?

It doesn't have a narrow goal, but doesn't it ultimately search for the "best" survivors in a given environment?

Is that not a "Goal"? If not, then how can you have "selection criteria"? Doesn't that word "criteria" imply a goal?

The Venus Flytrap seems to be moving in the direction of a mousetrap.

morbius wrote: "But designs humans can't find except by chance aren't at issue." Are you sure about that?

Dembski has a contest going where he's looking for examples of evolution in human inventions.

you won't find me backpedaling on what I meant

morbius wrote: "... quite an imagination. Do mice fly? Perhaps you would prefer to claim that the Venus Flytrap is moving in the direction of a battrap. But the claim would be utterly baseless."

By that I mean that the Venus Flytrap's trap has some of the same functional elements as that of the mousetrap. You've got bait which lures the victim into the trap and then something that sticks the victim to the trap.

The fly is caught in much the same way a mouse is.

I think there are larger versions of such plants that eat small animals. At least they exist in old grade B sci-fi films as "man eating plants."

Be careful there -- a mouse eating plant may exist. The Venus flytrap isn't the only eating plant, there's the pitcher plant and sundew too.

This probably makes human invention a faster process, but evolution has more time and parallel processors to work with.

I think there are larger versions of such plants that eat small animals. At least they exist in old grade B sci-fi films as "man eating plants."

If evolution has more parallel processors to work with, then why wouldn't it be the faster inventor?

actually, i see you actually touched on the same answer yourself in the rest of your paragraph.

which prompts me to wonder why you raised the question to begin with.

morbius wrote: "... quite an imagination. Do mice fly? Perhaps you would prefer to claim that the Venus Flytrap is moving in the direction of a battrap. But the claim would be utterly baseless." By that I mean that the Venus Flytrap's trap has some of the same functional elements as that of the mousetrap. You've got bait which lures the victim into the trap and then something that sticks the victim to the trap.

The fly is caught in much the same way a mouse is.

I think there are larger versions of such plants that eat small animals. At least they exist in old grade B sci-fi films as "man eating plants."

Be careful there --- a mouse eating plant may exist. The Venus flytrap isn't the only eating plant, there's the pitcher plant and sundew too.

actually, i see you touched on the same answer yourself in the rest of your paragraph.

which prompts me to wonder why you raised the question to begin with.

morbius -

i could be wrong, but the demeanor and direction of your posts suggests you just want to argue with folks.

that's fine and dandy, but you would find that type of thing much more satisfying in the "After the Bar Closes" area than in these threads.

If evolution has more parallel processors to work with, then why wouldn't it be the faster inventor? er, because there is no goal in the "invention" process? didn't we already cover that?

i could be wrong, but the demeanor and direction of your posts suggests you just want to argue with folks.

Matt Brauer wrote: Dembski's critics do not use his terminology in their critiques because ID terminology has the unfortunate property of changing its meaning to suit the proponent's goals of the moment.

Dembski in No Free Lunch Complex Specified Information : The coincidence of conceptual and physical information where the conceptual information is both identifiable independently of the physical information and also complex.

Their critique didn't even rise to the level of fair respresentation, much less a refutation.

If you really think I "just want to argue with folks", you might stop to wonder just why it was that I went out of the way to clarify that PaulC and had been right and I wrong about NFL refuting teleology.

Strategic retreat followed by rear-guard action?
Seems sound.

I really think STJ was just bringing to your attention that there's an associated forum specifically for the hashing out of loose ends from hijacked comment threads.

Hijacked, in the sense that now a space nominally for readers' comments regarding Dembski's recent hijinks is taken over by a (not-without-value) discussion of NFL, evolution, and the entire idea of search algorithms. (And commentary on same.)

And your hair-trigger for use of "ad hominem" suggests more than anything else that STJ's belief regarding your desire for argumentation is well-founded.

Tell me, Sal, how does
"The coincidence of conceptual and physical information where the conceptual information is both identifiable independently of the physical information and also complex."
differ from ANY occurence of the application of a concept to a newly encountered instance which falls under the concept?
Hmmmm?
No difference, is there?
Dembski is really a very silly lightweight little anti-intellectual. You demean yourself by lying for him.

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Please, please. Have some respect. That's pseudo-intellectual.

Salvador, would you address my response, please? That Dembski's idiosyncratic terminology is as shifting as the sand?

Specifically: what do TRACT and DELIM have to do with Dembski's theory, and why were they essential parts of it in TDI but not in NFL?

If you really think I "just want to argue with folks", you might stop to wonder just why it was that I went out of the way to clarify that PaulC and had been right and I wrong about NFL refuting teleology. Strategic retreat followed by rear-guard action? Seems sound.

Hijacked, in the sense that now a space nominally for readers' comments regarding Dembski's recent hijinks is taken over by a (not-without-value) discussion of NFL, evolution, and the entire idea of search algorithms. (And commentary on same.)

And your hair-trigger for use of "ad hominem" suggests more than anything else that STJ's belief regarding your desire for argumentation is well-founded.

Do mice fly? Perhaps you would prefer to claim that the Venus Flytrap is moving in the direction of a battrap. But the claim would be utterly baseless.

CSI deals with physical artifacts

Um, let me just butt in for a second to point out that (1) venus flytraps actually consume mostly ants, and (2) the flies that are caught by Venus flytraps aren't, uh, flying when they are caught. The prey has to walk inside the trap. Indeed, the prey has to walk inside the trap and then move around enough to touch several different trigger hairs inside. Simply flying into it, won't set the trap off.

You have quite an imagination. Do mice fly? Perhaps you would prefer to claim that the Venus Flytrap is moving in the direction of a battrap. But the claim would be utterly baseless.

(Kinda wandering off-topic here... but what the heck!)

I just happen to have a tray full of Venus flytraps right outside my kitchen window. And boy do they catch flies! (Most of the traps have fly "leftovers" in them).

I also have a tray full of Sarracenia Leucophylla with a whole bunch of pitchers 2 to 2 1/2 feet tall, some of which are packed almost to the brim with various and sundry flying insects.

It's pretty impressive -- I don't live in a very "buggy" area (just a condo in the city)... but those plants have been gorging themselves all summer!

"Why should Bill Dembski waste time responding to misrepresentation after misrepresentation?"

Actually, it doesn't make economic sense for him to talk to biologists or information theorists, because that doesn't accomplish anything. All they do is point out various and sundry ways his ideas don't make any sense. In the 20 years of Intelligent Design, has he been invited to an Information Theory conference? Have reputable biologists signed on to his program? Have experiments been done? Of course not.

What makes sense is for him to do things which result in him getting paid $200/hr. Talking to fawning sycophants like Salvador, and publishing incoherent books, makes him a lot of money.

*Scratches head* Well, this conversation is going in circles just a bit.

So, just curious. What exactly are the conditions for getting banned from "Panda's Thumb", and what is the origin of this strange story Alan Fox quotes about "vowels getting removed"? There does not appear to be a moderation policy posted on this site anywhere.

There does not appear to be a moderation policy posted on this site anywhere.

Ah, thank you. My apologies, I must have looked right past that.

I am still simply curious though what on earth this DaveScot individual (whom Alan Fox quotes above) is referring to about comments being "disembowled" by having their vowels removed. That doesn't seem to be a practice in accordance with the "comment integrity policy".

Of course, I'd have no trouble believing that "DaveScot" is simply lying there, considering that in the same paragraph he also says "At least Dembski will tell you why you're banned"... which is a verifiably untrue statement...

I'd have even less trouble believing "DaveScot" to be simply lying after reading this: http://austringer.net/wp/?p=112

It appears to be up to the one who starts a topic what he will do with obnoxious people like DaveScot. PZ Myers, I believe it was, chose to "disemvowel" posts from one or more individuals, almost certainly including DaveScot (who deserves it more than most). It was a sanction without being full censorship, whatever one thinks of it.

I doubt there are many here who would suppose DaveScot to be honest about anything regarding evolution, at least. But I'm sure the disemvoweling did happen to him. I would add that it is always wise to doubt DaveScot first, at least on forums dealing with origins.

Sal, I notice you still have not explained why you consider the definition you quoted for CSI to be the relevant one? In addition you have not shown that even if Elsberry and Shallit ignored this definition, that their arguments are without any merrit.

Given you attempts to rebut the article and given you attempts to now argue that somehow the critics have misunderstood or misrepresented Dembski, is not very original.

But I understand, what else could you argue...

You make for an excellent ID critic.

morbius wrote: "There's nothing here for me to be careful of, since this has no bearing on claims about Venus Flytraps moving in some perceived direction."

Well, if there is such a thing as a mouse-eating plant and if it's a relative of the flytrap, then wouldn't that mean the flytrap had already moved in the direction of being a mousetrap?

And according to Sir_Toejam: ...there are pitcher plants that are large enough to trap and digest something as large as a small mouse,... there are also carnivorous vines that apparently have been recorded to ingest small mammals, bird, and frogs (tho rarely):

http://www.sarracenia.com/faq/faq1160.html

The idea is not of evolution itself having a direction, but of certain species "looking" like they are moving in a direction. Evolutionary algorithms are called "hill climbing" algorithms and if a species looks like it landed on a certain hill and has been climbing it for awhile I think it could be said, in a metaphoric way, to be climbing that hill, and so moving in that direction.

It's an illusion of natural selection.

How much of an illusion? I'm not sure. To some extent we can predict the direction of "directionless" evolution -- we can know that bacteria colonies and insects will evolve immunity to our attempts to poison them... What does that mean?

A 16 digit Visa number has 54 bits of information, not 500 bits, but it is still CSI.

While the conversation on this thread has been snippy, it is at least somewhat informative on how difficult it is to model evolutionary probabilities in a realistic way. While these IT concepts do have real value, I think by wallowing in them many of us miss the point that Desmski has grossly underrepresented the character and size of the search target (since evolution seeks the transiently "fit" rather than some specific "fittest" conformation), just as in his explanatory filter (besides committing the logical error of ommitting "don't know" form the process) also in a much simpler way overestimates the specificity of the protein sequences required for function and entirely discounts the possibility of functional intermediates.

