Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Evolutionary Informatics as Intelligent Design and not as Theistic Evolution

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The paper on evolutionary informatics by Robert Marks and me that was recently published in an IEEE journal (go here for the paper) continues to generate discussion on the Internet. One criticism is that it at best is consistent with theistic evolution but does not support ID. I think this is a mistake. I’ve said for over a decade now that ID is consistent with the most far-flung evolutionary change. The key contention of ID is that design in nature, and in biology in particular, is detectable. Evolutionary informatics, by looking at the information requirements of evolutionary processes, points to information sources beyond evolution and thus, indirectly, to a designer. Theistic evolution, by contrast, accepts the Darwinian view that Darwinian processes generate the information required for biological complexity internally, without any outside source of information. The results by Marks and me are showing that this cannot be the case. The paper just published is only the first installment. It essentially lays out our accounting procedure for measuring the information in evolutionary search. We have two forthcoming papers that flesh out our larger project (available at www.evoinfo.org/publications), showing that attempts to account for the information internally, without an external information source, all founder.