Top people not known for fronting intelligent design think you should read it. But if it’s late and you’re tired …
7 Replies to “Darwin’s Doubt – the vid”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Serving The Intelligent Design Community
Top people not known for fronting intelligent design think you should read it. But if it’s late and you’re tired …
You must be logged in to post a comment.
It’s a pretty good read, I was impressed. He’s still confused about information though. Fortunately the book doesn’t stand or fall on that.
If you have time, could you expand on this. I have read the book but this would not be a criticism of it. Maybe I am missing something.
Check out Dr. Meyer’s interview with C-SPAN’s BookTV at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, a comprehensive discussion of Darwin’s Doubt:
http://www.booktv.org/Watch/14.....esign.aspx
jerry:
Meyer thinks that information can be meaningless. In particular, Shannon information. The very phrase “meaningless information” is an oxymoron.
He fails to properly understand both information and Shannon information.
As Jan Kahre writes in The Mathematical Theory of Information:
Even “Shannon information” is information about something.
Mung,
I wonder if you aren’t interpreting him according to a meaning that is more technical than he intends on this point. I haven’t read the book recently, but I’ve read it twice since it came out and my understanding of his comments with respect to the difference between Shannon Information and Specified (or Functional) Information in terms of ‘meaning’ was always that only the latter conveys “meaning” in the sense of an understandable message or set of functional instructions that DO something. A string containing a measurable amount of Shannon Information doesn’t necessarily convey any meaningful message understandable to us or a set of functional instructions that can be processed by a system to accomplish some task. In order for a string to carry “meaning” of these sorts (i.e. sorts that are relevant to biological function) it requires MORE than merely a measurable amount of Shannon Information but ALSO specified / functional information.
He refers to information carrying capacity to differentiate between information and the possibility of information. So perhaps Mung can provide a page or quote-mine to support the claim.
A few notes:
William Dembski himself stated that “things are real because they exchange information one with another.”
Dr. Dembski has some fairly impressive backing for his claim: