Uncommon Descent at 15000 posts: A tribute to Bill Dembski

Congratulations to UB! SA:

Congratulations, Denyse and UB.

I second that. ;) Mung

Congratulations to UD! Upright BiPed

DiEb, I'm afraid you'd have to teach us all maths. And to think I was accepted into the US Navy's nuclear program based upon my math proficiency. Sheesh. They must have been really hard up. I wasn't my bugle playing, honest. Mung

"Bill Dembski (who started this blog in 2005)" "if you want to be specific, this post is 15001." By golly, it takes a long time for information to produce itself. :) CannuckianYankee

Stephen Meyer debating Alex Berezow of Real Clear Science now on Michael Medved http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/07/today_at_1_pm_o097901.html http://www.michaelmedved.com/player.html bornagain77

Ray

Anytime Darwinists and/or Atheists respect you it’s because you’ve done something to make them happy.

I think you're putting yourself in a much too narrow position. If you can't get atheists to respect you, they'll probably never listen to you. If all you could do was make them angry or sad, then there wouldn't be much reason in trying to dialogue with them. Truth, beauty and goodness are things that make all people happy. They come from God. Even atheists can see those things, to some degree. Nobody is totally blind to them. As for your concerns about Behe and Dembski they're not really specific to the ID project, which has room for a lot of diversity of opinion on such things. Silver Asiatic

Silver Asiatic (msg #8): Congratulations, Denyse and UB. That’s a very good milestone. Bill Dembski and Michael Behe (among other of the modern-ID founders) were courageous and innovative. Yes, they were hated – but they’ve built some grudging respect from some of their enemies.

Which is not a good sign. Anytime Darwinists and/or Atheists respect you it's because you've done something to make them happy. Since Behe accepts most of the major evolutionary concepts existing in nature, and since Dembski accepts species mutability and conceptual existence of natural selection...well, your fact is explained. Ray Ray Martinez

Perhaps hypocrisy was too much. Sorry. 'Unfair emphasis' is perhaps more appropriate. i.e. I rather talk about what you refuse to talk about. "Whence comes this 'miracle' of mathematics and how come we can uniquely apprehend this "miracle"?" Since that, IMHO, VERY interesting, and very deep, question does not interest you, I guess we will forever talk past each other. Perhaps you can send Winston an e-mail to talk about the 'nuts and bolts' you are interested in? I'm certainly not qualified to defend their proof.

"Here are the two seminal papers on conservation of information that I’ve written with Robert Marks: “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher-Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14(5) (2010): 475-486 “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, 5(5) (September 2009): 1051-1061 For other papers that Marks, his students, and I have done to extend the results in these papers, visit the publications page at http://www.evoinfo.org videos - evolutionary informatics http://www.evoinfo.org/video.html Chaitin is quoted, by Marks, at 10:00 minute mark of following video in regards to Darwinism lack of a mathematical proof – Dr. Marks also comments on the honesty of Chaitin in personally admitting that his long sought after mathematical proof for Darwinian evolution failed to deliver the goods that he thought it had. On Algorithmic Specified Complexity by Robert J. Marks II - 2014 - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=No3LZmPcwyg&feature=player_detailpage#t=600 Here is the paper that Marks confronted Chaitin with: Active Information in Metabiology - Winston Ewert, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II - 2013 Excerpt: Introduction: Chaitin’s description of metabiology [3] is casual, clear, compelling, and mind-bending. Yet in the end, although the mathematics is beautiful, our analysis shows that the metabiology model parallels other attempts to illustrate undirected Darwinian evolution using computer models [10–13]. All of these models depend on the principle of conservation of information [14–21], and all have been shown to incorporate knowledge about the search derived from their designers; this knowledge is measurable as active information [14,22–25]. Except page 9: Chaitin states [3], “For many years I have thought that it is a mathematical scandal that we do not have proof that Darwinian evolution works.” In fact, mathematics has consistently demonstrated that undirected Darwinian evolution does not work. http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.4/BIO-C.2013.4

bornagain77

bornagain77, but what about the "whole splinter vs. beam" thing? What was that about? You accused me of hypocrisy - why? DiEb

