William Dembski writes:
I am reviewing Jason Rosenhouse’s new book, The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism (Cambridge University Press), serially. For the full series so far, go here.
Rosenhouse devotes a section of his book (sec. 6.10) to conservation of information, and prefaces it with a section on artificial life (sec. 6.9). These sections betray such ignorance and confusion that it’s best to clean the slate. I’ll therefore highlight some of the key problems with Rosenhouse’s exposition, but focus mainly on providing a brief history and summary of conservation of information, along with references to the literature, so that readers can determine for themselves who’s blowing smoke and who’s got the beef.
The importance of “conservation of information” can’t be overstated. The inability of nature to ratchet up information by any natural process in the universe is a hardwired property of the way the universe works.
Blowing Smoke
Rosenhouse’s incomprehension of conservation of information becomes evident in his run-up to it with artificial life. Anyone who has understood conservation of information recognizes that artificial life is a fool’s errand.
The term artificial life has been around since the late 1980s, when Christopher Langton, working out of the Santa Fe Institute, promoted it and edited a conference proceedings on the topic. I was working in chaos theory at the time. I followed the Santa Fe Institute’s research in that area, and thus as a side benefit (if it may be called that) witnessed first-hand the initial wave of enthusiasm over artificial life.
Artificial life is computer simulations that produce life-like virtual things, often via a form of digital evolution that mimics selection, variation, and heredity. The field has had its ups and downs over the years, initially generating a lot of enthusiasm, then losing it as people started to ask “What’s this got to do with actual biology?”, after which people forgot these nagging concerns, whereupon a new generation of researchers got excited about it, and so on to repeat the cycle. Rosenhouse, it seems, represents the latest wave of enthusiasm. As he writes: “[Artificial life experiments] are not so much simulations of evolution as they are instances of it. In observing such an experiment you are watching actual evolution take place, albeit in an environment in which the researchers control all the variables.” (p. 209)
Smuggled Information
Conservation of information, as developed by my colleagues and me, arose in reaction to such artificial life simulations. We found, as we analyzed them (see here for several analyses that we did of specific artificial life programs such as Avida, which Rosenhouse lauds), that the information that researchers claimed to get out of these programs was never invented from scratch and never amounted to any genuine increase in information, but rather always reflected information that was inputted by the researcher, often without the researcher’s awareness. The information was therefore smuggled in rather than created by the algorithm.
Displacing Information
Darwinists are in the business of displacing information. Yet when they do, they typically act all innocent and pretend that they have fully accounted for all the information in question. Moreover, they gaslight anyone who suggests that biological evolution faces an information problem. Information follows precise accounting principles, so it cannot magically materialize in the way that Darwinists desire.
What my colleagues and I at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab found is that, apart from intelligent causation, attempts to explain information do nothing to alleviate, and may actually intensify, the problem of explaining the information’s origin. It’s like filling one hole by digging another, but where the newly dug hole is at least as deep and wide as the first one (often more so). The only exception is one pointed out by Douglas Robertson, writing for the Santa Fe Institute journal Complexity back in 1999: the creation of new information is an act of free will by intelligence. That’s consistent with intelligent design. But that’s a no-go for Darwinists.