I hesitate to bring attention to a blog, called Thoughts from Kansas, written by Josh Rosenau (a grad student completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas), because I don’t think it makes accurate arguments and doesn’t deserve to be promoted, even in a rebuttal. The blog amounts to inaccurate, prideful digs at ID and reminisces over a paper he wrote pertaining to what he perceives are the legal and social histories of Intelligent Design:
The paper’s title, “Leap of Faith: Intelligent Design after Dover” is a reference both to the chalky cliffs of the English Channel, to the town in which ID itself took a fall, and to the politically and economically suicidal effects of pushing creationism into public schools. Along the way, I was able to work in some other subtle digs at ID, including this summary of the recent history of the ID movement…
Way to work in subtle digs, it’s obvious he’s an unbiased academic who is only concerned with presenting the truth. Of course, ID has no basis in creationism, it is not concerned with any holy writ as a guide to its discipline. I’ve never read anything about “specified or irreducible complexity” in any sacred text nor encountered them in any religious observance.
William Dembski, once heralded on a book jacket as “the Isaac Newton of Information Theory,” has been reduced to rewriting and analyzing toy computer programs originally written for a TV series and popular books in the 1980s by biologist Richard Dawkins as trivial demonstrations of the power of selection. Dembski explained his poor record of publication in peer-reviewed scientific literature by saying, “I‘ve just gotten kind of blasé about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print. And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well.” Alas, they don‘t convince mathematicians of his mathematical arguments…
Apparently Rosenau isn’t aware of the peer-reviewed IEEE publications from Drs. Dembski and Marks, Winston Ewert and George Montañez originating at their Evolutionary Informatics Lab:
- Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle “Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II”
- Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success “William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”
- Bernoulli’s Principle of Insufficient Reason and Conservation of Information in Computer Search “William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”
- Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism “Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II”
And Dr. Dawkins’ toy needed to be exposed as a farce, because a farce doesn’t illustrate anything except by deceit, and deceit is not an illustration. And alas, the Oxford mathematician John Lennox endorses Dr. Dembski’s mathematics. If you want to write a legal paper for the “lawyerly set”, at least get the story right. The rest of the paper is much of the same, a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed.