Luskin: Something is specified if it matches an independent pattern. There is no special, independent pattern to the shape of Mount Rainier. Its complexity alone is not enough to infer design. It matches a pattern — the faces of four famous Presidents.
specified complexity
At Mind Matters News: Does Mt Rushmore contain no more information than Mt Fuji?
As Jeffrey Shallit claims? That is, does intelligent intervention increase information? Is that intervention detectable by science methods?
Ten (or so) Pro-Intelligent Design Books You Should Read
On the Design Disquisitions YouTube channel, I’ve posted a new video where I recommend several books of interest, specifically pro-ID literature. Most of the suggestions may be familiar to you, but hopefully there are a few that you’ve not read before. I also give a brief summary of the content of each book. I don’t Read More…
Would specified complexity help us find extraterrestrial intelligences?
Specified complexity is what we should be looking for in signals from intelligent beings — orderly patterns that hold meanings not found in inanimate nature.
A protein informs cells that they should stick together
Move along, folks. No design to see here.
Why is specified complexity so badly misunderstood?
Put another way: What’s the difference between a bag of jigsaw puzzle pieces and a text message: “The city will get your car towed if you don’t move it within the next 8 minutes”?
If we need AlphaFold to figure out protein folding, how likely is protein folding to be a product of mere chance?
We are told by many philosophers that life came to exist on Earth purely by chance. How likely is that, given the intricacy of the machinery that governs our bodies, such that someone needs to design AlphaFold to figure it out?
Eric Holloway: An experiment can test the idea that there is an infinite number of universes
An essential part of the process of discovering the truth will be the disintegration ray gun… Read the fine print.
Coming to grips with specified complexity
Miller: One of the central requirements of design arguments is to evaluate the probability of patterns emerging through undirected processes.
At Quanta: Bacteria are now seen as very complex too
Cepelewicz: The very existence of organelles in these bacteria, coupled with intriguing parallels to the more familiar ones that characterize eukaryotes, has prompted scientists to revise how they think about the evolution of cellular complexity — all while offering new ways to probe the basic principles that underlie it.
Interview with Winston Ewert
The promised interview has arrived! Bob Murphy interviews Winston Ewert on various topics around Intelligent Design, including Winston’s latest paper on life’s dependency graph.
If Only Biologists Were This Smart!
For years, Darwinists have howled about Dembski’s “Explanatory Filter.” It was unscientific, they claimed. It is purely subjective. Etc. Yet, thinking human beings understand statistics fairly well and they know when to look for an explanation when the odds become too one-sided. Here’s an example of a government intelligence guy explaining how a poker cheat Read More…
Eric Holloway: How ID can help business
ID theory, he says, offers a way around false positives in interpretation of information.
ID Breakthrough — Syn61 marks a live case of intelligent design of a life form
Let’s read the Nature abstract: Nature (2019) Article | Published: 15 May 2019 Total synthesis of Escherichia coli with a recoded genome Julius Fredens, Kaihang Wang, Daniel de la Torre, Louise F. H. Funke, Wesley E. Robertson, Yonka Christova, Tiongsun Chia, Wolfgang H. Schmied, Daniel L. Dunkelmann, Václav Beránek, Chayasith Uttamapinant, Andres Gonzalez Llamazares, Thomas Read More…
George Montañez: Specified complexity, design, and surprise
Digging further into George Montañez’s new paper at BIO-Complexity, a lay-friendly version: Specified complexity allows us to measure how surprising random outcomes are, in reference to some probabilistic model. But there are other ways of measuring surprise. In Shannon’s celebrated information theory (Shannon 1948), improbability alone can be used to measure the surprise of observing Read More…