"The Origin of Specious Nonsense"

J C · 20-01-2012 08:30PM

MrPudding wrote: »

Wow. This is going to be excruciating.

MrP

The truth can be very painful ... but it is the truth ... and you will be all the better for knowing it.

J C · 20-01-2012 08:47PM

We believe it is not. They are entitled to their beliefs As we will show, Dembski's work is riddled with inconsistencies, equivocation, flawed use of mathematics, poor scholarship, and misrepresentation of others' results. We shall see if any of these, as yet, unsubstantiated assertions can be stood up.
As a result, we believe few if any of Dembski's conclusions can be sustained. Again we shall see if this assertion can be sustained.
Several writers have already taken issue with some of Dembski's claims (e.g., [23, 71, 72, 92, 78, 22, 94, 32]). In this paper we focus on some aspects of Dembski's work that have received little attention thus far. I can hardly wait!!!
Here is an outline of the paper. First, we summarize what we see as Dembski's major claims. Next, we criticize Dembski's concept of "design" and "intelligence". We then turn to one of Dembski's major tools, "complex specifed information", arguing that he uses the term inconsistently and misrepresents the concepts of other authors as being equivalent.
We criticize Dembski's concept of "information" and "specification". We then address his "Law of Conservation of Information", showing that the claim has significant mathematical flaws. We then discuss Dembski's attack on evolutionary computation, showing his claims are unfounded. Finally, we issue a series of challenges to those who would continue to pursue intelligent design. Some of our ideas are based on Kolmogorov complexity, so we provide an introduction to this theory as an appendix. The appendix also contains an alternate account of specification and a suggested replacement for CSI. Good summary of what is being addressed in the paper.

We note that our criticism is based on all of Dembski's oeuvre, not simply his most recent work. We regard this as completely legitimate; all of Dembski's claims are assumed to be in force unless explicitly retracted, and virtually no retractions have been forthcoming. Fair enough - but I reserve the right, in common with all other sceintists, to amend/withdraw claims, as new evidence is uncovered and our understanding of ID has developed.

J C · 20-01-2012 09:13PM

2 Dembski's claims
Dembski makes a variety of different claims, many of which would be revolutionary if true. Very true ... and the fact that they are truly revolutionary means that the more 'conservative' elements within science are having difficulties in accepting them ... even when the evidence is unambiguous.
Here we try to summarize what appears to us to be his most significant claims, together with the section numbers in which we address those claims.
1. The "complexity-specification" criterion/"explanatory filter" is a reliable method for detecting design by intelligent agents, and accurately reflects how humans traditionally infer design. True ... the presence of a combination of complexity and specificity is an infallible proof of the intelligent action of intelligent agents.
2. There exists a multi-step statistical procedure, the "generic chance elimination argument", that reliably detects design by intelligent agents. Once the probability is less than 10^-100 then ID can be safely assumed.
3. There is a "souped-up" form of information called "specified complexity" or "complex specified information" (CSI) which is coherently defined and constitutes a valid, useful, and non-trivial measure. It isn't a 'souped-up' form of information ... it is intelligently generated information ... and it is identified by its complex specificity e.g. Human writing ... and it does constitutes a valid, useful, and non-trivial type of information.
4. Many human activities exhibit "specified complexity". All Human intelligently directed activity results in the production of "specified complexity".
5. The presence of CSI is a reliable marker of design by intelligent agents. True.
6. CSI cannot be generated by deterministic algorithms, chance, or any combination of the two. True In particular, CSI cannot be generated either by genetic algorithms implemented on computers, or the process of biological evolution itself. CSI generation by intelligently designed biological systems and computers is limited to the quality of the original CSI that was 'programmed' into the original organism or computer programme.A "Law of Conservation of Information" exists which says that natural processes cannot generate CSI. Non-intelligently created and/or directed systems cannot generate CSI ... but intelligently designed systems can produce CSI ... for example, an intelligently designed robot can produce the CSD in a car part.
7. Life exhibits specified complexity and hence was designed by an intelligent agent, possibly disembodied. Life exhibits specified complexity and hence was designed by an intelligent agent or agents unknown ... possibly bodied or disembodied.

J C · 20-01-2012 09:43PM

3 Design
Dembski's account of design is inconsistent. On the one hand, he never gives a positive account of design; we do not learn from reading his works what Dembski thinks design is.
In The Design Inference [16] he simply defines design as the complement of regularity and chance, and the possibility that this complement is in fact empty is not seriously addressed. Intelligent Design is the complement of regularity (or deterministic processes) and chance (or random processes). The complement of regularity and chance isn't empty ... as all forms of Intelligent Design (including known intelligently-directed design by Humans) are within it.

