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The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.
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It isn't just that Evolution doesn't explain either the origins of life (which it doesn't claim to do anyway) ... it also doesn't explain how the vast quantities of complex functional specified information found in every genome arose either.
And the Creation Hypothesis is directly provable precisely by the vast quantities of complex functional specified information found in every genome .., which is a definitive signal of intelligent action.
Of course it doesn't, CFSI is creationist parlance not actual scientific terminology.
If you can read this, you're too close!
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My basic point was that modern Creation Scientists can trace their scientific pedigree right back to the 'fathers' of modern science ... and that point remains.
Well, no. Your point doesn't remain because as I pointed out, unlike the pioneers listed modern "creation scientists" are not out to investigate the world and report their findings. They're attempting to drum up pseudoscientific evidence for their religious beliefs and cobble together an explanation of origins which looks just science-y enough at first glance to fool non-scientists into believing that intelligent design is a legit theory. That way they can get their foot in the door of science classes and pretend to be on an equal footing with evolution.
Let's take your favourite creationist man-crush William Dembski, for example. Dembski's work on complexity shows why he isn't of the same pedigree as the real scientists listed previously.
1. Kolmogorov complexity & misrepresentation.
One of Dembski's common tactics is to cherrypick concepts and ideas from legitimate scientists and pretend that they support his argument. One such example is the idea of specified complexity espoused by Leslie Orgel and Paul Davies. Dembski introduces the idea of specified complexity in Chapter 1 of No Free Lunch. In a footnote to the chapter he quotes Orgel:
“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.”
and Davies:
“Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”
Dembski introduces the comments so he can pretend that when he talks about specified complexity it means the same thing as when legitimate scientists do. Unfortunately, Dembski can't even be consistent in this regard. On page 144 of No Free Lunch Dembski explains that his use of specified complexity refers to low Kolmogorov complexity. However, on page 116 of The Fifth Miracle, Davies explains that he uses specified complexity to mean high Kolmogorov complexity.
For those who don't know Kolmogorov complexity refers to the degree to which a string of information can be communicated in an abbreviated way.
For example, take the following two strings of text:
abababababababababababababababab
4clj5b2p0cv4w1x8rx2y39umgw5q85s7
The first string has low Kolmogorov complexity. This is because the information content of the string can be transmitted using less characters than the string length, e.g. "ab 16 times". Dembski uses low Kolmogorov complexity to mean specified complexity because the regular repeating pattern looks intentional (at least to him).
The second string has high Kolmogorov complexity, meaning that it is so complex that you would have to transmit the entire string as is to get the message across. This is what Davies refers to as specified complexity, something which is very difficult to unpick into smaller parts.
Dembski's misrepresentation of Orgel, Davies and Kolmogorov complexity underlines his dishonesty and lack of scientific expertise and integrity.
2. Claude Shannon & Genetic Information
The next point about Dembski is his willingness to quote other scientists' work even when his conclusions about said work are demonstrably false. In Chapter 6 of Intelligent Design: The bridge between science and theology, Dembski introduces the idea of intelligent design as a kind of information theory, informed by the work of Claude Shannon. Shannon's key contribution to science was the development of Shannon uncertainty or the information theory equivalent of entropy. His work lead Dembski to formulate his "Law" of conservation of information which 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.”
However, Shannon's work shows that genetic information can be increased, using mutation.
Shannon defined information initially as a probability. For example, a message Xi has the probability p(Xi). So if you asked someone their birthday, assigning the value of Xi to 1st January would yield p(Xi) of 0.003.
Shannon then formalised this postulate by defining the information content of a stream as its entropy given by:
so for p(x) = 0 and p(x) = 1, the function has a value of 0.
Now, as far as genetics is concerned, the following example shows clearly why Dembski is wrong.
Let's start with a population of 1000 individuals. 500 of these individuals (which we'll call group A) have a gene with the codon CAG and 500 (which we'll call group
with the codon CCC. So p(A) = 0.5 and p(B) = 0.5. Therefore, H = -(0.5*log2(0.5) - 0.5*log2(0.5)) = 1.000.
Now in the next generation, group A remains unchanged. However, in group B, thanks to a random mutation, there are 499 individuals with codon CCC and 1 mutant with CCG. Therefore, the sum of entropies is now:
p(CAG) * log2(p(CAG)) = 0.50000
p(CCC) * log2(p(CCC)) = 0.50044
p(CCG) * log2(p(CCG)) = 0.00997
So now, H = -(0.50000 + 0.50044 + 0.00997) = 1.01041
Therefore the information has increased thanks to this mutation.
3. Ronald Fisher & Scientific Integrity
One final point to show why Dembski and other "creation scientists" cannot trace their pedigree back to scientists like Maxwell, Newton and Mendel.
"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, to which Dembski refers, 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."
Dembski tries to define design into existence rather than investigate if design is really responsible. It is a top-down, rather than a bottom-up approach to evidence which is as unscientific, and dishonest, as it gets. This more than all his other work shows that Dembski is trying to find evidence to fit his predetermined conclusions rather than following the evidence where it leads. The idea that Dembski or Behe or Gish, Morris and the rest of the modern creationism industry take their lead from real scientists of the past is laughable.Its weakness is that it doesn't explain how the rich information was created in the first place ... something that is a very great weakness, when somebody wishes to claim that evolution created the information by the totally implausible mechanism of selecting genetic information mistakes.:)
It seems the old adage holds true once again: "A coward believes all other men are cowards and a thief believes all others are thieves."
This is quite a common tactic from Christians. They think that because their origin story covers the origin of life as well as its development that any competing theory must necessarily do the same. Unfortunately, reality owes you no such favour. In 12 years you have never managed to explain why a theory of evolution must include a theory on the origins of life. It doesn't, the theory of evolution is perfectly valid without dealing with abiogenesis, just as the Big Bang theory is perfectly valid without dealing with cosmogony. This argument is the same one that you get from Christians claiming that atheism is the positive belief that there is no God. As an agnostic atheist who usually describes my position as a lack of belief I hear this argument a lot from Christians because when their position is based on faith they assume that everyone else's must be too. The world doesn't work like that.0 -
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