Mathematics

Here’s a discussion at New Scientist on proportional representation vs. “first past the post”: Can mathematics help? On 5 May, the UK will hold a referendum to determine which voting system the country should use in future elections, with voters asked to decide whether they want to adopt the alternative vote (AV) or stick with the first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, which is currently used. Can mathematics tell us which system is the most fair?[ … ] Highlighting a more radical solution is David Maclver, a software engineer with a background in mathematics. In 1963 economist Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system can satisfy a few reasonable and democratic conditions – in other words, democracy is always unfair. MacIver points out Read More ›

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this monster priority mail). This is a must-have book if you are interested at all in the ID debate. To get it from Amazon.com, click here. Below is the table of contents and some introductory matter.

(Other news coverage continues below)

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Seven years in the making, at 500,000 words, with three Nobel laureate contributors, this is the most thorough examination of naturalism to date.

<<<<<>>>>>

The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science

Edited by Bruce L. Gordon

and William A. Dembski

ISI Books

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Wilmington, DE 19807

Back Cover:

Read More ›

My thanks to Jonathan M. for passing my suggestion for a CSI thread on and a very special thanks to Denyse O’Leary for inviting me to offer a guest post.

[This post has been advanced to enable a continued discussion on a vital issue. Other newer stories are posted below. – O’Leary ]

In the abstract of Specification: The Pattern That Signifies Intelligence, William Demski asks “Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause?” Many ID proponents answer this question emphatically in the affirmative, claiming that Complex Specified Information is a metric that clearly indicates intelligent agency.

As someone with a strong interest in computational biology, evolutionary algorithms, and genetic programming, this strikes me as the most readily testable claim made by ID proponents. For some time I’ve been trying to learn enough about CSI to be able to measure it objectively and to determine whether or not known evolutionary mechanisms are capable of generating it. Unfortunately, what I’ve found is quite a bit of confusion about the details of CSI, even among its strongest advocates.

My first detailed discussion was with UD regular gpuccio, in a series of four threads hosted by Mark Frank. While we didn’t come to any resolution, we did cover a number of details that might be of interest to others following the topic.

CSI came up again in a recent thread here on UD. I asked the participants there to assist me in better understanding CSI by providing a rigorous mathematical definition and showing how to calculate it for four scenarios: Read More ›

A friend, watching a serial thriller, The Oxford Murders, jotted down this interesting bit of dialogue between a professor who holds the Darwinist view of the brain (shaped for fitness, not for truth) and a design-based one (design in mathematics is real, and the brain is designed to apprehend it):

Elijah Wood is sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor discuss the significance of Wittgenstein and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Professor: There is no way of finding a single absolute truth, an irrefutable argument that might help to answer the questions of mankind. Philosophy, therefore, is dead. Because “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.”

[Elijah Wood raises his hand]

Professor: Oh, it seems that someone does wish to speak. It appears you are not in agreement with Wittgenstein. That means either you have found a contradiction in the arguments of the Tractatus, or you have an absolute truth to share with us all.

Wood: I believe in the number Pi.

Professor: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you. What was it you said you believed in?

Wood: In the number Pi, in the Golden Section, the Fibonacci Series. The essence of nature is mathematical. There is a hidden meaning beneath reality. Things are organized following a model, a scheme, a logical series. Even the tiny snowflake includes a numerical basis in its structure. Therefore, if we manage to discover the secret meaning of numbers, we will know the secret meaning of reality. Read More ›

Just added to the web, the linked article aims to give a short, non-technical, beginner’s answer to the question: “What has Christianity got to do with Mathematics?”

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical laws, operating on an initially random arrangement of matter, cannot produce complex objects with any reasonable chance in any reasonable time.

The published version may be downloaded (payment or subscription needed) from Springer at:

         http://www.springerlink.com/content/74316rt8373k560x/

Alternatively, a pre-published version is freely available at:

         http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

The argument is based on a number of original mathematical theorems that are proved in the paper.  A less technical presentation of the argument is however given below.

Read More ›

A new measure of information has been invented – the Zettabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10^21 bytes.
Zettabytes overtake petabytes as largest unit of digital measurement Heidi Blake, 4 May 2010, The Telegraph UK “The size of the “digital universe” will swell so rapidly this year that a new unit – the zettabyte – has been invented to measure it.”

Humanity’s total digital output currently stands at 8,000,000 petabytes – which each represent a million gigabytes – but is expected to pass 1.2 zettabytes this year. Read More ›

In modern mathematics fractals are complex objects generated from simple formulas. Some have found also in biology forms that seem to have fractal shapes. Before the astonishing geometric shapes of fractals one might argue something like this: as the complexity of the fractal geometries arises from simple formulas, analogously the fractal biological complexity could come from simplicity and as a consequence intelligent design is not necessary to explain it.

You can tell that Darwinism is failing when it attracts completely ridiculous attacks like this one, on Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009). The gist is that Nagel thought Meyer’s book a prize.* But Shallit says, Meyer claims, over and over again, that information can only come from a mind — and that claim is an absolutely essential part of his argument. Nagel, the brilliant philosopher, should see why that is false. Consider making a weather forecast. Meteorologists gather information about the environment to do so: wind speed, direction, temperature, cloud cover, etc. It is only on the basis of this information that they can make predictions. What mind does this information come from? What mind indeed? If we Read More ›

Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don’t have gaps in my teeth either. Check unretouched photos.) As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about “superstition” the other day. The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping I’d fall in? The skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they feel the current number assignment is “unlucky.” Look, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the number bugs you so much, move. Don’t mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire Read More ›