DiEB, "Yes, I “dodged the question”." Thanks for at least that much honesty. As Nancy Percy would say, 'it sticks out of your box'. see "Finding Truth - Pearcey" bornagain77

bornagain77, I don't know what you are talking about: a) I'm not interested in the meta-mathematical discussion. There are many places where the topic is debated, so you should have no problem to find interested parties - I'm not one of them. Yes, I "dodged the question". b) If you are not interested in discussing the mathematical details of ID, fine. I don't remember that I uttered an "accusation of dodging an issue" against you. c) William Dembski - the founder of this blog - and his colleagues like Bob Marks have made mathematical contributions to ID. I cannot find an outlet where these ideas are discussed on a technical level - I just hoped that this blog could be the place to do so. DiEb

DiEB, as Vigil pointed out, it is funny that you want to discuss the 'nuts and bolts' behind the math of ID when Darwinists refuse to honestly acknowledge the devastating mathematical difficulties against their theory that are clearly seen. But more to my specific point, I asked you:

DiEb, as to discussing mathematical topics, how do you, presumably a materialistic atheist who believes in Darwinian evolution, account for our unique human ability to understand the universe through mathematics? In other words, exactly how is logic and reasoning to be grounded in a worldview that insists everything arose without any rhyme or reason?

And you basically dodged the question by referring to 'dozens – if not hundreds – of blogs'. Excuse me, but does not your accusation of dodging an issue ring extremely hollow when you yourself dodged an issue in your very next comment on this thread? Perhaps you should read that whole splinter vs. beam thing in the Bible again? bornagain77

BA77, That quantum foam paper looks interesting. There's a preprint here, I believe. daveS

DiEB, Is there anyone discussing the nuts and bolts of evolutionism? We already know that it doesn't have any math to support it. So what does it have? Virgil Cain

daveS, as SA stated, perhaps you can e-mail Berlinski and ask him yourself about the Lie group. As to the my claim that math governs the universe, here are a (very) few notes, i.e. 'observational evidences', to back up my specific claim:

Describing Nature With Math By Peter Tyson - Nov. 2011 Excerpt: Mathematics underlies virtually all of our technology today. James Maxwell's four equations summarizing electromagnetism led directly to radio and all other forms of telecommunication. E = mc2 led directly to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The equations of quantum mechanics made possible everything from transistors and semiconductors to electron microscopy and magnetic resonance imaging. Indeed, many of the technologies you and I enjoy every day simply would not work without mathematics. When you do a Google search, you're relying on 19th-century algebra, on which the search engine's algorithms are based. When you watch a movie, you may well be seeing mountains and other natural features that, while appearing as real as rock, arise entirely from mathematical models. When you play your iPod, you're hearing a mathematical recreation of music that is stored digitally; your cell phone does the same in real time. "When you listen to a mobile phone, you're not actually hearing the voice of the person speaking," Devlin told me. "You're hearing a mathematical recreation of that voice. That voice is reduced to mathematics." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/describing-nature-math.html Wheeler's Classic Delayed Choice Experiment: Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles "have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy," so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory. http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/basic_delayed_choice.htm Quantum Foam Paper Suggests Einstein Was Right About Space-Time Being 'Smooth' - January 2013 Excerpt: It appears Albert Einstein may have been right yet again. A team of researchers came to this conclusion after tracing the long journey three photons took through intergalactic space. The photons were blasted out by an intense explosion known as a gamma-ray burst about 7 billion light-years from Earth. They finally barreled into the detectors of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009, arriving just a millisecond apart. Their dead-heat finish strongly supports the Einsteinian view of space-time, researchers said. The wavelengths of gamma-ray burst photons are so small that they should be able to interact with the even tinier "bubbles" in the quantum theorists' proposed space-time foam. If this foam indeed exists, the three photons should have been knocked around a bit during their epic voyage. In such a scenario, the chances of all three reaching the Fermi telescope at virtually the same time are very low, researchers said. So the new study is a strike against the foam's existence as currently imagined,,, "If foaminess exists at all, we think it must be at a scale far smaller than the Planck length," http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/10/quantum-foam-einstein-smooth-space-time_n_2449734.html Stronger and More Comprehensive Tests Affirm the Universe’s Unchanging Physics - July 1, 2013 By Dr. Hugh Ross Excerpt: For thousands of years, the Bible has been on record stating that the physical laws governing the universe do not vary. For example, Jeremiah 33:25, God declares that he “established the fixed laws of heaven and earth” (NIV, 1984).,,, Laboratory measurements have established that variations any greater than four parts per hundred quadrillion (less than 4 x 10-17) per year cannot exist in the fine structure constant, which undergirds several of the physical laws.,,, ,,they confirmed with 99 percent certainty that possible variations in the fine structure must be less than two parts per 10 quadrillion per year over the past 10 billion years. This limit is about a thousand times more constraining than the one I described in More Than a Theory. http://www.reasons.org/articles/stronger-and-more-comprehensive-tests-affirm-the-universe%E2%80%99s-unchanging-physics Dark energy alternatives to Einstein are running out of room – January 9, 2013 Excerpt: Last month, a group of European astronomers, using a massive radio telescope in Germany, made the most accurate measurement of the proton-to-electron mass ratio ever accomplished and found that there has been no change in the ratio to one part in 10 million at a time when the universe was about half its current age, around 7 billion years ago. When Thompson put this new measurement into his calculations, he found that it excluded almost all of the dark energy models using the commonly expected values or parameters. If the parameter space or range of values is equated to a football field, then almost the whole field is out of bounds except for a single 2-inch by 2-inch patch at one corner of the field. In fact, most of the allowed values are not even on the field. “In effect, the dark energy theories have been playing on the wrong field,” Thompson said. “The 2-inch square does contain the area that corresponds to no change in the fundamental constants, (a 'true cosmological constant'), and that is exactly where Einstein stands.” http://phys.org/news/2013-01-dark-energy-alternatives-einstein-room.html The Underlying Mathematical Foundation Of The Universe - Walter Bradley - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4491491 Quote from preceding video: “Occasionally I’ll have a bright engineering student who says, “Well you should see the equations we work with in my engineering class. They’re a big mess.”, The problem is not the fundamental laws of nature, the problem is the boundary conditions. If you choose complicated boundary conditions then the solutions to these equations will in fact, in some cases, be quite complicated in form,,, But again the point is still the same, the universe assumes a remarkably simple and elegant mathematical form.” – Dr. Walter Bradley