IT concepts and processes are hard to understand, which is how people like Demski are even believed to begin with, but fortuitously it is somewhat obvious that WAD's models are fatally flawed before the calculations take place.

"How is CSI not a useless, ill-defined concept? Can you write a computer program that can distingush CSI from "ordinary" information? Why not? Is it because you want to be able to arbitrarily decide when something is or isn't CSI?"

I don't think CSI as a concept is useless, to real information theorists. But it seems Demski is using it as a surrogate for how Behe uses "purposeful". It is real, and predictions can be made about CSI, but it is an artificial construct and not a physical property, as far as I understand it. That nevertheless doesn't negate the fact that Demski misrepresents the nature of the search, the search space and the target space of evolutionary processes all at once.

Finally, I should point out that there are two categories of Intelligent Design. In one, the designer is supernatural and uses means that cannot be described by science. That view deserves no place in the science classroom, though I have no objection to its presentation as religion. In the other category, the designer (or designers) is material and located within this universe. This idea has been presented in books by such prominent scientists as Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle. It does qualify as science, but it is speculative and unsupported by evidence. In debates with William Dembski earlier this year (they were officially called "panels"), I asked him which type of Intelligent Design he was advocating. He specifically denied the supernatural interpretation. But when I then asked him why he did not grant priority to Crick and especially to Hoyle, and endorse their ideas, he could give no good answer. I believe that this line of questioning strikes at the most vulnerable weakness in the Intelligent Design position, and should be used more frequently.

Sorry, I ommitted the link for the previous comment. Go here for source of quote in comment #54744.

Salvador Cordova:

I categorically reject your false charges of misrepresentation.

If you read Dembski's work carefully, as Wes Elsberry and I have, you will see that Dembski gives many different definitions of his main concepts. Our paper is not a critique solely of No Free Lunch, but of all of Dembski's oeuvre up to 2002. In particular, the fundamental concept of "specified complexity" is defined in several places in Dembski's work, and the definitions do not coincide. I see no obligation to list every single definition that Dembski provides. Not only would that be boring for readers, but it would not allow us to focus on a particular definition and analyze it for consistency.

Your main objection to our 54-page paper seems to be that we do not quote the definition of "specified complexity" as it appears in on page 141 of No Free Lunch. But note that this "definition", which you seem to consider so crucial, does not appear in the main text, but rather in a Figure, namely, Figure 3.2 on page 141. (The terms "conceptual reduction" and "physical reduction" also appear on page 142, but are not elaborated.)

Rather, we used the formal definition given by Dembski in the main text of No Free Lunch, on page 142, which defines "complex specified information" as a pair (T,E) where T and E are both events and satisfy certain properties. This definition is summarized in our paper at the bottom of page 14 and the top of page 15. If your objection is that we omitted the fuzzy definition and relied on the formal definition, then I consider your objection without merit. It is like criticizing a paper on Kolmogorov complexity because it eschews the fuzzy definition "shortest description length" in favor of the more formal definition involving a universal Turing machine.

I now ask you to perform a thought experiment. For purposes of argument, let us assume you are correct that we should have provided the fuzzy definition you are so enamored of (which I dispute, but this is a thought experiment). Fine. Now insert this formal definition into our text at the bottom of page 14, leaving the rest of the text unchanged. Would our critique suddenly become more cogent? If so, then you have an obligation to address the rest of our argument, all 54-epsilon pages of it. You have not, and Dembski has not. In fact, no intelligent design advocate has answered our critique. Rather, intelligent designers seem to rely on airy dismissals and personal attacks.

As for your defense of VISA card numbers being CSI, a fact which Dembski claimed in 1999, but has not repeated since, I think you need to read page 142 of No Free Lunch. There you will find that the term CSI is defined to apply only in the case of low probability events, a threshhold that VISA card numbers do not meet. Otherwise (line 3 of page 142), it is only "specified information" and not "complex specified information". I do not blame you for being confused, since as we point out Dembski has given several inconsistent definitions of the terms "specified complexity" and "complex specified information", so it is not always easy to tell what he is trying to say. Indeed, that was precisely our point.

A more recent objection of yours is our use of "functions" generating CSI. You object that "CSI deals with physical artifacts, not just abstract mathematical entities such as mathematical functions," and imply that this represents some deficiency in our argument. I would like to ask you to peruse the argument on pages 152-154 of No Free Lunch, where Dembsi "proves" the "Law of Conservation of Information". (Of course, the "proof" is not a proof at all, as we have pointed out in our text in detail.) There you will see that Dembski is quite comfortable with examining the possibility of using functions to generate CSI -- precisely the thing the horrible transgression you accuse us of. I'd suggest you take it up with Dr. Dembski. I'm sure he will treat your objection with the same courtesy he has shown to me.

Your objection to our TSPGRID example is similarly nonsensical. Yes, we examine the input and output of a computer program. You object "Did they identify a valid example [sic] Physical Information in the scenario and then demonstrate the concidence with Conceptual Information? NO!". But then exactly the same criticism applies to Dembski's own analysis of evolutionary algorithms in Chapter 4 of No Free Lunch. Note how much space Dembski gives to Dawkins' "weasel" example, which, like TSPGRID, is a computer program. Had Dembski used Cordovan analysis, he could have saved himself so much work! He could have just said "Did Dawkins demonstrate a valid example of physical information and its coincidence with physical information? NO!" and be done with it.

Of course, I need not point out that in any real computer program, there is "physical information" by virtue of its computations taking place on a real physical computer. So your objection is baseless.

In summary, I am glad to see that some intelligent design advocate is reading our work, but I would encourage you to devote a little more intellectual effort in digesting our critique and seeing if it has any merits.

To Nick Matzke:

You can use DJVU format to achieve the small file size for the collection of scanned images. PDF indeed sucks in this respect.

I don't think CSI as a concept is useless, to real information theorists.

I would encourage you to devote a little more intellectual effort in digesting our critique and seeing if it has any merits.

Salvador works by a much more straightforward logic:

Shallit is wrong.
Shallit said X.
Therefore X is wrong.

Dembski is right.
Dembski said X.
Therefore X is right.

Shallit's X and Dembski's X are identical.
Therefore, Dembski's is ignored while Shallit's is criticized.

Science is so much easier when you know the answers in advance.

Your main objection to our 54-page paper seems to be that we do not quote the definition of "specified complexity" as it appears in on page 141 of No Free Lunch. But note that this "definition", which you seem to consider so crucial, does not appear in the main text, but rather in a Figure, namely, Figure 3.2 on page 141.

— Jeffrey Shallit

Salvador Cordoba -- the man whose lips move when he looks at pictures.

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Hey guys, give poor Sal a break. He can't be bothered with such a "pathetic" level of detail, like a consistent definition of CSI.

If Dembski doesn't bother with such trifles, why should Sal?

Darwinists are just SOOO picky!

A few late responses to morbius.

(1) When I suggested that human intelligence might be a "faster" complexity-generating process than evolution, I meant "faster with respect to the same amount of processing power". Evolution has vastly more "processing power" at its disposal than the combined intelligence of all humans who've ever lived, and it shows in the richness of nature. This is a vague notion but I believe it could be quantified sufficiently well to back up the previous statement.

(2) NFL treats all possible objective functions identically. But for "most" objective functions (in a strict measure theoretic sense), no amount of intelligence will give you an advantage over random probing. So Dembski's use of NFL is inappropriate as it has no ability to distinguish between "intelligent" design and the result of an evolutionary process. I would contend that Dembski knows even less about how human's invent things than he does about how evolution works.

(3) I don't see why you consider it "missing the point" to observe that human's can test ideas without building prototypes. The ability to work with virtual models provides a huge jump in efficiency. This is not conjecture. Note how much faster engineering has become since the advent of computer aided design. Actually, humans have a number of other tricks up their sleeves, such as being able to rule out entire trails as fruitless (e.g. perpetual motion machines or chemical methods of turning lead into gold). They can also change the "coordinate system" in such a way to make the objective function more amenable to hill climbing.

Example: The problem of finding a matching in graphs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matching) is one in which the obvious greedy algorithm (like hill-climbing) fails to find an optimum, but when you replace the obvious incremental step (add a matching edge) with the step of finding an augmenting path and reversing edges along it, you are back to applying hill-climbing and you will find the global optimum. I contend that virtually all optimization boils down to random probing and hill-climbing. Humans have some tricks to extend the range of these methods, but they have no magic formula that makes them more powerful than evolutionary processes, only more efficient given the same amount of processing power.

(4) The fact that humans are goal directed is certainly worth noting, but I don't see why it's more important than other advantages. Having a goal means you are more likely to find a design that meets that particular goal, but it doesn't mean that you're obviously better at generating structure. In fact, it strikes me as the reverse, that given two hypothetical "complexity-generating" black boxes, the one that is directed towards a particular goal will have a disadvantage in producing just any example of "specified complexity" (given some meaningful definition). This is speculation on my part; I just don't see why you give goal-directedness privileged significance over other properties that might distinguish human intelligence from nature.

It appears to be up to the one who starts a topic what he will do with obnoxious people like DaveScot. PZ Myers, I believe it was, chose to "disemvowel" posts from one or more individuals, almost certainly including DaveScot (who deserves it more than most). It was a sanction without being full censorship, whatever one thinks of it.

I would encourage you to devote a little more intellectual effort in digesting our critique and seeing if it has any merits.

Jeffrey Shallit wrote: If you read Dembski's work carefully, as Wes Elsberry and I have, you will see that Dembski gives many different definitions of his main concepts.

Complex Specified Information : The coincidence of conceptual and physical information where the conceptual information is both identifiable independently of the physical information and also complex.

