Informatics

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, vol.39, #5, September 2009, pp.1051-1061. *****For the official listing, go here. *****For a pdf of the article, go here. P.S. Our critics will immediately say that this really isn’t a pro-ID article but that it’s about something else (I’ve seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have a look at the article. In it we critique, for instance, Richard Dawkins METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL (p. 1055). Question: When Dawkins introduced this example, was he arguing pro-Darwinism? Yes he was. In Read More ›

Consultant Rick Ferguson quipped that the hacking of Dawkins’ website “is proof there’s no “Intelligent Design” on Dawkins’ forum”:
Dawkins’ website forum hacked to send spam: God! What a nuisance By John Leyden

A website forum run by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was compromised on Monday.
Cybercrooks hacked into the forum to send members an invite to sign up to a warez site. A message on RichardDawkins.net confirms the hack and adds that site admins are working to restore the forum to normal. By Tuesday morning the forum was back, and apparently fighting fit. . . . Read More ›

What properties of the four forces of nature predict linguistic sequences? Or can an intelligent cause be inferred from the discovery and decryption of hieroglyphics?

That is the foundational challenge to Darwinism in explaining the discovery and deciphering of the Indus hieroglyphs.

Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script.
The team led by a University of Washington researcher has used computers to extract patterns in ancient Indus symbols. The study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows distinct patterns in the symbols’ placement in sequences and creates a statistical model for the unknown language. Read More ›

Here’s our newest paper: “Life’s Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information,” by William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, forthcoming chapter in Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, eds., The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2009). Click here for pdf of paper. 1 The Creation of Information 2 Biology’s Information Problem 3 The Darwinian Solution 4 Computational vs. Biological Evolution 5 Active Information 6 Three Conservation of Information Theorems 7 The Law of Conservation of Information 8 Applying LCI to Biology 9 Conclusion: “A Plan for Experimental Verification” ABSTRACT: Laws of nature are universal in scope, hold with unfailing regularity, and receive support from a wide Read More ›

On pp. 47-48 of THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, Richard Dawkins gives two runs of his WEASEL program (note that there were typos in both initial seeds — one had 27 characters, the other 29 whereas they should have 28; I’ve corrected that). Here are the two runs using the Courier typeface, which assigns equal width to each character (spaces are represented by asterisks): WDL*MNLT*DTJBKWIRZREZLMQCO*P WDLTMNLT*DTJBSWIRZREZLMQCO*P MDLDMNLS*ITJISWHRZREZ*MECS*P MELDINLS*IT*ISWPRKE*Z*WECSEL METHINGS*IT*ISWLIKE*B*WECSEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*I*WEASEL METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL Y*YVMQKZPFJXWVHGLAWFVCHQXYPY Y*YVMQKSPFTXWSHLIKEFV*HQYSPY YETHINKSPITXISHLIKEFA*WQYSEY METHINKS*IT*ISSLIKE*A*WEFSEY METHINKS*IT*ISBLIKE*A*WEASES METHINKS*IT*ISJLIKE*A*WEASEO METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEP METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL These runs are incomplete. The first, according to Dawkins, required 43 iterations to converge, the second 64 (Dawkins omitted the other iterates to save space). As you can see, by using the Courier font, one can read up from the target sequence METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL, Read More ›

The publications page at EvoInfo.org has just been updated. Two forthcoming peer-reviewed articles that Robert Marks and I did are now up online (both should be published later this year).* ——————————————————- “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success” William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II Abstract: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs on average as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Three measures to characterize the information required for successful search are (1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target Read More ›

In response to an earlier post of mine, DaveScot kindly pointed out this website’s definition of ID. The breadth of the definition invites scepticism: ID is defined as the science of design detection — how to recognize patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. But is there really some single concept of ‘intelligence’ that informs designs that are generated by biological, human, and possibly even mechanical means? Why would anyone think such a thing in the first place? Yet, it is precisely this prospect that makes ID intellectually challenging – for both supporters and opponents.

It’s interesting that not everything is claimed to be intelligently designed. This keeps the phrase ‘intelligent design’ from simply collapsing into ‘design’ by implying a distinction between the intelligence and that on which it acts to produce design. So, then, what exactly is this ‘intelligence’ that stands apart from matter? Well, the most obvious answer historically is a deity who exists in at least a semi-transcendent state. But how can you get any scientific mileage from that?

Enter theodicy, which literally means (in Greek) ‘divine justice’. It is now a field much reduced from its late 17^th century heyday. Theodicy exists today as a boutique topic in philosophy and theology, where it’s limited to asking how God could allow so much evil and suffering in the world. But originally the question was expressed much more broadly to encompass issues that are nowadays more naturally taken up by economics, engineering and systems science – and the areas of biology influenced by them: How does the deity optimise, given what it’s trying to achieve (i.e. ideas) and what it’s got to work with (i.e. matter)? This broader version moves into ID territory, a point that has not escaped the notice of theologians who nowadays talk about theodicy.

