The Statue of Liberty is OK. And so is ID

_{Barry Arrington

December 4, 2015

Intelligent Design}

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Over the Thanksgiving holiday LK and I visited my sister in New York. While we were there we did all of the touristy things one might expect, including an obligatory ferry ride over to check out the Statue of Liberty, and I can assure you it is just as beautiful and majestic as ever.

Meanwhile, over at The Skeptical Zone Tom English has posted an article entitled The Law of Conservation of Information is defunct. Apparently they are mighty proud of English’s article, because they have had it glued to the top of their homepage for nearly a month.

Anyone who has been following the ID debate for any length of time knows that reports of ID’s demise are issued by our opponents with monotonous regularity. And just as monotonously, those reports turn out to be false.

Same song; different verse here. Over at ENV Winston Ewert has written a series of posts demonstrating the flaws in English’s analysis, most of which stem from English’s fundamental misunderstanding of Dembski’s and Mark’s claims. See here, here, here and here.

What does any of this have to do with the Statue of Liberty? Well, the title of English’s post reminded me of this scene from Saving Private Ryan (starting at 1:44).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0sEzNQtzaE

Comments

Part 4
Breaking Sticks - Winston Ewert - December 5, 2015 Conclusion: English and Felsenstein have been engaged in knocking down straw men. Felsenstein attacks a version of specified complexity that Dembski never articulated. He misrepresents the actual idea promoted by Dembski as being pointlessly circular. Both critics misrepresent conservation of information as a simplistic argument that only intelligence can produce active information. They misrepresent us as claiming that Darwinian evolution is only as good as a random guess, despite the explicit published demonstration that repeated queries are a source of active information. English misrepresents our reasons for thinking that birds are more probable than a random configuration of matter. Their arguments are valid objections to these straw men, but our actual arguments lie elsewhere. What, then, would be necessary to demonstrate that we are wrong? As I've argued, conservation of information shows that evolution requires a source of active information. We have not proven that such a source must be teleological. Nevertheless, we've argued that the sources present in available models of evolution are indeed teleological. Our argument would be refuted by the demonstration of a model with a source that is both non-teleological and provides sufficient active information to account for biological complexity. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/12/breaking_sticks101401.html
bornagain_{December 5, 2015
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I love WW11 movies but hated private ryan. it was actually anti- American in the usual liberal hollywood way. Tom hanks is a terrible actor and character when not in a special character status. Remember the statue was given by the French and was not made by americans. As long as the people do not rule themselves , but are ruled by the courts, its not the land of liberty as proposed and consented to by the people. its just also a liberal concept. i still like to see it one day . As a statue of liberity and not a symbol of foreigners right or justification to enter and possess America. Its used for that a lot. The opposite of liberty for the natives.Robert Byers_{December 4, 2015
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VC, We got to go into the base, but not the statute itself. I feel sorry for Larry. It must be sinking in that he gave away the store last month.Barry Arrington_{December 4, 2015
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Did you get to go into the Statue? I know the guy who installed the Entry Scans- the explosive sniffing "puffer machines". He got a personal, private guided tour of the Statue a month before it re-opened (while the security was being set up- July 2004). Some jobs have cool perks. Also, over on TSZ, your buddy Larry Moron, is busy proving he would rather be willfully ignorant of ID than to admit that evolution by design is a possibility.Virgil Cain_{December 4, 2015
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Tom English? Oh, HIM! Barry, did you hear … this one? Shoutout to Tom English: How much of the animus you display against Marks and Dembski is scholarly?
English appears to have more or less retracted his own paper since 1996, as this amended version at his Bounded Theoretics site shows. The Abstract is now heavily edited. A number of pages feature crossouts of the text (explanation appended at [2]).
That perhaps is the context for his comment at Salvo, “conservation of information” turns out to be nothing but obfuscation of statistical independence—a concept that undergraduates encounter early in introductory courses on probability and statistics.
But, whatever the fate of English’s paper, the sense in which Marks and Dembski have used the phrase conservation of information (COI) [3] is well supported by the work of others in the literature.
Here is a similar statement from Harvard mathematician …
Yeah, the guy was raising heck with yer humble news hack over at Salvo, and well, you can read about it here. Background: Data BasicNews_{December 4, 2015
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