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"The Origin of Specious Nonsense"
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I've made a start here:-
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=74840918&postcount=5960
... and I am awaiting your response.
You claim to be a former scientist and yet you don't understand the meaning of the word "refute"?
Your post is nowhere near even beginning to discuss the paper. All you do is regurgitate the same word soup about complex things requiring a designer.
Nowhere do you show how the paper is wrong, i.e. refute the content of the paper.
So would you like to try and refute the paper now?If you can read this, you're too close!
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I'll start with Item 3 page 3
Quote:-
It is a repeatably observable (i.e. a scientifically valid) account of the only known method of producing Complex Specified Design (CSD)
... 'design' and even 'complex design' can indeed mean just 'pattern' ... but 'Complex Specified Design' doesn't mean pattern ... because it is functonal due to its specificity ... and it is actually the specificity that is the reason why it requires an intelligent source.
Complex Specified Design implies a designer ... complex designs (i.e. without specificity) can be deterministically (or even randomly) produced.
... and ID proponents don't say this either!!!
... because a pattern does not always imply a 'patterner'.
... biological processes are specified ... and they therefore produce Complex Functional Specified Design (that is the 'hallmark' of intelligent action).
... other patterned phenomena, like snowflakes and fractals, for example, produce complex designs allright ... but they do not produce specified functionality and these designs are therefore not specific ... and thus they can be produced using combinations of random and deterministic processes (that don't require any intelligent input).
First off, JC, the above points that you have made are meaningless without defining your terms precisely, which I have asked you to and am still waiting for. Secondly, if we continue down this road, we are going to be here till the post counter breaks and senility sets in. At the moment you are inviting posters to present a rebuttal to your rebuttal above of a rebuttal of Dembski's work. I thought that in this instance I would cut out a couple of steps and go straight for Dembski's work (and jugular). This is going to be as comprehensive as I can manage and may require multiple posts so bear with me.
Problem 1 - Misrepresentation of source material
As a christian JC, I'm sure that you're familiar with Matthew 7:26, the foolish man who builds his house on shifting sands. This is one of the key problems with Dembski's work. He references several sources in the compilation of his specified complexity argument which don't say what he says they say. I don't know whether this misinterpretation is through incompetence or dishonesty but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment.
1A - Stastical methods, experimental design, and scientific inference; R.A. Fisher; 1956
The first source which Dembski twists is Ronald Fisher's book on scientific research methods. On page 2 of "The Design Inference", Dembski references Fisher's work on elimination of chance through small probabilities. He says:
"When Ronald Fisher charged Gregor Mendel's gardening assistant with data falsification because Mendel's data matched Mendel's theory too closely, Fisher was eliminating chance through small probabilities (see Fisher, 1965, p.53)"
Dembski further uses Fisher's work as the basis for the creation of his trichotomy of design, regularity and chance and the explanatory filter based on it. Having detailed his filter, on page 49, Dembski states:
"Trichotomy holds because regularity, chance and design are mutually exclusive and exhaustive."
However, this simply isn't true. In Fisher's book, which Dembski refers to, Fisher says that mutations represent an option common to all three sets. Mutations occur individually at random, but collectively are governed by deterministic processes which, according to Fisher are all part of the design in God's divine plan.
The other problem is that Dembski has constructed his trichotomy to be mutually exclusive and exhaustive by definition and not by investigation. He states on page 36:
"Defining design as the set-theoretic complement of the disjunction of regularity-or-chance guarantees that the three modes of explanation are mutually exclusive or exhaustive."
Starting with such a blatant non-sequitur doesn't bode well for the rest of his work.
BTW, I find it interesting to note that Demsbki cites Fisher's work as 1965 when Fisher died in 1962. It should read 1956, just goes to show how rigorously it was scrutinised.
1B – A mathematical theory of communication; C.E. Shannon; 1948
The next problem stems from Dembski’s use of the term information in relation to his development of the CSI concept. He outlines the idea of intelligent design as a theory of information in Chapter 6 of his book “Intelligent Design: The bridge between science and theology”. Dembski’s use of the term information is based on Shannon uncertainty or what has become known as entropy in information theory. This describes the amount of information required to transmit a signal irrespective of its content. The thing that Dembski attempts to dismiss or hide in his book, however, is that Shannon’s use of entropy is equivalent to entropy in thermodynamics.
The Gibbs entropy as outlined in the 1870s defines entropy, mathematically as:
while Shannon’s definition is
The exact relationship between information theory entropy and thermodynamic is outlined in greater detail here:
Entropy in thermodynamics and information theory
What Dembski is attempting with this chapter is to introduce the well-worn creationist cliché about the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He may have couched it in some new mathematical language but he’s not fooling anyone.