bornagain77

BA77, No it's you and Berlinski who are making the claim, so the burden is on you. Like everyone, I accept that representations of Lie groups are used in models describing particle physics. What I question is how a Lie group such as SO(3) actually interacts with an elementary particle. Show us observational evidence of this interaction. daveS

bornagain77

[H]ow do you [...] account for our unique human ability to understand the universe through mathematics?

This is the kind of meta-mathematical question which has the potential to generate hundreds of comments (even from those who have difficulties to understand the Cantor's concept of infinity)! I have no doubt that there are dozens - if not hundreds - of blogs, wikis, message-boards, twitter-feeds, etc., where it is debated hotly right now! I'd just like to see one place where the mathematical nuts-and-bolts of ID are discussed, too - and I hoped that Uncommon Descent would fill this void. DiEb

David Berlinski is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute -- could one of the powers-that-be here on UD email him with that question? I think when he says "interact" he means metaphorically - or maybe not? In any case, if someone knows him well-enough it would be great to have more detail on that. Silver Asiatic

daveS, I don't 'flee the thread'. I just consider it pointless to discuss matters with atheistic dogmatist such as yourself. Especially since we have been through these issues before. dog-tail-chase-circle etc..' As to unbiased readers, the claim that math governs the universe is self evident, especially in quantum mechanics. If a dogmatic atheist disagrees that the universe is governed by 'transcendent mathematics', it is up to him to show one place in the universe that is not governed by mathematics. bornagain77

So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces.

Please, BA77. You've been asked to justify this, but have always ended up fleeing the thread. daveS

OT: Today Eric Metaxas will have Stephen Meyer on his program to discuss the new book "Debating Darwin's Doubt". 2pm-4pm ET http://www.metaxastalk.com/ http://player.tritondigital.com/1191 bornagain77

Congratulations, Denyse and UB. That's a very good milestone. Bill Dembski and Michael Behe (among other of the modern-ID founders) were courageous and innovative. Yes, they were hated - but they've built some grudging respect from some of their enemies. Silver Asiatic