But note that this "definition", which you seem to consider so crucial, does not appear in the main text, but rather in a Figure, namely, Figure 3.2 on page 141. (The terms "conceptual reduction" and "physical reduction" also appear on page 142, but are not elaborated.)

Jeffrey Shallit wrote: Of course, I need not point out that in any real computer program, there is "physical information" by virtue of its computations taking place on a real physical computer. So your objection is baseless.

Salvador, would you mind clearing up for me why TRACT and DELIM were crucial parts of Dembski's theory in TDI but not in NFL?

("I don't know" would be a perfectly acceptable answer, BTW.)

I have been, for an ID advocate, somewhat critical of his definitions, so much so Wesley Elsberry started a brief correspondence with me pertaining to SAI (Specified Anti Information).

— Cordova

With 10 bits of CSI possibly in evidence, an observer is reluctant to make a strong design inference unless one is in contact with the designer, but with 500 bits an observer can be more confident.

wrote: Of course, I need not point out that in any real computer program, there is "physical information" by virtue of its computations taking place on a real physical computer. So your objection is baseless.

— Salvador Cordova

Yes and the physical information in that computer in the forme of software is rooted in the action of an intelligence, so a suggestion that computer creates the large scale physical information (CSI) without human intelligence is even more baseless. The fact that the form of the outputs of TSPGRID is algorithmically compressible is because a human coded the algorithms that made algorithmically compressible data.

That's because they have a mathematical definition for "complex", and are able to determine exactly who "specifies" this informaiton and when. IDers cannot. Just ask them. Sal, tell us who "specifies" this complex information, and when it is "specified". (sound of crickets chirping) IDers just do the old "draw a bullseye around the bullet hole" thingie.

I can't help but notice the irony on this thread of how obessed everyone seems to be with every detail of Dembski's supposed "obessions" with a couple of his critics.

Um, what is the difference between 'what' and 'who'? A who is a what.

If you had actually read TDI or NFL or Dembski's paper Specification: the Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, then he would know how utterly misguided his question to Sal about "who specifies" really is. Specification is a what not a who. But since you've not read anything by Dembski, you wouldn't know that. Nor do I suspect you will read any of it, because you're not the least bit interested in finding out what he actually said, but only in the continual misrepresentation (read: straw man version) of it.

Sorry, but you've clearly have not read Lenny's work in detail. Both "who" and "what" are important, as they apply to "how." That pertains to mechanics, which is what science deals with.

And it's clear that you have not touched any of his main questions about Dembski's work.

If you want to be taken seriously, DON'T ATTACK THE ATTACKERS. That just means the stuff you want to defend doesn't speak for itself. And if it doesn't speak for itself, then it's useless for science.

If Dembski's works is so great, THEN USE IT TO MAKE USEFUL PREDICTIONS.

Either Donald M did not read Dembski's so-called "replies" to his critics, or, if he did, he deliberately misinforms PT readers. Dembski's "replies" are full of insults of his critics and usually avoid answering the substance of their critique. Moreover, there is a whole list of critics to whom he has never responded at all, except for sometimes posting some supercilious dismissive comments consisting of a few sentences aimed at denigrating his opponents, but not touching on the substance. For example, such a list can be seen here.... ...Donald M apparently does not realize that most of PT visitors have sufficient knowledge of the matter to see through his attempts at presenting Dembski's behavior in a positive light. Your spin, Donald, may work on Dembski's sites, where half-truth and/or direct lies may be welcome as long as they favor Dembski, but not here.

If you want to be taken seriously, DON'T ATTACK THE ATTACKERS. That just means the stuff you want to defend doesn't speak for itself.

Is there a way to determine scientifcally that intelligent causes are not operative in nature even in principle?
If there is not, which seems to be your contention, then can you tell us how, in principle, one would use the scientific method to test the hypothesis that "intelligent causes are operative in nature?"

I'm repeating myself (sort of) but I think this point is rarely brought up and deserves some emphasis.

What, precisely, is it that Dembski et al. believe that intelligent agents can do other than combining random or exhaustive trial and error with some form of iterative refinement? I offered a few ideas above, such as ruling out possibilities analytically, transforming coordinate systems, and manipulating virtual models. If you have a lot more time and processing power, though, it's not obvious that you need any of these shortcuts, and evolution is a process rich in time and processing power.

In short, the ID program purports to be developing a rigorous method of distinguishing between the product of intelligence and the product of evolution. But as far as I know, this group has never presented any theory of what intelligence entails. So how on earth do they ever hope to show how it is different from some other process?

Donald M,

I can't imagine how someone would falsify the existence of a supernatural tinkerer. I agree, it's completely untestable. How would you prove that said tinkerer did not create this post posing as myself?

I suppose that every paper published in the scientific literature should have at the end of its conclusions "or Goddidit."

Thank you for demonstrating that ID is not science.

Perhaps one of the design deniers can tell me how they know scientifically that the apparent design we observe throughout biological systems can not be actual design, even in principle.

Or, how do you know scientifically that the cosmos, and everything in it, is a closed system of natural cause and effect, and that even if some putative supernatural entity did exist, such entity could not, even in principle, take any actions or effect any events that would have empirically detectable consequences anywhere in nature?

What, precisely, is it that Dembski et al. believe that intelligent agents can do other than combining random or exhaustive trial and error with some form of iterative refinement?

Well, let's see...
You've got your plagues of locusts, your raising the dead, the occasional burning bush. Then there's run-of-the-mill stuff like turning water into wine, loaves and fishes...
Gee, Paul, all kinds of stuff!

You may complain that you thought his ideas were not clear, but that is not the same as saying they are wrong.

— Salvador

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever!

Donald M. (comment 54834) has responded to something I did not even mention -whether or not the general conjecture of ID could be disproved. I think it can't, agreeing on that with Donald M, but this, being in tune with the assertion of ID's being unfalsifiable and hence unscientific, has nothing to do with my point. In my comment I stated that Dembski usually avoids answering specific critical remarks revealing weaknesses and errors in his methods of identifying design. Unlike the general unfalsifiable conjecture of ID, these specific claims can be refuted and have been refuted by a number of critics, but Dembski almost never replies to the substance of most of these refutations, often indulging instead in denigrating his opponents. Donald seems to have taken lessons from Dembski as his comment (a) changes the subject and (b) resorts to rudeness (referring to my comment as to "hogwash"), which are two common devices used when one has no good counter-arguments but craves to vent anger.

Specification is a what not a who. But since you've not read anything by Dembski, you wouldn't know that. Nor do I suspect you will read any of it, because you're not the least bit interested in finding out what he actually said, but only in the continual misrepresentation (read: straw man version) of it.

There are many different examples of the same concept, not many different definitions.

If you had actually read TDI or NFL or Dembski's paper Specification: the Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, then he would know how utterly misguided his question to Sal about "who specifies" really is. Specification is a what not a who. But since you've not read anything by Dembski, you wouldn't know that. Nor do I suspect you will read any of it, because you're not the least bit interested in finding out what he actually said, but only in the continual misrepresentation (read: straw man version) of it.

How much of an illusion? I'm not sure. To some extent we can predict the direction of "directionless" evolution --- we can know that bacteria colonies and insects will evolve immunity to our attempts to poison them... What does that mean?

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever!

Sorry, but you've clearly have not read Lenny's work in detail. Both "who" and "what" are important, as they apply to "how." That pertains to mechanics, which is what science deals with.

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever!

Perhaps one of the design deniers can tell me how they know scientifically that the apparent design we observe throughout biological systems can not be actual design, even in principle.

Of course, if there are no scientific reasons to believe that intelligent causes or actual design are not operative in nature, then that must leave us with only philosophical ones. For some reason, though, everyone gets their knickers in a twist whenever the philosophical presuppositions of science are brought up. I can't imagine why.

Donald seems to have taken lessons from Dembski as his comment (a) changes the subject and (b) resorts to rudeness (referring to my comment as to "hogwash"), which are two common devices used when one has no good counter-arguments but craves to vent anger.

When I suggested that human intelligence might be a "faster" complexity-generating process than evolution, I meant "faster with respect to the same amount of processing power". Evolution has vastly more "processing power" at its disposal than the combined intelligence of all humans who've ever lived, and it shows in the richness of nature. This is a vague notion but I believe it could be quantified sufficiently well to back up the previous statement.

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever!

Perhaps one of the design deniers can tell me how they know scientifically that the apparent design we observe throughout biological systems can not be actual design, even in principle.

Is there a way to determine scientifcally that intelligent causes are not operative in nature even in principle?

And the subject wasn't "complexity-generating process", it was "invention".

As I said, I think this profoundly misses what's relevant.

more complex organisms must come later in the process because the stepwise path to them is longer.

This is speculation on my part; I just don't see why you give goal-directedness privileged significance over other properties that might distinguish human intelligence from nature.

I apologize if I appeared to be discussing anything else.

I will repeat my very short and sweet argument why Dembski's "filter" is all BS;

Stripped of all its mathematical gloss, Dembski's "filter" boils down to:

"Ff not law, if not chance, then design"

I.e., "if we can't explain it, it must be design".

For YEARS now, I have been asking IDers a simple question ----- how, exactly, does one rule out not only all currently existing possible explanations that invoke either chance or natural conditions, but *all possible future explanations that have not even been thought of yet*?

Never got any intelligible answer.

Which leads to: If the first step of Dembski's filter is "determine if the thing can be explained by a natural law", and if IDers CANNOT rule out all possible explanations from natural law that have not been thought of yet, then, uh, how can we ever get past the very first step of Dembski's filter?

If Dembski means, in the first step, determing if there is a CURRENT explanation for a thing, then all we have is "god of the gaps" -- "we can't explain it now, therefore goddidit".

On the other hand, if Demsbki means, in the first step, determining yhat there is NO POSSIBLE explanation for a thing, then I will once again ask, how do we rule out EVERY POSSIBLE explanation, including all the ones that have not been thought of yet?�?