He further highlights this with his introduction of his “Law” of conservation of Information later in the chapter. He states:
“Natural causes are therefore incapable of generating CSI. This broad conclusion I call the Law of Conservation of Information, or LCI for short. LCI has profound implications for science. Among its corollaries are the following: (1) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases. (2) CSI cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously, or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research). (3) The CSI in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system though now closed was not always closed). (4) In particular, any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever CSI it contains before it became a closed system.”
It should be pointed out here that, Dembski’s “law” has not been the subject of peer-reviewed testing either by himself or others. It does not feature in the scientific literature and consequently has no merit as a claim. The fact that Dembski would claim this as a law shows astounding ego.
As a side note, for JC’s benefit, it is useful at this point to explain a scientific law since creationists rarely seem to understand them. To do this, I will use an example first given by physicist John W. Carroll.
Consider the two statements:
There are no gold spheres larger than 1 mile in diameter.
There are no uranium spheres larger than 1 mile in diameter.
The first statement could be considered to a theory, since it holds as long as our observed reality contains no gold spheres. The second statement on the other hand could be considered a law, because we know from nuclear physics that it is impossible to have a uranium sphere larger than about 6 inches, since anything larger would collapse in on itself.
Dembski’s LCI contains no such rigorous scientific observations and no merit.
1C/D – The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection; L.E. Orgel; 1973. The Fifth Miracle; P. Davies; 1999.
Misrepresentation seems to be the one skill that Dembski possesses in abundance. One of the recurring ones in Dembski’s work is to conflate his use of the term “specified complexity” with other uses in the scientific literature. It reminds me of the scene in Red Dwarf where Rimmer has stuck all the newspaper headlines on the wall as if they referred to him.
Dembski tries the same trick in No Free Lunch. Footnote 13 of Chapter 1 refers to the use of the term specified complexity by Leslie Orgel and Paul Davies. Orgel stated:
“In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.”
while Davies comments:
“Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”
Dembski’s tactic is to suggest, well look here are other scientists talking about specified complexity so I must be right. However, Dembski uses the term to mean something different and often contrary to what is reported in the literature. Take Davies, for example. On page 116 of The Fifth Miracle, Davies explains that he means high Kolmogorov complexity when he refers to complexity. Dembski on the other hand, on page 144 of No Free Lunch, uses specified complexity to refer to low Kolmogorov complexity.
Dembski has built his arguments on shifting sands, misrepresenting key source works either through his ignorance of evolutionary theory or deliberate deception and his CSI/CSD/CFSI ideas fall flat.
Problem 2 - Mutations and CSI
The fulcrum on which Dembski's dubious conclusions rest is the idea that mutation cannot generate new CSI. However it has been shown and can be shown that this is in fact the case.- Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Δ32 AIDS-Resistance Allele by the Coalescence of Haplotypes
- Myostatin Mutation Associated with Gross Muscle Hypertrophy in a Child
- High Bone Mass in Mice Expressing a Mutant LRP5 Gene
- Experimental evolution in Chlamydomonas II. Genetic variation in strongly contrasted environments
- Evolutionary adaptation to temperature I. Fitness responses of Escherichia coli to changes in its thermal environment.
- Purification and Characterization of 6-Aminohexanoic-Acid-Oligomer Hydrolase of Flavobacterium sp. KI72
That's all I've got time for at the moment, but I'll be back with more. You're more than welcome to respond to this in the meantime JC.0 -
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A snowflake would be a complex design ... and a bicycle would be a complex specified design.
The difference between the two is that it doesn't matter what complex shape the snowflake forms (and there is an effective infinity of them) ... whereas the components of a bicycle must be specific shapes that interact precisely with each other and thus there is effectively only one way that a partcular design for a particular bike will function..
And how does any of that support the creationist myth? If you can read this, you're too close!
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living organisms exhibit complex specified designs ... that interact precisely with each other and thus there is effectively only one way that a particular design for a particular living process will function ... and the only known way of overcoming the vast non-functional design spaces that exist around all living systems, to produce the observed highly specified designs that precisely interact with each other is via the appliance of intelligence.And how does any of that support the creationist myth?
... and ID also supports other theories about the production/manipulation of life on Earth via the appliance of intelligence as well as Divine Creation.
There is a view, for example, that life on Earth may have been 'seeded' or even genetically manipulated by Alien Intelligences. Prof Dawkins, for example, has speculated about this possibility.0 -
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