In No Free Lunch [19, p. xi] he gives a process-oriented account of design:
(1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials.
But this is not a positive account of what constitutes design. This is indeed a positive process-oriented account of design in action.
Furthermore, the description is problematical. In common parlance, "design" can mean "pattern" or "motif", and the relationship between "pattern" and "purpose" is unclear.
Dembski isn't talking about 'pattern' or 'motif' which can be formed by deterministic processes, when they aren't specified ... and thus may have no relationship to any 'purpose' e.g. a snowflake.
Dembski is taslking about Intelligent Design which is identified by its specified complexity ... and the fact that it is functional or purposeful.

Intelligent design advocates claim that "design implies a designer", ID proponents claim that "Intelligent Design implies an Intelligent Designer".
but perhaps this claim owes more to the structure of English than it does to logic. After all, we would not likely say "pattern implies a patterner". The reason we don't say that "pattern implies a patterner" is because 'patterns' and indeed 'designs' that aren't specified can be produced by random and deterministic processes that don't require any intelligent input.

J C · 20-01-2012 10:05PM

It is certainly easy to claim a teleological account of biology, but other natural processes produce "design", in the sense of pattern, without evidently falling under the process-oriented view of design that Dembski provides. Consider, for example, the highly symmetrical 6-sided patterns that appear in snowflakes. If there is any evidence of purpose in the patterns seen in snowflakes, it eludes us. Snowflakes and other designs produced by deterministic and/or random processes lack specificity and functionality. They are therefore the product of non-intelligently directed design.
Living systems are highly specfied and functional ... and thus are the product of Intelligent Design.
We address this issue in more detail in Section 9.3. Good.
Dembski pleads for more consideration of design as a scientific explanation, but he seems to be of two minds concerning this. On the one hand, he claims "science has largely dispensed with design" and science "repudiates design" [19, p. 3]; on the other hand, just three pages later he cites archaeology [19, p. 6] as an example of a science that is based in part on inferring design. Dembski is clearly referring to the 'two minds' of most scientists in relation to Intelligent Design ... there are vast areas of the forensic sciences that deals with intelligent design (including Archaeology) ... yet when it comes to Biology these same scientists are in denial that Biological systems are Intelligently Designed
Contrary to Dembski's assertions, design is not arbitrarily ruled out as an element of scientific explanation, even in biology. I'm glad to hear it ... but what Dembski and I would like to know is does Evolutionary Biologists accept Intelligent Design in Biology?

J C · 20-01-2012 10:28PM

Scientists, however, are reluctant to infer "rarefied" design, a design inference based on ignorance of both the nature of the designer and regularities that might explain the observed phenomenon. That is fair enough ... but most scientists don't follow through on this logic ... as they accept that a combination of random and deterministic processes 'evolved' living organisms from 'Microbes to Man ... when a combination of random and deterministic processes has never been observed to produce Complex Specified Designs or information.
Equally, it is scientifically valid to infer intelligent activity whenever CSI or CSD is encountered ... as in all cases, where the design agent has been identified for CSI and CSD phenomena these agents are always intelligent.
But this reluctance is well-grounded. Empirically gained knowledge of designers and the artifacts which they create permit us to recognize regularities of outcomes, leading us to make an "ordinary" design inference in such cases. With an "ordinary" design inference, a designer becomes just another causal regularity. This is a confusion of categories under the term 'ordinary' design and 'rarefied' design ... the correct categories are 'non-specified comples design', which is observed to be non-intelligently directed and 'specified complex design' which is observed to always be intelligently directed, whenever the agent is identified.

This is not so with a "rarefied" design inference, which Dembski urges us to make in ignorance of the properties of any putative designer and also of other causal regularities which may be operative. For more details,
see [94].Once again the incorrect categorisation is being used ... 'rarefied' design is undefined and meaningless as it cannot be unambiguously identified by examining a designed artifact. On the other hand, whether an artifact is specified or not can be objectively determined ... and thus it can be objectively determined whether the artifact was Intelligently Designed or not.