Dembski, it seems, simply wants to assume his conclusion. His "filter", it seems, is nothing more than "god of the gaps", written with nice fancy impressive-looking mathematical forumulas.

That suspicion is strengthened by the simple observation that if we reverse the steps of Dembski's "filter", from "(1) rule out law, (2) rule out chance, (3) therefore design" to any other sequence -- say, "(1) rule out design, (2) rule out chance, (3) therefore law" -- then we get results that Dembski, uh, doesn't like very much.

The simple fact is that Dembski has NO IDEA AT ALL how to tell if a thing is designed or not. So he wants to dump the burden onto others -- since he CAN'T demonstrate that any thing was designed, he wants to relieve himself of that responsibility, by simply declaring, with suitably impressive mathematics, that the rest of us should just assume that something is designed unless someone can show otherwise.

Odd, isn't it, that Dembski's much-vaunted "filter" depends upon the **one sequence, out of all the possible ones**, that relieves "design theory" of ANY need to either propose anything, test anything, or demonstrate anything?

I suspect that isn't a coincidence.

That suspicion is strengthened by the simple observation that if we reverse the steps of Dembski's "filter", from "(1) rule out law, (2) rule out chance, (3) therefore design" to any other sequence --- say, "(1) rule out design, (2) rule out chance, (3) therefore law" --- then we get results that Dembski, uh, doesn't like very much.

even if some putative supernatural entity did exist, such entity could not, even in principle, take any actions or effect any events that would have empirically detectable consequences anywhere in nature?

In short, the ID program purports to be developing a rigorous method of distinguishing between the product of intelligence and the product of evolution. But as far as I know, this group has never presented any theory of what intelligence entails. So how on earth do they ever hope to show how it is different from some other process?

To be precise, I should have said "he doesn't argue that the results could not have come about without intelligence". What many people (like Behe) fail to appreciate is that the probability of an particular outcome occurring is a function of the number of opportunities for it to occur -- which brings us to PaulC's point about " evolution is a process rich in time and processing power". IDists seem to only look at the numerator, and never the denominator. When you look at both, there's nothing at all implausible about evolution; in fact, if intelligence (teleology) was involved, we might wonder why it took so long.

Dembski's argument is probabilistic, so entailment isn't really relevant --- he doesn't argue that the results could not have come about naturally.

Arden Chatfield asks: But wait --- when disemvoweling someone, do y's count,

Sometimes, y. ;)

Oops -- good (er, excellent) point, Lenny. So going back to PaulC's question, I guess what they think that an intelligent agent can do is to use its noodly appendages to arrange molecules just so, bypassing interative refinement.

Jeffrey Shallit wrote: Your main objection to our 54-page paper seems to be that we do not quote the definition of "specified complexity" as it appears in on page 141 of No Free Lunch. But note that this "definition", which you seem to consider so crucial, does not appear in the main text, but rather in a Figure, namely, Figure 3.2 on page 141.

Jeffery Wrote: (The terms "conceptual reduction" and "physical reduction" also appear on page 142, but are not elaborated.)

Exhibit 2

— Salvador

Dembski writes: CSI is consistent with the basic idea behind information, which is the reduction of possibilities from a reference class of possibilites. But whereas the traditional understanding of information is unary, conceiving of information as a single reduction of possibilities, complex specified information is a binary form of information. Complex specified information , and specifiend information more generally, depends on a dual reduction of possibilites, namely a conceptual reduction (i.e., conceptual information) compbined with a physical reduction (i.e., physical information ).(sic)

Salvador, would you mind clearing up for me why TRACT and DELIM were crucial parts of Dembski's theory in TDI but not in NFL? ("I don't know" would be a perfectly acceptable answer, BTW.)

You write "Having a goal means you are more likely to find a design that meets that particular goal, but it doesn't mean that you're obviously better at generating structure" --- exactly so on the first part, but who ever claimed the latter? And why should anyone care about what is better at "generating structure" per se?

Dembski's argument is probabilistic, so entailment isn't really relevant --- he doesn't argue that the results could not have come about naturally.

Salvador cordova: When you choose a computer passoword for your computer account, you are "delimiting" the password out of a space of possibilities. When the computer system has created your account with your new password, the physcial information in the computer's records constitutes the physical information. You password in your mind is the conceptual information. The overlap of the two makes the password CSI.

For example, a blue print is a specification. It delimits how the intended object is to be designed. It does this by choosing a particular configuration (delimiting) from the space of many possible outcomes.

— Sal

Dr. Bottaro wrote: If I look at a rock, that's CSI, because the information about it is in my mind, and in the rock.

Hey Sal,
thanks for so clearly confirming that conceptual (ie, abstract) knowlege is all CSI.
And if that's all there is to it, why should anyone care?

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Sal said
"
The information about the rocks in your head are not detachable, but after the fact (post-dictive).
"

pure metaphysical poppycock

Sal check out "the men who stare a goats" and tell me what the difference is between that and your ramblings

http://www.jonronson.com/goats_nytimes.html

No because information about the rock in your mind is a post-dictive, after the fact, connected conceptualization. A specification for the "S" in CSI must be detachable. The information about the rocks in your head are not detachable, but after the fact (post-dictive).

Andrea,
Of course it is -- it MUST be. Any application of a concept to a newly encountered instance which falls under the concept is perforce CSI.
Which renders the whole notion pointless for Dembski's purpose -- unless his purpose is to resurrect the nonsensical positions of Bishop Berkeley...

hugs,
Shirley Knott

Salvador Cordova:

You write: "There are many different examples of the same concept, not many different definitions."

This is clearly false, as even a cursory examination of Dembski's work will show. For example, compare the "Generic Chance Elimination Argument" on pages 184-185 of The Design Inference with the GCEA on pages 72-73 of No Free Lunch. These constitute genuinely different definitions; to name just two differences, compare the different rejection regions, and the change in the tractability conditions. It is imply a falsehood to claim that there have not been different definitions.

You write: "By way of analogy there are many different kinds of real numbers: integers, whole numbers, natural numbers, odd numbers, irrational numbers, rational numbers, negative numbers, zero, positive numbers, etc. Would a mathematician say because a real number in some cases may be an irrational positive number, and then in some cases a real number may be a negative integer, that therefore the definition of real numbers is confused or inconsistent? Of course not."

I think there is a reading comprehension problem here. Our list on page 15-16 is not intended to address the inconsistency of Dembski's definitions, and we never offered it to support that claim. Rather, the inconsistency of the definitions is addressed on pages 14 and ends before "Here is a brief catalogue" on page 15 of our paper. Instead, our catalogue of examples is presented to show that Dembski has presented many claimed examples of CSI without justifying these claims using his own methodology. Even a cursory reading of our paper would make this clear.

As we wrote, determining if something has CSI according to Dembski's own definition, requires the choice of a probability space, a probability estimate, a discussion of relevant background knowledge, an independence calculation, a rejection function, and a rejection region. Our catalogue on page 15 was intended to illustrate 16 items for which Dembski has claimed CSI, but has not justified it according to his own criteria. But I am willing to revise this section, if Salvador or anyone else can point to the place where these requirements (probability space, estimate, etc.) are given for any of the 16 items.

You write: "The definition of CSI is:
Complex Specified Information :
The coincidence of conceptual and physical information where the conceptual information is both identifiable independently of the physical information and also complex."

That is an informal definition. The formal definition is contained on page 142, in terms of the ordered pair (T,E) and that is the one we quote. If you continue to insist that fuzzy definitions are more important than formal ones, I am afraid I have no choice but to regard your objection as completely without merit, and I cannot waste my time repeatedly addressing the same meritless objection.

You write:
"Yes and the physical information in that computer in the forme of software is rooted in the action of an intelligence, so a suggestion that computer creates the large scale physical information (CSI) without human intelligence is even more baseless."

This objection is even more absurd, and demonstrates you have not understood our argument. In our calculation we specifically include the number of bits of CSI needed to account for the program, and we show that the number of bits generated by the output exceeds this quantity by whatever amount you desire. This is true whether the algorithm is written by a human being, a flying spaghetti monster, or arises through natural selection.

You write: "The fact that the form of the outputs of TSPGRID is algorithmically compressible is because a human coded the algorithms that made algorithmically compressible data."

Again, I believe there is a reading compehension problem. The output of TSPGRID has been set up so that it is not particularly algorithmically compressible. Indeed, that was the point.

Finally, you say "Since you referred to the ordered pair of T,E, what were your T's and E's in your TSPGRID example? You supplied none of that, and had you done so, it would have shown the fallacy of you supposed counter example."

It is true that we did not specifically state what T and E were in our TSPGRID example. (Strange, however, that you do not fault Dembski, since he himself does not provide these for most of the examples he claims have CSI.) We
did assume a certain mathematical competence on the part of our readers -- but your misunderstanding shows me that our assumption was incorrect. In any event, a cursory reading should make it clear what T and E
represent. Omega, the space of all events, is the set of all possible permutations on 4n^2 cities; it has cardinality (4n^2)! T is the set of all such permutations corresponding to Hamiltonian cycles on the grid, and E is the particular instance output by the program. If you wish to make it "physical", we can insist that the input and output be given by punched cards or paper tape.

Arguments about how TSPGRID could have arisen are not germane. Our example is solely intended to address the bogus claim that evolutionary algorithms cannot generate CSI. They can, and our TSPGRID example shows how they do, using Dembski's own "short-cut" of basing his calculations on an assumption of uniform probability.

Finally, I repeat my previous suggestion. You do not seem to be reading our paper with much care, and so far your objections are, quite frankly, silly -- at the level of a not particularly bright high school student. It could well be that there are legitimate objections to our analysis, but so far you have not presented any.

On 14 Jan 2004 you wrote in a thread on Brainstorms about Complex Specified Information: Cordova wrote: I have been, for an ID advocate, somewhat critical of his definitions, so much so Wesley Elsberry started a brief correspondence with me pertaining to SAI (Specified Anti Information).