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Further to Granville Sewell‘s work on the 2nd Law in an open system, here is Duncan & Semura profound insight into how loss of information is the foundation for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This appears foundational to the understanding and development and testing of origin theories and consequent change in physical and biotic systems. ———————

The key insight here is that when one attempts to derive the second law without any reference to information, a step which can be described as information loss always makes its way into the derivation by some sleight of hand. An information-losing approximation is necessary, and adds essentially new physics into the model which is outside the realm of energy dynamics.

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As some UD readers are aware, one of my interests is artificial-intelligence computer programming, especially games-playing AI (here, here, and here).

In producing retrograde endgame databases for the game of checkers, with massive computational resources (two CPUs performing approximately a billion integer operations each per second over a period of two months, for a total of 10,000,000,000,000,000 [ten thousand trillion] mathematical calculations), some very interesting results were produced, including correction of human play that had been in the books for centuries. But did the program produce any new information? Well, yes, in a sense, because the computer found stuff that no human had ever found. But here’s the real question, which those of us at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab are attempting to address: Was the “new information” supplied by the programmer and his intelligently designed computational algorithm, or did the computer really do anything original on its own, in terms of information generation?

The answer is that computers do not generate new information; they only reshuffle it and make it more easily accessible. Here’s an example:

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NASA, the NY Times and most intelligent human beings apparently believe that it is possible to communicate across space – i.e., to detect signals that can be distinguished from natural causes and “noise”, which give evidence of other intelligent beings! e.g., Beatles songs vs quasar pulses and lightning pulses. ——————– NASA Says, ‘Hello, Universe. Meet the Beatles.’ By Patrick J. Lyons NY Times February 1, 2008, 4:47 pm . . . NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as Read More ›

As you read this article from the Washington Post, ask yourself how far such research would get without enzymes and a host of other materials “borrowed” from existing life-forms. “From scratch” properly should mean “made only with chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment.” That’s not what we’re dealing with here. And even if we were getting back to chemicals available in a realistic prebiotic environment, could the same be said for the investigator inteference of Craig Venter and his colleagues? Wouldn’t it be safer to say that they are acting as intelligent designers and not as mere accelerators of existing blind evolutionary processes? Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms By Rick Weiss | Washington Post Read More ›

[Comp Sci. /Eng, Informatics] I felt compelled to offer a tribute….. A great pioneer of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and non-Darwinian evolutionary computing passed away September 20, 2007. See this Washington Post Article: Ryszard Michalski; Shaped How Machines Learn. Michalzki created the notion of Intelligent Evolutionary Design and advanced the hypothesis of non-Darwinian evolutionary computing. From Foundations of Intelligent Systems: 12th International Symposium In contrast to Darwinian evolution, an intellectual evolution is guided by an “intelligent mind,”…. Every Easter at George Mason, Campus Crusade would flood the campus bulletin boards with a list of professors offering to share their wisdom and knowledge with students. Ryszard S. Michalski’s name was always on the list.

Computer programs that purport to validate the grand claims of Darwinian (i.e., chance and necessity) biological evolution are a hoot.

In early August my aerospace R&D company sent me off to Livermore, CA for a four-day course in using a finite element analysis (FEA) simulation program called LS-DYNA, originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It models the laws of physics and material properties with astounding fidelity. It is so powerful that it is used heavily in the automotive industry to simulate entire vehicles and how they behave during impacts.

On the first day of the course the instructor warned us that it is very easy to create “cartoons” with LS-DYNA (it not only generates all kinds of data, it produces beautiful animations). By this he meant that if your initial assumptions are not correct, or if the FEA tools are not used correctly, you can get results that look really cool but don’t comport with reality. Much of the course focused on avoiding cartoon-generating pitfalls.
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As I announced a few weeks ago on this blog, Robert Marks and I have been collaborating on some papers on the mathematical foundations of ID at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (these papers are currently under review with mainstream peer-reviewed journals): ecs.baylor.edu/…/Research/EILab. We have also just finished a paper debunking the statistics of James Cameron et al. (go to www.jesusfamilytomb.org), who have claimed both in a documentary on the Discovery Channel and in a book titled The Jesus Family Tomb that the pattern of names in a tomb found outside Jerusalem matches names in Jesus’ family so closely that it is highly probable that this is in fact the family tomb of the New Testament Jesus. Since “Jesus son of Read More ›