J C · 21-01-2012 12:15AM

Where Dembski offers examples that have practical application, one finds that the operative mode of inference is to an "ordinary" design inference. The appeal to SETI is such an example, for actual SETI research is based upon knowledge of how intelligent agents (humans) actually use radio wavelengths for communication. SETI is based on an Intelligent Information inference ... and even though the potential 'Aliens' that we are trying to make radio contact with are an unknown ... we are still (validly) basing the SETI research on our ability to objectively recognise Intelligent Activity by whatever type of agent (via complex specified potential radio broadcasts) from the far side of the Universe.

Another is Dembski's claim that "the Smithsonian Institution devotes a room to obviously designed artifacts for which no one has a clue what those artifacts do." [19, p. 147]3 Dembski overlooks the fact that artifacts of "ordinary" designers can be recognized not only through something like his concept of CSI, but also by the more prosaic methods long employed in archaeology. Again there is a confusion of terminology ... the so-called 'ordinary' designers are actually 'intelligent' designers ... and their intelligent activity can be identified from its complex specificity.
These methods include signs of working of an artifact, where a chance explanation is eliminated due to the artifact showing characteristic signs of manipulation that we know by experience are attributable to human artisans.
The 'manipulation that is known by experience' is complex specified manipulation ... which is the definitive evidence of intelligent action.
The Smithsonian example turns out to be non-mysterious and unsupportive of Dembski's attempt to justify a "rarefied" design inference. Again, Dembski isn't justifying 'rarefied' design ... he is justifying an intelligent design inference ... which can be scientificlally drawn when we encounter Complex Specified Information and Design

J C · 21-01-2012 12:35AM

Dembski claims that, using his methodology, one can infer the existence of an intelligent designer responsible for certain forms of observed design. That is true
Sometimes he views this as the first step of a scientific inquiry: "Once specified complexity tells us that something is designed, there is nothing to stop us from inquiring into its production." [19, p. 112]. Later, however,
he claims that both the "Intentionality Problem-What was the intention of the designer in producing a given designed object?" and the "Identity Problem-Who or what is the designer?" are not legitimate "questions of science" at all! [19, p. 313] The intentionality and identity of the agent(s) are much more difficult questions to answer scientifcally than whether an intelligent agent designed the artifact ... and science may not be able to answer these questions in every case. This is similar to the fact that a forensic scientist is able to relatively easily establish that a person was murdered ... but may find it much more difficult to establish why and who did the murder.

This is especially noteworthy given Dembski's discussion of intentionality in his book, Intelligent Design [17, pp. 245{246].
Removing intention and identity from rational inquiry may be legitimate if, as many intelligent design advocates admit when pressed, the designer they have in mind is a disembodied supernatural being [65]. But it is certainly not legitimate if the designer is human, or even an extraterrestrial being. The same difficulty exists with scientifically establishing why people were intelligntly designed and who/what did it many years ago ... irrespective of whether the 'designer' was an embodied or disembodied 'extraterrestrial' being.

"Explaining" crop circles as the product of alien design does not end the inquiry; instead, it enlarges it. Where did the aliens come from? Why did
they wish to create the circles? And so forth. I agree that it enlarges the enquiry ... but it doesn't mean that scientifically verified answers will be forthcoming.
Crop Circles exhibit Complex Specificity ... and we can therefore definitively conclude that they are the product of intelligent action ... which could be Human or ET (or both) ... and unless and until we get direct evidence of who the 'entities' are that are creating crop circles, we cannot reach valid scientifc conclusions in relation to who is creating them - but we can still definitively conclude that they are intelligently designed.

... of course, this also shouldn't stop us from trying to scientifically identify who / what the intelligent 'entities' producing Crop Circles are ... or what their intention(s) are in producing them.
... but if we are unable or unwilling to identify the fact that an intelligent agent is causing them ... we will never enlarge the enquiry to even try to establish who they are or what their motives are.

dlofnep · 21-01-2012 12:40AM

Um, you do know there's a quote function, right?

5uspect · 21-01-2012 12:58AM

It took him a couple of years to figure it out before. Maybe he's forgotten again.