Next, on 25 Aug 2005 on ARN you wrote: With 10 bits of CSI possibly in evidence, an observer is reluctant to make a strong design inference unless one is in contact with the designer, but with 500 bits an observer can be more confident. Could you tell me how many bits are needed to make an inference of design absent being "in contact with the designer"? And what precisely is the role that "contact with the designer" plays in ID theory? Respectfully, Matt

Sal continues to pop up on various threads spouting various versions of his standard mumbo-jumbo. While we occasionally take the time to straighten him out (for the benefit of others; Sal is unteachable), please observe what Sal consistently fails to do as he flits hither and yon:

Just answer Lenny's questions.

Howzabout it, Sal? Just answer the questions you've been asked so many times, or point us to the thread where you claim to have done so.

If ID is really some toddling form of science, and not laughably puerile religious apologetics, it shouldn't really be that hard.

No because information about the rock in your mind is a post-dictive, after the fact, connected conceptualization. A specification for the "S" in CSI must be detachable. The information about the rocks in your head are not detachable, but after the fact (post-dictive).

No because information about the rock in your mind is a post-dictive, after the fact, connected conceptualization. A specification for the "S" in CSI must be detachable. The information about the rocks in your head are not detachable, but after the fact (post-dictive).

are, quite frankly, silly --- at the level of a not particularly bright high school student.

How many experiments do we need to run to establish a law of physics?

— Sal

This is clearly false, as even a cursory examination of Dembski's work will show. For example, compare the "Generic Chance Elimination Argument" on pages 184-185 of The Design Inference with the GCEA on pages 72-73 of No Free Lunch. These constitute genuinely different definitions; to name just two differences, compare the different rejection regions, and the change in the tractability conditions. It is imply a falsehood to claim that there have not been different definitions.

Jeffrey Shallit wrote: Arguments about how TSPGRID could have arisen are not germane. Our example is solely intended to address the bogus claim that evolutionary algorithms cannot generate CSI. They can, and our TSPGRID example shows how they do, using Dembski's own "short-cut" of basing his calculations on an assumption of uniform probability.

Finally, I repeat my previous suggestion. You do not seem to be reading our paper with much care, and so far your objections are, quite frankly, silly --- at the level of a not particularly bright high school student.

Face it, Dembski's a nerd-boy who almost certainly has resentments and exaggerated self-importance from the traumas he underwent by being shoved into lockers and beat up for being a know-it-all (I know, I previously said there's not much point in psychoanalyzing the unwilling, but some things just glare out at you).

One feels some sympathy for the young Dembski, even if he probably was annoying from the beginning of his schooling. However, one feels some sympathy for the bullies at this point, since he's such an annoying and appalling geek.

If he's not the classical case of ressentiment as discussed by Nietzsche, he's still fairly close. He has that slavish desire for the certain, rather than enjoying the uncertainties of empirical science, which is why he uses terms that he think signifies absolutes. Sal does the same, of course, being to Demski what Worm (Grima) was to Saruman. While it may be that being kicked in the head, literally and/or figuratively, produced such damaged individuals, it's hard to see what can be done with them except kicking them in the head some more (figuratively, of course).

The analyses of Dembski's sorry work, and Behe's pitiful "looks designed" nonsense, have been done, in spite of the lack of anything to commend these claims to scientific review (the only reply really necessary to Dembski is that he entirely lacks relevant empirical data on which to base his "mathematical analysis"). All that's left now is to figure out what keeps the dolts saying so many stupid things, even though we must be provisional with such uncooperative, reactive subjects.

BTW, of course evolutionary processes have discernable directions just as hurricanes have discernable directions.

— PaulC

Salvador Cordova:

You write:

"Each random input corresponds to a particular event E in the space of possible outcomes. Your target space T is therefore the entire space of possibile outcomes in Omega! Since the probability of hitting something in that large a space is 1, the measure of information that your program generates is ZERO."

You are very confused. The target space T is not Omega; in fact it is a vanishingly small part of it. Did you even bother to read the paper?

Your confusion is matched by Dembski's own. On page 194 of No Free Lunch, he analyzes Dawkins' "weasel" algorithm and says

"Nonetheless, with respect to the original uniform probability on the phase space, which assigned to each sequence a probability of around 1 in 10^40, E appears to have done just that, to wit, generate a highly improbable specified event, or what we are calling specified complexity."

You have inadvertently demonstrated the point we are trying to make: Dembski cannot make up his mind whether (a) the target in an evolutionary algorithm is hit with probability 1, and hence the specified complexity is 0 or (b) one should measure the specified complexity with respect to a uniform distribution on strings. One of the points of our TSPGRID example is that (i) if one uses uniform complexity then this algorithm generates specified complexity without producing the same string each time (which was one of Dembski's complaints about the "weasel" program). The uniform complexity interpretation, therefore, is nonsensical, despite the fact that Dembski uses it again and again.

In any event, as we show in our paper, on pages 34-35, even if one does not use the bogus uniform probability approach, it is still possible to generate "specified complexity" by using a dovetailing approach common in computational complexity.

You write:
"Well then that doesn't particularly speak well for your work since the level of a not- particularly-bright-high-school-student demonstrated the sloppiness of you metrics for measuring CSI."

I'm afraid you don't even understand the point. The point is, we were using Dembski's own method for evaluating specified complexity and showing it was bogus.

It's not "of course" at all; Newton's laws of motion don't apply to evolutionary processes.

But forces do act upon evolutionary processes.

BTW, "Cope's law" is predictive, but that's far different from direction being "discernible"; rather, we infer direction from it. And it isn't really a matter of direction; Cope's law predicts that mammals on islands will become larger if they reach the mainland -- their past history isn't relevant. That's totally different from how we discern the direction of hurricanes, which is by observing which way they've been going -- and Newton tells us they will tend to continue in that direction.

...the direction of evolutionary processes is generally not "discernable".

BTW, "Cope's law" is predictive, but that's far different from direction being "discernible"; rather, we infer direction from it. And it isn't really a matter of direction; Cope's law predicts that mammals on islands will become larger if they reach the mainland --- their past history isn't relevant. That's totally different from how we discern the direction of hurricanes, which is by observing which way they've been going --- and Newton tells us they will tend to continue in that direction.

It's not "of course" at all; Newton's laws of motion don't apply to evolutionary processes.

The justification for 500 bits is reasonable. For example, the PKI encryption on the internet is 256 bits for strong encryption, but a mere 64 bits is considered very adequate. One thing that can be tested is whether the 500 bit threshhold is adequate for detecting human designs. Beyond that one is left to making the best inferences possible.

I'm not deeply interested in the exercise. The level of CSI is may or may not be able to be established, thus even in cases where the design is known, a score may not be affixable, at least immediately. If one feels that a CSI metric must be established in all cases, that is an incorrect view. Establishing CSI is a sufficient, but not necessary condition to establish design.

I only meant that a process can have discernable directions without having intent or purpose, a weather system being an obvious example.

Nevertheless we can (and do!) speak of it having direction.

I think the same is often true of evolution, though the notion of "direction" does not have the obvious geographic meaning, and I also agree that it is not always---perhaps rarely even---discernable.

BTW morbius, I don't know that you're just being argumentative for its own sake, but you do seem to have a way of pouncing on details. I'm not a biologist and presumably get a lot of things wrong; bear with me on that. I am a computer scientist and know that subject quite well.

My main thesis with respect to ID is that besides debunking them on the grounds that they don't understand how evolution works, why not debunk them on the equally valid grounds that they don't understand how intelligence works either? The advantage to this approach is their stockpile of polemic tends to be addressed at objections from evolutionary biologists. I don't think they've given much thought at all to the other attack.

I've been thinking about this since the NYT ran a rather weak he said/she said account back in August of ID vs. science. This was when I first heard of Behe and Dembski and I was naturally curious about whether they really had any new rigor to offer this old and tired debate.

Behe and Dembski believe that humans (and not just the anonymous designer) are capable of creating "intelligent designs". They also believe that evolutionary processes are incapable of doing so (except with vanishingly small probability). Dembski purports to have a mathematical proof of this, but it's very long. Reliable sources suggest that it does not even use consistent definitions. I admit I have not tried hard to follow Dembski's argument though I skimmed some of his work briefly.

However, I can conclude sight unseen that Dembski's if valid must distinguish between the power of mere human intelligence over a human lifespan and the power of evolutionary processes over the lifespan of earth's biosphere. It's not enough that it distinguishes between evolution and god-like abilities to solve intractable optimization problems, because even by Dembski's admission, it does not take omniscience, but rather ordinary intelligence to make designs.

Now if Dembski has actually made the discovery he claims, it would have deep-reaching implications for AI. For instance, it would be clear that no amount of processing power will get intelligence out of evolution-motivated algorithms. It would have deep-reaching implications for complexity theory. Right now, for instance, we have no idea if a polynomial time algorithm exists for the traveling salesman problem, yet Dembski claims he has shown a fundamental limitation of evolution-motivated algorithms ever solving problems that generate "CSI" (except with vanishing probability) using all the atom's and physical interactions of earth in its lifetime.

If Dembski could prove all that, he'd surely be a candidate for a Fields medal instead of toiling away in relative academic (if not popular) obscurity. No conspiracy of scientists could prevent it, because his claims have such far reaching implications that he could easily leverage a small fraction of them to resolve far less controversial open problems. He could probably do this in his spare time. Once he had his Fields medal, he could renew his attack on evolution with new and impressive credentials, so it would actually help his cause.

That, in short, is why it's pretty obvious to me that Dembski is blowing smoke.

The justification for 500 bits is reasonable. For example, the PKI encryption on the internet is 256 bits for strong encryption, but a mere 64 bits is considered very adequate.

Often but rarely, eh?

BTW morbius, I don't know that you're just being argumentative for its own sake, but you do seem to have a way of pouncing on details.

