Michael Shermer vs. William Dembski streamed debate tonight, 7:00pm CST

The audio was atrocious - so, I had to stop listening after a couple of minutes: I would like to read a transcript sometimes! Did they discuss Dr. Dembski's latest publication, i.e., The Search for a Search? I've still some problems with this paper, and here is a simple example highlightening one of those: Bernoulli vs. Clark Kent When discussing the consequences of their Horizontal No Free Lunch theorem, the authors W. Dembski and R. Marks state:

Because the active entropy is strictly negative, any uninformed assisted search will on average perform worse than the baseline search.

Here, the baseline search is the blind search. But what is an assisted search? As an example, the authors have introduced the perfect search

an assisted search guaranteed to succeed

Let's look at an example: a shell game - three shells, one pea. The operator is a fair man, who will hide the pea with probability 1/3 under any of the three shells. The players are Bernoulli and Clark Kent. Knowing the paper of W. Dembski and R. Marks on the HNFLT, Bernoulli makes a guess at random, using a uniform distribution on the shells. Clark Kent just picks the shell which hides the pea (remember - Clark Kent is Superman...), thereby performing a perfect search. Who fares better? According to W. Dembski and R. Marks, both do equally well: observing the picking pattern of Clark Kent, they conclude that Clark Kent uses a uniform measure on the search space - as Bernoulli does. Putting these numbers into the the HNFLT, they see that Clark Kent's message doesn't add any active information on average: unfortunately, the mathematics of their paper has no way to deal with a strategy which is influenced by the position of the target (as any assisted search would be.) DiEb

(Plus Mike Behe interview!) bornagain77

OT: Unbelievable Christian Radio 9 Oct 2010 - Hawking's God - John Polkinghorne & Hugh Ross (Plus Mike Behe interview!) - 08 October 2010 http://ondemand.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/AudioFeed.aspx http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={3775C4E9-5CF2-456E-84AC-969AD1B229FB} bornagain77

I second Bornagain's request...hope that you will post the video and/or transcript if there is to be one forthcoming. I've mentioned the debate to several people, and some have requested a link if it eventually becomes available on line. FtK

Dr. Dembski, I thought you did extremely well and hope to see the video uploaded to the web soon and posted here. It seems that Dr. Shermer never varies much from his original script of already addressed and refuted points. The act was worn the first time I saw it and only gets worse as I realize that even he must realize his evidence for neo-Darwinism is shallow to non-existent. bornagain77

I was able to attend the debate in person since I live in Topeka. I actually attended Washburn many moons ago. It was a lively and interesting exchange, and I enjoyed it immensely. My eldest son, a sophomore in high school, was able to go with me so that made it all the more fun. It was so interesting hearing his thoughts about the exchange of views. You did an outstanding job Dr. Dembski. Thanks for taking the time to take on this debate. It seemed to have been well received. FtK

Too bad the Husker game was tonight. I missed the debate. Huskers played in Manhattan, not far from Topeka. tragic mishap

Well we can see you, but the audio is all coming from a remotely placed microphone. Gods iPod

Very cool. I will also put this on God's iPod at http://godsipod.com/live/ That should pull in a few more viewers for you. Gods iPod