DiEb, as to discussing mathematical topics, how do you, presumably a materialistic atheist who believes in Darwinian evolution, account for our unique human ability to understand the universe through mathematics? In other words, exactly how is logic and reasoning to be grounded in a worldview that insists everything arose without any rhyme or reason? To presuppose that the universe can be understood through logic and reason is to presuppose that there is logic and reasoning behind the universe to be understood in the first place. The atheistic/materialistic worldview is incoherent as to providing a rational foundation for practicing science in that it presupposes no logic or reason behind the universe. Einstein and Wigner are both on record as considering it a miracle that we can understand the universe through mathematics:

"You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.. the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for example, is wholly different. Even if a man proposes the axioms of the theory, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the 'miracle' which is constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands." Albert Einstein - Goldman - Letters to Solovine p 131. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner - 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

As well, Wallace and Godel both considered our ability to do mathematics as proof that man has a soul/mind:

"Nothing in evolution can account for the soul of man. The difference between man and the other animals is unbridgeable. Mathematics is alone sufficient to prove in man the possession of a faculty unexistent in other creatures. Then you have music and the artistic faculty. No, the soul was a separate creation." Alfred Russell Wallace - co-discoverer of Natural Selection, "New Thoughts on Evolution", 1910 "Either mathematics is too big for the human mind or the human mind is more than a machine." - Kurt Gödel

Berlinski states the situation like this:

An Interview with David Berlinski - Jonathan Witt Berlinski: There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time …. Interviewer:… Come again(?) … Berlinski: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/found-upon-web-and-reprinted-here.html

Thus DiEB, how does the atheistic materialist, other than the usual denial that the problem exists, go about accounting for our uncanny ability to understand mathematics? As a Theist, particularly as a Christian Theist, I have no trouble whatsoever accounting for our ability to understand mathematics:

John1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." of note: ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos is also the root word from which we derive our modern word logic http://etymonline.com/?term=logic

A few more notes:

BRUCE GORDON: Hawking's irrational arguments - October 2010 Excerpt: The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy. This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world. Neither is it the case that “nothing” is unstable, as Mr. Hawking and others maintain. Absolute nothing cannot have mathematical relationships predicated on it, not even quantum gravitational ones. Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency - a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Anything else invokes random miracles as an explanatory principle and spells the end of scientific rationality. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/ THE INFINITY PUZZLE: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe Excerpt: In quantum electrodynamics, which applies quantum mechanics to the electromagnetic field and its interactions with matter, the equations led to infinite results for the self-energy or mass of the electron. After nearly two decades of effort, this problem was solved after World War II by a procedure called renormalization, in which the infinities are rolled up into the electron’s observed mass and charge, and are thereafter conveniently ignored. Richard Feynman, who shared the 1965 Nobel Prize with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for this breakthrough, referred to this sleight of hand as “brushing infinity under the rug.” http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/tackling-infinity

Feynman rightly expresses his unease with “brushing infinity under the rug.” here:

“It always bothers me that in spite of all this local business, what goes on in a tiny, no matter how tiny, region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time, according to laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out. Now how can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do?" - Richard Feynman – one of the founding fathers of QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) Quote taken from the 6:45 minute mark of the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCjODeoLVw

I don’t know about Feynman, but as for myself, being a Christian Theist, I find it rather comforting to know that it takes an ‘infinite amount of logic to figure out what one stinky tiny bit of space-time is going to do’: Verse and Music

John1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." When The Stars Burn Down - Phillips, Craig & Dean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPuxnQ_vZqY

as mentioned previously, ‘the Word’ in John1:1 is translated from ‘Logos’ in Greek. Logos is also the root word from which we derive our modern word logic. bornagain77

Congratulations! If you havn't seen it yet, here are some pictures illustrating the success. I'm still quite disappointed that Dr. Winston Ewert's experiment to discuss mathematical topics wasn't picked up by the pro-ID-side on this blog: I think that this should be a crucial part of this site! DiEb

BA77:

Conservation of information, evolution, etc – Sept. 30, 2014 Excerpt: Kurt Gödel’s logical objection to Darwinian evolution: “The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation].” As quoted in H. Wang. “On `computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems.” in Nature’s Imagination, J. Cornwall, Ed, pp.161-189, Oxford University Press (1995).