I'm not a biologist and presumably get a lot of things wrong; bear with me on that.

My main thesis with respect to ID is that besides debunking them on the grounds that they don't understand how evolution works, why not debunk them on the equally valid grounds that they don't understand how intelligence works either?

That, in short, is why it's pretty obvious to me that Dembski is blowing smoke.

It often has a direction, though it may rarely be discernable.

I don't see what is bogus about the analogy.

My assertion really wasn't relevant to my overall point, and I therefore regret having written it, but it's not as dumb as you seem to think.

Your implication that hurricanes follow "Newton's laws of motion" was at least as asinine as anything I said.

Do you honestly think Newtonian mechanics is sufficient even in a reductionist sense to explain atmospheric chemistry?

I wish you would occasionally try to get mine.

I generally comment on things I disagree with

morbius: Sorry I'm baffled. If I'm correct, you believe that hurricanes are fully explicable in terms of classical dynamics. I agree that there are probably classical hurricane-like systems that could be analyzed in classical terms, but I see little evidence for your apparent assertion that actual hurricanes follow Newtonian physics. I doubt, for instance, that even water droplet formation is fully explicable using classical physics.

Is my ego wound up in this? Eh, maybe. But I still find your assertion puzzling.

And I disagree about direction --- it's always climbing a hill, but the fitness landscape is constantly changing.

In the interest of closure, I'll add that if you meant that hurricanes are subject to Newton's laws--they do not violate conservation of momentum, for example--I agree with that. I retract my claim that your statement was asinine, since you never actually claimed that they were fully explicable in terms of Newton's laws. I may have misunderstood what you were claiming.

The definition on page 139, 141 of Dembski's book defines his terms.

For example, a blue print is a specification. It delimits how the intended object is to be designed. It does this by choosing a particular configuration (delimiting) from the space of many possible outcomes.

You could occasionally try commenting on the main point of a posting

If I'm correct, you believe that hurricanes are fully explicable in terms of classical dynamics.

No because information about the rock in your mind is a post-dictive, after the fact, connected conceptualization.

In the interest of closure, I'll add that if you meant that hurricanes are subject to Newton's laws---they do not violate conservation of momentum, for example---I agree with that. I retract my claim that your statement was asinine, since you never actually claimed that they were fully explicable in terms of Newton's laws. I may have misunderstood what you were claiming.

I've a feeling that Morbius has been here before, under a different name . . . . . .

But then, I really don't care. (shrug)

Sal continues to pop up on various threads spouting various versions of his standard mumbo-jumbo. While we occasionally take the time to straighten him out (for the benefit of others; Sal is unteachable), please observe what Sal consistently fails to do as he flits hither and yon: Just answer Lenny's questions. Howzabout it, Sal? Just answer the questions you've been asked so many times, or point us to the thread where you claim to have done so. If ID is really some toddling form of science, and not laughably puerile religious apologetics, it shouldn't really be that hard.

We've all got egos and, I suspect, most of us are susceptible to reacting defensively when our statements are challenged. So let's set that aspect of things to one side for a moment.

This is a publicly-accessible site. Some of us are evolutionary biologists or scientists with similar background, training, and experience. Only a few of us, thankfully, are creationists or IDiots. But whoever we may be and regardless of our knowledge or background, once we hit "Post," we have effectively become a kind of commentator or journalist. And, like any other commentator or journalist, we need to be prepared--potentially--to justify and defend each statement we make, and each of the words we use to make it with. Anything we say here is potentially subject to follow-on commentary, to criticism, to challenge.

We certainly expect to be able to challenge the creationists and IDiots. To start with, we expect--well, that's way too optimistic--it would certainly be appreciated if they made clear, consistent, and comprehensible statements. We then expect to be able to challenge them to back up their claims with rational explanation, some minimal modicum of logic, and--ideally--documentable evidence (based on experience, we may not expect them to be able to supply any of this, but we assert the right to demand it of them, and to chide them when they fail to do so).

<>It's not clear to me why we expect any less of ourselves. Yeah, it can be frustrating and tedious to have our--what we may consider to be mere asides, off-the-top, or peripheral--statements subjected to the same "nitpicky" scrutiny as our main themes. Especially by acerbic co-commentators like ts or morbius. But we can't fairly expect that we should exempt ANY of our own statements or claims from the same withering degree of scrutiny that we expect to be able to apply to the IDiots.

I've made sloppy statements here. Not every pearl that spills from my fingertips is immortal or irridescent. Sometimes I've winced when I've been corrected, especially on those peripheral statements that I didn't really think through carefully. Or a typo, or spelling, or grammar error, for frick's sake.

But I've also learned a few things. And had to admit I was wrong on occasion.

Nah, we don't always learn something of great value from these side-discussions. And, too often, they seem to degenerate into sniping sessions.

But what's the alternative? While "civility" is easy to insist upon, it's not always so easy to define, especially when gored by our own oxen (or however that saying goes...when the horn is on the other ox?). Certainly we can't issue ourselves a free pass.

Any suggestions for improving the collegiality of our interactions would be welcome, SO LONG AS we don't sacrifice the quality. In the meantime, winces, warts and all, I'll take our more prickly and edgy co-commentators over their mushy brain-dead sycophants any day of the week.

We've all got egos and, I suspect, most of us are susceptible to reacting defensively when our statements are challenged. So let's set that aspect of things to one side for a moment.

This is a publicly-accessible site. Some of us are evolutionary biologists or scientists with similar background, training, and experience. Only a few of us, thankfully, are creationists or IDiots. But whoever we may be and regardless of our knowledge or background, once we hit "Post," we have effectively become a kind of commentator or journalist. And, like any other commentator or journalist, we need to be prepared--potentially--to justify and defend each statement we make, and each of the words we use to make it with. Anything we say here is potentially subject to follow-on commentary, to criticism, to challenge.

We certainly expect to be able to challenge the creationists and IDiots. To start with, we expect--well, that's way too optimistic--it would certainly be appreciated if they made clear, consistent, and comprehensible statements. We then expect to be able to challenge them to back up their claims with rational explanation, some minimal modicum of logic, and--ideally--documentable evidence (based on experience, we may not expect them to be able to supply any of this, but we assert the right to demand it of them, and to chide them when they fail to do so).

It's not clear to me why we expect any less of ourselves. Yeah, it can be frustrating and tedious to have our--what we may consider to be mere asides, off-the-top, or peripheral--statements subjected to the same "nitpicky" scrutiny as our main themes. Especially by acerbic co-commentators like ts or morbius. But we can't fairly expect that we should exempt ANY of our own statements or claims from the same withering degree of scrutiny that we expect to be able to apply to the IDiots.

I've made sloppy statements here. Not every pearl that spills from my fingertips is immortal or irridescent. Sometimes I've winced when I've been corrected, especially on those peripheral statements that I didn't really think through carefully. Or a typo, or spelling, or grammar error, for frick's sake. Or, ahem, the dreaded "mismatched tag"!

But I've also learned a few things. And had to admit I was wrong on occasion.

Nah, we don't always learn something of great value from these side-discussions. And, too often, they seem to degenerate into sniping sessions.

But what's the alternative? While "civility" is easy to insist upon, it's not always so easy to define, especially when gored by our own oxen (or however that saying goes...when the horn is on the other ox?). Certainly we can't issue ourselves a free pass.

Any suggestions for improving the collegiality of our interactions would be welcome, SO LONG AS we don't sacrifice the quality. In the meantime, winces, warts and all, I'll take our more prickly and edgy co-commentators over their mushy brain-dead sycophants any day of the week.

Sal some questions

1.Do you think that abiogenesis and evolution could have happened without you, Dembski, and a littoral reading of the Gen1 and Gen2 ?.

2.If your "design" requires a "designer" how does that "designer" transfer knowledge of itself to the writers of Gen1. Gen2. or any other human creation story or scripture, and so on down to you and Dembski ?

3.Since you can't answer 2 unless you are schizophrenic then anything you say about a designer can neither be proved nor disproved why should we accept anything you say about a "designer" ?

4.Further why limit any definition of your "cause for an infinitely small probability of occurrence" to a "designer" and not a freak accident, space alien intervention, the infinite dreams of the Hindu gods ?

3. Why do we have to rely on the "reports" from "wandering intuition" and value judgments by Dembski and yourself when you absolutely refuse to test any of theories ?

4. Why should anyone consider your theory to be of any use whatsoever when you refuse anyone else the right to define any part of it in a formal definition and alternative language ?

5. Are you aware of Kant's "Logic of Illusion" and why he rejects it ?

6. Are you aware "private definitions" and "made up definitions" are classic hallmarks of pseudo-science ?

Fascinating to see when Sal "I will take a grenade for Dembski" (YEC) meets Science. It seems a rather unfair confrontation though.
No wonder that ID remains scientifically vacuous

Jeffrey Insists: The target space T is not Omega; in fact it is a vanishingly small part of it. Did you even bother to read the paper?

The Designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials William Dembski

Taken in its most fundamental sense, the word design denotes a pattern or blueprint

Dembski has been accused of not responding to his critics, and Salvador has eagerly expressed (and in public, no less) his willingness to take a "grenade" for Dembski so that Dembski can continue to not respond to critics. Who is that supposed to fool?

Nice try Sal but a theory must communicate an understanding and add information not previously available.

You refuse to communicate an understanding because you change your own understanding when it suits you.

You are adding no information other than "a designer designed the design" without any testable evidence, pure metaphysics, empty of any meaning except in prayer.

Nice comments, Stevie. I've tried to be civil with Paul, thanking him for his comments, acknowledging that he was right and I was wrong about NFL (which someone strangely claimed was additional evidence that I "just like to argue"), noting that he knows a lot more about it than I do. I really don't think comments about personalities and styles are relevant -- and yet I, in my own defensiveness, fell into it, commenting about ego involvement, telling him to grow up, etc. For that I apologize. Sorry, Paul.

