Retired British doctor Jon Garvey wrote an interesting review some months back at Hump of the Camel of William Dembski’s Being as Communion:
Evolution, then, is legitimately viewed as an algorithmic search, which is agreed at least by those who produce evolutionary algorithms to simulate it. As is well known, Dembski utilized the then recently-proven “No Free Lunch” theorems to say that, when all factors are considered, no type of search is better than random search, including evolutionary searches.
More recently this led him to postulate a Law of Conservation of Information, or actually to consolidate the idea, first put forward by Nobel-prizewinner Peter Medawar in the 1980s. Medawar had shown, as others before him, that in mathematical and computational operations, no new information can be created, but new findings are always implicit in the original starting points – laws and axioms. Although Dembski doesn’t mention it, I’m interested how congruent Medawar’s Law is with what was argued by mathematicians at the infamous 1966 Wistar Conference (which he chaired), and which I mentioned here. He seems to have been persuaded. In that blog I quoted Kurt Gödel’s logical objection to Darwinian evolution: More.
So if we haven’t mentioned it, let me commend it now.
Lots of great thinkers have doubted Darwinism, which is, after all, a form of secular magic, and best understood as a cultural phenomenon. Tht is what makes it so powerful. People who know little science and care less know Darwin.