Thanks for that quote. Now that I think about it, Godel thought he was being poisoned by his enemies. He is said to have been crazy and paranoid. I wonder if Godel was right about being poisoned and was eventually murdered. He did have enemies. He was certainly a thorn on the side of establishment science. He once showed that Einstein's GR, if correct, would allow time travel which was considered to be silly nonsense in those days. Obviously, his views on Darwinist pseudoscience would not have helped either. The jackasses had good reasons to eliminate Godel and I would not put it past them. Someone should pay to exhume his body and conduct some toxicological tests. Just thinking out loud. Mapou

Mung at 1, we tried becoming a troll sanctuary, but our facilities for real, serious brutes were ruled to be substandard. We decided not to appeal the decision. News

It is just mostly selection on random mutations, even if drift concepts are included, Therefore the glory of evolution is really in mutationism. Without mutations do do the complexity creating there would be no claim for explaining the glory of working biology. Natural selection/sexual selection is fine , in a post fall world, for yEC creationism etc. its all that new complexity , I guess information, that is the unlikely and impossible and unproven claim that good guys, and smart ones, everywhere fight. The evolutionists hijack nat sel for their ideas. They should be forced into mutationism as their real idea claim. Robert Byers

a few notes:

Conservation of information, evolution, etc - Sept. 30, 2014 Excerpt: Kurt Gödel’s logical objection to Darwinian evolution: "The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]." As quoted in H. Wang. “On `computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems.” in Nature’s Imagination, J. Cornwall, Ed, pp.161-189, Oxford University Press (1995). Gödel’s argument is that if evolution is unfolding from an initial state by mathematical laws of physics, it cannot generate any information not inherent from the start – and in his view, neither the primaeval environment nor the laws are information-rich enough.,,, More recently this led him (Dembski) 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. http://potiphar.jongarvey.co.uk/2014/09/30/conservation-of-information-evolution-etc/ Evolutionary Computing: The Invisible Hand of Intelligence - June 17, 2015 Excerpt: William Dembski and Robert Marks have shown that no evolutionary algorithm is superior to blind search -- unless information is added from an intelligent cause, which means it is not, in the Darwinian sense, an evolutionary algorithm after all. This mathematically proven law, based on the accepted No Free Lunch Theorems, seems to be lost on the champions of evolutionary computing. Researchers keep confusing an evolutionary algorithm (a form of artificial selection) with "natural evolution." ,,, Marks and Dembski account for the invisible hand required in evolutionary computing. The Lab's website states, "The principal theme of the lab's research is teasing apart the respective roles of internally generated and externally applied information in the performance of evolutionary systems." So yes, systems can evolve, but when they appear to solve a problem (such as generating complex specified information or reaching a sufficiently narrow predefined target), intelligence can be shown to be active. Any internally generated information is conserved or degraded by the law of Conservation of Information.,,, What Marks and Dembski prove is as scientifically valid and relevant as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics. You can't prove a system of mathematics from within the system, and you can't derive an information-rich pattern from within the pattern.,,, http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/06/evolutionary_co_1096931.html Before They've Even Seen Stephen Meyer's New Book, Darwinists Waste No Time in Criticizing Darwin's Doubt - William A. Dembski - April 4, 2013 Excerpt: In the newer approach to conservation of information, the focus is not on drawing design inferences but on understanding search in general and how information facilitates successful search. The focus is therefore not so much on individual probabilities as on probability distributions and how they change as searches incorporate information. My universal probability bound of 1 in 10^150 (a perennial sticking point for Shallit and Felsenstein) therefore becomes irrelevant in the new form of conservation of information whereas in the earlier it was essential because there a certain probability threshold had to be attained before conservation of information could be said to apply. The new form is more powerful and conceptually elegant. Rather than lead to a design inference, it shows that accounting for the information required for successful search leads to a regress that only intensifies as one backtracks. It therefore suggests an ultimate source of information, which it can reasonably be argued is a designer. I explain all this in a nontechnical way in an article I posted at ENV a few months back titled "Conservation of Information Made Simple" (go here). ,,, ,,, Here are the two seminal papers on conservation of information that I've written with Robert Marks: "The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher-Level Search," Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14(5) (2010): 475-486 "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A, Systems & Humans, 5(5) (September 2009): 1051-1061 For other papers that Marks, his students, and I have done to extend the results in these papers, visit the publications page at www.evoinfo.org http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/04/before_theyve_e070821.html

bornagain77

I would go up faster if we allowed more trolls. Mung