Between Sal C and Nullasalus, this has come up: [youtube RYNLgX50TpU] Paper can be read here. Also cf. The Music of Life sourcebook, here. A key step in the reasoning: Noble’s pivotal point in light of his detailed argument: This is meant to support a thread of discussion, so kindly comment here. END

HT: Nullasullus Evolutionary theory itself is already in a state of flux… all the central assumptions of the Modern Synthesis (often also called Neo-Darwinism) have been disproven Denis Noble Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology Nice to hear the truth for a change. The paper drew on the work of James Shapiro (who by the way had co-authored a paper with Discovery Institute Fellow, Richard Sternberg here). Jerry Coyne has a dislike of Shapiro’s writings: I hate to give attention to my Chicago colleague James Shapiro’s bizarre ideas about evolution, which he publishes weekly on HuffPo rather than in peer-reviewed journals. His Big Idea is that natural selection has not only been overemphasized in evolution, but appears to Read More ›

In Illustra Media’s Darwin’s Dilemma, there is a clip on proteins as islands of function in amino acid sequence space: [youtube h38Xi-Jz9yk] Food for thought. As a stimulus to such, let us next note how the bloggist Wintery Knight has given an interesting summary of the challenges involved if a chance-dominated process is invoked for a hypothetical 100-AA polypeptide: Let’s calculate the odds of building a protein composed of a functional chain of 100 amino acids, by chance. (Think of a meaningful English sentence built with 100 scrabble letters, held together with glue) Sub-problems: BONDING: You need 99 peptide bonds between the 100 amino acids. The odds of getting a peptide bond is 50%. The probability of building a chain Read More ›

There are two versions of the metric for Bill Dembski’s CSI. One version can be traced to his book No Free Lunch published in 2002. Let us call that “CSI v1.0”. Then in 2005 Bill published Specification the Pattern that Signifies Intelligence where he includes the identifier “v1.22”, but perhaps it would be better to call the concepts in that paper CSI v2.0 since, like windows 8, it has some radical differences from its predecessor and will come up with different results. Some end users of the concept of CSI prefer CSI v1.0 over v2.0. It was very easy to estimate CSI numbers in version 1.0 and then argue later whether the subjective patterns used to deduce CSI were independent Read More ›

It is intuitively obvious that insect wings, such as these shown from the desert locust, did not evolve from random chance events as evolutionists insist they did, and new research is helping to elucidate the underlying reasons. One glance at the insect wings pictured here reveals something special, but what is it? There is a definite pattern revealed by the crisscrossing veins and the new research demonstrates that the cells formed by the intersecting veins are optimized to minimize the weight of the wing while maximizing the wing’s resistance to cracks. Specifically, the cell’s are sized according to the so-called “critical crack length” which is the length at which a crack becomes a structural threat—a property of the wing material. Read More ›

The scientific enterprise entails: 1. observation 2. hypothesis 3. testing Consider this passage from the class text of an introductory cosmology class I took once upon a time: galaxies farther than 4300 megaparsecs from us are currently moving away from us at speeds greater than that of light. Cosmological innocents sometimes exclaim, “Gosh! Doesn’t this violate the law that massive objects can’t travel faster than the speed of light?” Actually, it doesn’t. The speed limit that states that massive objects must travel with v < c relative to each other is one of the results of special relativity, and refers to the relative motion of objects within a static space. In the context of general relativity, there is no objection Read More ›

Just now VJT picked up a TSZ attempt to challenge CSI. I suggested wood grain as a possibility, leading to complex but not relevantly specified. Phineas did a Google Image search and came up, ash on ice. I did a similar search: This led me to seek to superpose and fit on a colourised version of the suggested original: This seems to be indeed the source. In neither case are we dealing with the joint complexity and specificity pattern that leads to inferring CSI thence design. It is worth repeating the design inference filter as a reference. Notice, the significance of the joint presence of specificity and complexity: Comments may be made in VJT’s discussion thread. END

Over at The Skeptical Zone, Dr. Elizabeth Liddle has put up a post for Uncommon Descent readers, entitled, A CSI Challenge (15 May 2013). She writes: Here is a pattern: It’s a gray-scale image, so it is just one 2D matrix. Here is a text file containing the matrix: MysteryPhoto I would like to know whether it has CSI or not. The term complex specified information (or CSI) is defined by Intelligent Design advocates William Dembski and Jonathan Wells in their book, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas, 2008), as being equivalent to specified complexity (p. 311), which is then defined as follows: An event or object exhibits Read More ›