I see it is completely pointless arguing with Cordova. I specified Omega, T, and E in a previous comment (54992); he simply ignores them, and continues to state I have not defined them even though they are there for all to see. He gives a bogus set of two options, and doesn't even realize there is a third. Pathetic.

As I stated before, we did not explicitly define Omega, T, and E in our paper, but they are obvious to any minimally competent reader. Dembski does not even do that much. Cordova cannot complain about this without being hypocritical, since as I already pointed out, Dembski fails to specify Omega, T, and E for nearly every example he claims has CSI. I challenged Cordova to show where Omega, T, and E were provided for the 16 examples in our paper. He did not respond.

I must say, this little exchange was very revealing. Do we need any more proof of the vacuity of intelligent design?

Yeah, it can be frustrating and tedious to have our---what we may consider to be mere asides, off-the-top, or peripheral---statements subjected to the same "nitpicky" scrutiny as our main themes. Especially by acerbic co-commentators like ts or morbius.

Remember when Flint and Great White Wonder used to go at it?

Thems were the days.

Yeah, it can be frustrating and tedious to have our---what we may consider to be mere asides, off-the-top, or peripheral---statements subjected to the same "nitpicky" scrutiny as our main themes. Especially by acerbic co-commentators like ts or morbius.

Remember when Flint and Great White Wonder used to got at it?

Thems were the days.

-sniffle-

Jeff wrote: Omega, the space of all events, is the set of all possible permutations on 4n^2 cities; it has cardinality (4n^2)! T is the set of all such permutations corresponding to Hamiltonian cycles on the grid, and E is the particular instance output by the program. If you wish to make it "physical", we can insist that the input and output be given by punched cards or paper tape.

Will the program behave outside of the constraints designed by the programmers? Not unless the computer is broken.

Omega, the space of all events, is the set of all possible permutations on 4n^2 cities; it has cardinality (4n^2)!

William Dembski wrote: The Designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials

Here the input is n, which has at most log2 n bits of information, and the algorithm is of fixed size, and can have at most c bits of information. Since for large n we have 8n^2log2n - 2:6n^2 >> (log2 n) + c, we conclude that TSPGRID has indeed generated specified complexity with respect to the uniform probability interpretation.

Remember when Flint and Great White Wonder used to got at it?

Hey Sal, why won't you answer my simple questions?

What happened to ts BTW?

As I have pointed out before, Sal is actually quite valuable. No one reading his posts will confuse the ID movement he espouses with anything possessing actual intellectual content.

And he's clueless about how much he embarrasses both the movement and himself. Fascinating.

Sal, doesn't it bother you to lie for your faith? Doesn't that violate the commandments? Doesn't it bother you that you've no understanding whatsoever of the math that you chunk around?

Get some cojones Sal - behave like an adult for a change.

The intelligence of the designer selecting out of the possible outcomes in Omega is the source of information, not the tool (such as computer code) which he uses to carryout his manufacturing process.

— Salvador Cordova

Donald M asserts

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever!

Alan Fox: Until Dembski makes such a response, your assertion will remain baseless.

The fact is, no amount of responses by Dembski, no matter how detailed would ever satisfy his critics...ever! for the simple reason that it 'just can't be the case that life (or any other feature of the cosmos for that matter) is actually designed. Therefore, there just can't be any evidence for that, and if anything even remotely looks like evidence of actual design, well, we know (wink wink) that it really wasn't.'

Donald M. (comment 54834) has responded to something I did not even mention -whether or not the general conjecture of ID could be disproved. I think it can't, agreeing on that with Donald M, but this, being in tune with the assertion of ID's being unfalsifiable and hence unscientific, has nothing to do with my point. In my comment I stated that Dembski usually avoids answering specific critical remarks revealing weaknesses and errors in his methods of identifying design. Unlike the general unfalsifiable conjecture of ID, these specific claims can be refuted and have been refuted by a number of critics, but Dembski almost never replies to the substance of most of these refutations, often indulging instead in denigrating his opponents. Donald seems to have taken lessons from Dembski as his comment (a) changes the subject and (b) resorts to rudeness (referring to my comment as to "hogwash"), which are two common devices used when one has no good counter-arguments but craves to vent anger.

Hogwash Donald M

1.Worthless, false, or ridiculous speech or writing; nonsense.
2.Garbage fed to hogs; swill.

your pick

What I asked was how we know scientifically that the properties of the cosmos are such that none of the apparent design we observe throught biological systems can be actual design, even in principle? So far, no one has provided a scientific answer to that question. No one. Claims of "no evidence" or "they don't look designed, they look evolved" do not provide a scientific answer to the question, and are merely hand waving assertions.

This proves my point: no response by Dembski (or any other IDP for that matter) will ever be considered enough to satisfy the critics. The "baseless" assertion being made here by Alan et.al. is that Dembski hasn't responded. That is simply and demonstrably false. It is disingenous to pretend otherwise. Dembski's (and ID's) critics complain that the "really hard" questions to ID haven't been addressed. Dembski then releases his book No Free Lunch followed by The Design Revolution. The ink was barely dry on either book before the ID critics were complaining that the answers were inadequate, or that it didn't address the right questions, or whatever. Subsequent to that, Dembski publishes on the internet two or three more papers that expand on concepts introduced in NFL. These were highly detailed in every respect. Still the ID critics aren't satisfied.

I agree with Steviepinhead that it would be terrible if we felt afraid to criticize each other's comments freely. But I want to add that it would also be a shame if people were afraid to add colorful asides for fear of being pounced on for imprecision.

It's possible to point out where something is imprecise without the criticism sounding like an attack. This forum is not nearly at the same level as peer reviewed publication, but even peer reviewers usually take care not to be insulting. I base this on referee reports I have received and written. It's a question of tone, which is naturally subjective. In this particular discussion, it seems that morbius and I were like fingernails on a blackboard to each other. I won't claim any highground here, but merely acknowledge the subjectivity of tone.

If I found an aside in a paper submitted for publication that seemed both incorrect and irrelevant to the main point. I would probably say that it "seemed imprecise" unless it was so wrong that I couldn't in all honestly be so polite, in which case I'd say it was wrong and give a precise counterargument. I'd add that it can be deleted without hurting the main argument, and recommend that it be deleted.

BTW, while I think it's fine to identify any part of a posting as wrong whether or not it is part of the main point, I personally expect some kind of counterargument, even if it's just the assertion that the meaning is so imprecise it's "neither right nor wrong." But even then, a suggestion as to what it could mean and why that's wrong is better than mere assertion.

As for the relevance of comments like "you seem unnecessarily argumentative" I did refrain from this kind of meta-comment until quite recently in the thread (my early comment about not shifting terminology was made in reference to Dembski, not morbius; sorry for any misunderstanding). I've tried to respond to objections with clarifications and corrections. After about the fifth go-round, it is hard to escape thinking "Why does this person have it in for me?" My justification for making it personal is that at least on this thread, it seemed that morbius was being more critical of my postings than others were and also being more critical than it seemed he was being of other comparably vague or self-contradictory assertions in other postings.

I regret if my perception was incorrect. I also don't hold it against him (even if he holds it against himself) for making his own metacomments about ego and so forth. At that point, the discussion had descended to the personal, and this really did need to be resolved before any fruitful commentary could ensue.

At the risk of belaboring things, I want to comment that I don't think Newtonian inertia is the main factor that holds a hurricane to its course. It's an externally driven system that I think is usually approached in terms of fluid dynamics. In think it adheres to a course because it's being pulled by some pressure system rather than because it is a very massive object that just happens to be headed in that direction (like a ballistic object). But I don't pretend to be a meteorologist, so I may be completely wrong about all that.

What is true is that regardless of the specific laws governing any complex chaotic system, you can usually calculate scalar functions of the system that are continuous and seemingly well-behaved over sufficiently short intervals. You can at the very least make statements about whether these functions are increasing or decreasing over your time interval. This applies both to the weather and to evolution. I feel confident in this analogy and would like to substitute it for my vague comments about "direction" and whether it is "discernable." I would also assert that this analogy has some use to it. At least, I find it helpful.

For instance, in the case of a hurricane, you can state that the distance to the Gulf of Mexico is instantaneously increasing or decreasing. You cannot predict in detail what it will do, but you can usually rule out possibilities such as the distance of the storm center to Albuquerque ever decreasing to zero. You also cannot attribute any intent or purpose to the hurricane. It is not "seeking" the Gulf the way a human tourist might be said to. Yet, the location of the Gulf is significant to our understanding of hurricanes.

In the case of antibiotic resistance, you can likewise determine whether the level of resistance of some strain to some antibiotic is increasing or not. This kind of thing has been observed even though we are far from understanding all the details. Even though the bacteria have no intent or purpose to developing resistance, we have more reason to look at what happens to antiobiotic resistance than some other property--say a color change due to the presence of some new pigment--for which there is no selective pressure.

What these situations have in common is that while they have no intent or purpose and are subject to much uncertainty, neither are they "random" as assumed in some of the strawman arguments of IDers. Evolution is influenced by uniform random events, but the outcome is not uniform. Obviously, this is old hat to biologists--it's no concidence for example that marsupials appear to fill similar niches in Australia as placentals do elsewhere in the world. The analogy, as such, was therefore not really pertinent to my point, but I am prepared to defend (possibly with minor corrections) the more precise version of it as put forth above.

It is frustrating to argue with the likes of Donald M. Donald uses the device familiar from the writing of Dembski, Cordova, Heddle, etc, which is accusing opponents of "not understanding" their statements. There is not really much to understand, Donald. The simple fact is that Dembski routinely avoids replying to critique in a substantial way but resorts to pejorative remarks about his critics - just look at his "replies" to Wein, Pennock, Erik, Matzke, etc. A list of critics to whom he never replied at all is even longer and this is a fact regardless of Donald's emotions. All the rest of Donald's lengthy comments has nothing to do with the subject in point and obviously is aimed at obfuscating the matter.

