In a prior post lastyearon employs such a classic example of the strawman fallacy that I can’t resist putting it up for all to marvel at. In the course of an attack of ID as disguised theism lastyearon writes:  “Meyers: The origin of the gene can’t be explained by chemistry (i.e. must’ve happened supernaturally).”  Meyers has never said anything like the statement in the parenthetical that is attributed to him.  I defy lastyearon to provide any source for his statement. As I said in the comment thread, when one’s opponents feel they must erect a strawman to attack instead of addressing the arguments one is actually making, that is a sure indicator that they have no response to the actual Read More ›

Next up in the Engineering and Metaphysics conference lineup is Eric Holloway’s talk on using ID concepts in engineering to solve problems. Holloway did an experiment to see whether or not he could garnish more information about a search space from an agent than from a machine. His results were lackluster (for a variety of reasons, not least of which that he couldn’t tell for sure if his subjects were machines or humans), but I think that his approach is quite worthwhile, and worth taking a look at. I think we’ll see a lot more from Holloway in the future, and I think up-and-coming ID’ers could learn a lot from his experimental approach. I think with some improvements his basic Read More ›

According to Richard Dawkins, Intelligent Design does not explain complexity because the designer must be even more complex than the design. In my opinion, it is like to claim that the car industry doesn’t explain cars because the mechanical engineers are more complex than cars. Dawkins says that because has a priori commitment to reductionism/evolutionism, according to which the explanation/cause must always be simpler than the data/effects. What for Dawkins is a supposed “defect” of ID, for me — who haven’t such commitment — is a great merit. Specifically it is a value of coherence with self-evident principles, first of all, the intuitive principle that more cannot come from less. However Dawkins offers us the opportunity of asking some interesting Read More ›

Next up in the Engineering and Metaphysics series is a presentation by Winston Ewert. This one is on a new informatics metric, called conditional Kolmogorov complexity. Check it out!