J C · 21-01-2012 01:01AM

Furthermore, questions of intention and identity arise all the time in archaeology. Agreed To give just two examples: in the 1890's historian Arthur Evans heard of mysterious seal-stones from Crete. The identity of their creators, as well as the script used, was then unknown. Evans went on to identify the stones as the product of a civilization now called Minoan, and eventually one of the scripts, Linear B, was deciphered [24]. Like I have said, the first step is to definitively identify that the artifact has been Intelligently designed ... and once this is definitively established, resources can be justifiably allocated to trying to determine who the Intelligent Designer(s) was/were ... and what they were communicating (if anything).
Similarly, the intention of the artists of the wall-paintings of the Bronze Age wall paintings from Thera is an active area of scientific controversy, with some arguing that rooms with such paintings were always intended to be shrines, and others disputing this [68, 64, 21]. Despite Dembski wishing to rule identity and intention of designers out of science, archaeologists are quite happily pursuing these questions. I don't think that establishing the identity or the intention of Intelligent Designer(s) should be ruled out of science ... but, as the above cited examples show, the difficulty of establishing these things is much greater than estsblishing that the artifact was intelligently designed, in the first place.

J C · 21-01-2012 01:07AM

dlofnep wrote: »

Um, you do know there's a quote function, right?

I am structuring my postings to allow you to have both the quote from the paper and my comments when you use the quote facility on my postings ... this will allow you to easily make positive comment on the paper and/or negative comment on my comments.

I think that I will now stop and give you guys the chance to reply to what has been posted to date.

If one person could reply ... and take the postings/paper in sequence it would help retain clarity for everyone following the thread.

I will deal with any questions/comments on the 'paper' so far tomorrow ... and I will then proceed with the next part of the 'paper' ... if that is OK with everybody

J C · 21-01-2012 01:56PM

OK then ... I'll move on with my review of the paper:-

Quoting Jay Richards, Dembski says "If someone explains some buried earthenware as the result of artisans from the second century b.c., no one complains, `Yeah, but who made the artisan?' " [19, p. 355]. We find this reply altogether too facile. It is a very fundamental question ... that goes to the heart of all 'origins' worldviews ... Atheists believe that it all happened by purely materialistic means ... and Theists believe that an intelligence/intelligences was/were involved at some level. Science can be used to settle the question ... but Atheists and their fellow travellers have a distinct reluctance to follow the evidence where it leads.

In the case of human artisans from 200 b.c.e, we need no extraordinary explanation to account for their existence - there is abundant evidence for human life and pottery-making culture during that time period. Nobody is questioning the existence of people in 200 BC ... the controversal question that is being asked is how/when did Humans and other life forms come into existence?
On the other hand, if we found buried earthenware in Devonian strata, and the explanation proffered was "artisans from 300 mya", scientists certainly would want to inquire about the origin of the artisan. Would they really?
I would suggest that they would promptly deny that the particular stratum was Devonian ... by claiming that it was a 'disturbed' composite stratum, with a mixture of fossils of different 'ages' ... or some such 'explanation'.
In this regard Sharks, Rays and finned fish as well as spiders are all found as 'Devonian' fossils ... and if a dead Human was to be found beside a dead Shark or a live spider today nobody would 'bat an eyelid' ... so why would anybody get exicited about their fossils being found together?
Similarly, Dembski says if we find a scrap of paper with writing on it, we infer a human author and "there is no reason to suppose that this scrap of paper requires a different type of causal story" [19, p. xi]. But surely this depends upon the circumstances of the find and the causal hypothesis which is proposed to account for it. Dembski was clearly talking about finding a piece of paper on Earth with a recognisable Human language written on it ... and his conclusion is perfectly reasonable and vaild in these circumstances.
If Neil Armstrong had found a scrap of paper with writing on it on the moon, the remoteness of the location and a hypothesis that the writing was done in situ would conjointly exclude human agency and require a different type of causal story. Under these circumstances, the hypotheses would expand significantly to include Human travel to the Moon prior to Neil Armstrong or the deposition of the paper by an un-manned spacecraft prior to the Apollo 11 landing ... but this is a completely different situation to what Dembski was talking about ...
... and in either circumstances nobody would deny that the writing on the paper had an intelligent cause.

These are symptoms of a more general inconsistency in the level of explanation Dembski wishes to pursue. For Dembski, explanation of design always ends at intelligence, and we are not permitted to inquire further about the origin of the intelligence. The explanation for non-specified 'design' includes random and/or deterministic processes ... but the explantion of Specified i.e. Intelligent Design is the appliance of intelligence. We continue this line in the next section. Not much point, as it doesn't describe Dembski's actual position.

J C · 21-01-2012 02:47PM

4 Intelligence
Just as Dembski fails to give a positive account of the second half of "intelligent design", he also fails to define the first half: intelligence. Intelligence, and intelligent agents, are treated as unfathomable mysteries beyond human comprehension, and not explainable by natural causes. Intelligence is a virtual phenomenon that is a found in its most developed form on Earth in Humans. It is observed to not exist within non-intelligently designed phenomena.