Sal "I will take a grenade for Uncle Bill so that he does not have to respond to criticism" seems to be willing to further undermine the credibility of ID by making unsubstantiated assertions and accusations based on his limited understanding of what Shallit et al are arguing.

At all cost, "Uncle Bill" needs to be protected from criticism. Fascinating... Even if ID becomes a victim of collateral damage...

But I want to add that it would also be a shame if people were afraid to add colorful asides for fear of being pounced on for imprecision.

main () { while(1) printf("heads "); }

It is CSI that within the Chaitin-Kolmogorov-Solomonoff theory of algorithmic information identifies the highly compressible, nonrandom strings of digits

This is why I'm convinced that the real problem that ID critics have isn't with [Dembski's] science, but with the metaphysical implications of the science.

If you fear being "pounced on", that's entirely your own problem. Therapy might help.

Sal, you still have failed to show any misrepresentations or manglings other than your own ignorance. It's this appeal to ignorance which makes ID scientifically vacuous and vulnerable to such a ruling in the Dover case.
In other words, your arguments make for excellent case of why ID is scientifically vacuous.

Are you sure you are not an ID-Critic deep down? I used to be a YEC-er and I am personally very aware of the lingering doubt which finally caused me to read up on science and thus reject YECism.
For some this path may be a bit slower as the overwhelming veil of self deception may take a longer time to lift.
I have been there, it was not pretty.
But there is hope

Shallit's TSPGRID was an example of mathematical theatrics. A comparable result, with simpler code would have been achieved with the following program being run for as long as the user wishes: main () { while(1) printf("heads "); }

DonaldM, It's great seeing you here. I participated because Jeffrey Shallit started posting. Now that he's gone from this thread, I say adios for now.

acerbic co-commentators like ts or morbius

which someone strangely claimed was additional evidence that I "just like to argue"

For YEARS now, I have been asking IDers a simple question ------- how, exactly, does one rule out not only all currently existing possible explanations that invoke either chance or natural conditions, but *all possible future explanations that have not even been thought of yet*? Never got any intelligible answer. Which leads to: If the first step of Dembski's filter is "determine if the thing can be explained by a natural law", and if IDers CANNOT rule out all possible explanations from natural law that have not been thought of yet, then, uh, how can we ever get past the very first step of Dembski's filter? If Dembski means, in the first step, determing if there is a CURRENT explanation for a thing, then all we have is "god of the gaps" --- "we can't explain it now, therefore goddidit". On the other hand, if Demsbki means, in the first step, determining yhat there is NO POSSIBLE explanation for a thing, then I will once again ask, how do we rule out EVERY POSSIBLE explanation, including all the ones that have not been thought of yet?�?

Donald M said

What I asked was how we know scientifically that the properties of the cosmos are such that none of the apparent design we observe throught biological systems can be actual design, even in principle? So far, no one has provided a scientific answer to that question. No one. Claims of "no evidence" or "they don't look designed, they look evolved" do not provide a scientific answer to the question, and are merely hand waving assertions.

Rilke's grandaughter: You are asking for a universal negative - no such negative exists or can be demonstrated. The issue here is not whether the various 'parameters' and natural laws of the universe cannot be designed, but whether or not there is any evidence that they are. No ID advocate has been able to answer this point.

It is frustrating to argue with the likes of Donald M. Donald uses the device familiar from the writing of Dembski, Cordova, Heddle, etc, which is accusing opponents of "not understanding" their statements. There is not really much to understand, Donald. The simple fact is that Dembski routinely avoids replying to critique in a substantial way but resorts to pejorative remarks about his critics - just look at his "replies" to Wein, Pennock, Erik, Matzke, etc. A list of critics to whom he never replied at all is even longer and this is a fact regardless of Donald's emotions. All the rest of Donald's lengthy comments has nothing to do with the subject in point and obviously is aimed at obfuscating the matter.

This is the hidden meaning of the word "explanation". In the context of the question being asked, it means "explanation with reference to undirected natural causes only."

Donald M quoted Dembski: "The prospect that further knowledge will upset a design inference poses a risk for the EF. But it is a risk endemic to all of scientific inquiry."

Translation: Until we have evidence that suggests evolution, we will assume ID.

Sounds like God of the gaps to me.

In fact, your whole post is just one big God of the gaps.

So, while Steviepinhead's comments on the redeeming value of nitpicky arguments are well-received, I maintain that such disputes are most often the product of inflated self-regard on the part of one or the other (or both) of the participants.

The objections to ID, then, rest entirely on philosophical grounds.

— Donald M

[N]o reply, no matter how detailed, complete, or thoughtful will ever be acceptable to the anti-ID crowd. So, I have to ask "why"? I think the answer is obvious: it is the metaphysical implications of ID that gets everyone's knickers in a twist. That and only that is the real issue.

— Donald M

"The objections to ID, then, rest entirely on philosophical grounds."

That's because ID is entirely philosophical. There is no Intelligent Design model that corresponds to some aspect of reality. There's no there there. If it consoles some people whose mental habit is to crave religious or metaphysical certainly, let them quibble the semantic difference between design and merely its appearance. It does not make a shred of scientific difference.

This is why I'm convinced that the real problem that ID critics have isn't with the science, but with the metaphysical implications of the science.

it is the metaphysical implications of ID that gets everyone's knickers in a twist. That and only that is the real issue.

CSI rules out chance and necessity or their combination

I say adios for now.

What I asked was how we know scientifically that the properties of the cosmos are such that none of the apparent design we observe throught biological systems can be actual design, even in principle? So far, no one has provided a scientific answer to that question. No one.

I am trying to clarify what is the real issue.

Donald M Claims of "no evidence" or "they don't look designed, they look evolved" do not provide a scientific answer to the question, and are merely hand waving assertions.

If intelligent cause can not be eliminated, then it is perfectly legitimate AND scientific to ask, what would be indicators or markers of intelligent cause. That leads us to CSI, IC and all the other aspects of ID that the IDPs have been talking about. And note that so stated, this focuses only what is empirically detectable, and therefore well within scientific bounds.

— Donald

You are correct in pointing out that there is no way to scientifically eliminate intelligent cause, or actual design as a live possibility. The objections to ID, then, rest entirely on philosophical grounds. That is what my question demonstrates clearly.

— Donald

If only it were that simple. Richard Wein wrote some 37,000 word "rebuttal" to Dembski's book No Free Lunch.(it is my understanding that that article is now archived somewhere on Talk.Origins.) In response, Dembski wrote Obsessively Criticized but Scarcely Refuted: A Response to Richard Wein. And The Fantasy Life of Richard Wein. To say that Dembski "hasn't done much to answer their critques" and that he only calls them "obsessed" is simply false. Dembski's website has a long list of articles with detailed responses to several of his critics.

— Donald

BillD's response to Wien's paper on bacterial flagella marks him out as a fraud extraordinaire. BillD lost all claim to scientific legintimacy about three years back after he was trounced in writing and in debates. His connections with the world of science came to an end about then. Since then he has been inflating himself with trhe help of a vast crowd of factotums. This is exactly the sort of response that would lead an IDC defending lawyer to ask BillD to step down. There isn't any consideration of the numerous points and references in the paper; only a long whine about how many references it contains. BillD clearly shows that he understands nothing about the biology and simply blwoing hot air. Since Donald M says you can't eliminate ID ever produce it now. And then define intelligence.

Answer my questions, Donald. Don't be like Sal and Nelson.

Remember, Bill is not a biologist. His work clearly shows how unfamiliar he is with science especially evolutionary science (just read his paper on human evolution for a good laugh). Even his math was compared to 'written in Jello' by another mathematician.
Bill had the opportunity to take ID to the mainstream via the Polayni center at Baylor but his Waterloo comments destroyed it all.
Must be hard to be so close to having it all and then losing it all. Well, at least he has his theology position at the southern baptist seminary. But that hardly compares to what he could have been.
Now everyone who is critical of his work misunderstands him or misrepresents him, but what amazes me is that despite many documented cases of errors on his part, Dembski seems to be unable to admit to any error.
Fascinating...

Well, if you're correct, and there is no scientific way to eliminate intelligent causes as a factor in the cosmos, then we can focus on the evidence.

Contrary to your opinion that "no ID advocate has been able to answer this point", most of the books and articles written by IDPs is about observational data that indicates design.

The way you present the argument here is tantamount to saying there is not a single observation that anyone has made that can be legitimately taken as evidence of intelligent cause.

Well, then what would satisfy you as evidence of intelligent cause? And why would that be the only acceptable evidence?

If intelligent cause can not be eliminated, then it is perfectly legitimate AND scientific to ask, what would be indicators or markers of intelligent cause.

That leads us to CSI, IC and all the other aspects of ID that the IDPs have been talking about.

And note that so stated, this focuses only what is empirically detectable, and therefore well within scientific bounds.

You are correct in pointing out that there is no way to scientifically eliminate intelligent cause, or actual design as a live possibility.

The objections to ID, then, rest entirely on philosophical grounds.

That is what my question demonstrates clearly.

If God indeed designed the world, every object in the world is an instance of design. No particular object can serve as evidence for design since a cow pat is as contrived as a cat or a watch. Arguments from analogy are illegitimate if there is no instance of an undesigned object.

Of course those of us who have been paying attention know that somethings are not designed, some have been shaped by natural selection, some have been designed by animals that have been shaped by natural selection, and some have been designed by machines that were themselves designed by animals that have been shaped by natural selection. We're within our rights to make an analogy between human design and natural selection or between natural selection and computer design programs.

This might be another thread where I might pose my request of the Dembski defenders yet again.

Please point to one serious academic in any relevant field (mathematics, statistics, information theory, biology...) who has given any of Dembski's published work a positive review.

[cue crickets]

Th'weirdest sounding crickets I ever did hear...