He writes "I will argue that intelligent agency, even when conditioned by a physical system that embodies it, cannot be reduced to natural causes without remainder. Moreover, I will argue that specified complexity is precisely the remainder that remains unaccounted for. Indeed, I will argue that the defining feature of intelligent causes is their ability to create novel information and, in particular, specified complexity." [19, p. xiv]
5 True
Dembski does not accept that intelligence itself could arise purely through natural processes, via evolution: It has never been observed to arise through non-intelligently directed processes ... so this a scientifically valid contention, on Dembski's part.
"Out pop purpose, intelligence, and design from a process that started with no purpose, intelligence, or design. This is magic." [19, p. 369]
But this skepticism is apparently based in part on belief in a sharp distinction between intelligent and non-intelligent causes: agency is always either natural or intelligent, and cannot be both. There is a sharp distinction between intelligent and non-intelligent causes ... otherwise every shooter down through History could never be convicted because s/he could always claim that the bullet fired itself ... and have this plea accepte, if juries truly believed that there isn't a sharp distinction between intelligent and non-intelligent causes!!!
But what if purpose, intelligence, and design are words we assign to emergent properties of complex systems? What if intelligence is not a binary classification, but a multifactorial gradation, with thermostats and bacteria being only slightly intelligent, and computers and rats more so? ... and what if the Moon was made of blue cheese?
The key scientific issue is what we observe ... and we don't observe intelligence or its product complex specificity to be emergent from anything other than from the previous or current action(s) of intelligence.

J C · 21-01-2012 04:10PM

Intelligent agency always receives preferential treatment in Dembski's analysis: in his explanatory filter framework, he never allows hypotheses involving intelligent agents to be eliminated. Hypotheses involving intelligent agents should only be eliminated when they are shown to be invalid ... and/or when a hypothesis involving a non-intelligent agent has been proven to be the case
Consider his analysis of the Nicholas Caputo case. Caputo was an Essex County, New Jersey official charged with deciding assigning the order of political parties on the ballot in local elections. Caputo, a Democrat, chose the Democrats first in 40 of 41 elections.
Writing D for Democrat and R for Republican, Dembski proposes considering the string
c = DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
that represents the sequence of choices to head the ballot. Did Caputo cheat?
When Dembski analyzes this case, he applies his "generic chance elimination argument", which is supposed to "sweep the field clear" of all relevant chance hypotheses. (Chance hypotheses, in Dembski's idiosyncratic terminology, also include purely deterministic hypotheses in which no chance was actually involved.) What remains is the conclusion that Caputo's selections were due to the mysterious process Dembski calls design. The filter cannot and does not make any claims in relation to why or how phenomena are Intelligently Designed.

But in fact the only chance hypothesis that Dembski considers is that Caputo's selections arose by the flipping of a fair coin. He does not consider other possibilities, such as
(a) Caputo really had no choice in the assignment, since a mobster held a gun to his head.
on all but one occasion. (On that one occasion the mobster was out of town.)If this happened, this would also be intelligence in action (on the part of the mobster) ... the filter doesn't make any claim about why or how ID was deployed.
(b) Caputo, although he appears capable of making choices, is actually the victim of a severe brain disease that renders him incapable of writing the word \Republican". On one occasion his disease was in remission. This is special pleading of a very high degree ... such a disease has never been identified ... and the fact that he would have been able to write 'Democrat' means that anybody who believed this excuse would be very gullible indeed.
(c) Caputo was molested by a Republican at an early age, and the resulting trauma has caused a pathological hatred of Republicans. He therefore tends to favor Democrats, but on one occasion a Republican bought him a beer immediately prior to the ballot assignment. If it were true,this could imply bias ... and it would add further evidence to the indication that the result was intelligently designed.
(d) Caputo attempted to make his choices randomly, using the flip of a fair coin, but unknown to him, on all but one occasion he accidently used a two-headed trick coin from his son's magic chest. Furthermore, he was too dull-witted to remember assignments from previous ballots. Just another Intelligently designed excuse.COLOR]6
(e) Caputo himself is the product of a 3.8-billion-year-old evolutionary history involving both natural law and chance. The structure of Caputo's neural network has been shaped by both this history and his environment since conception. Evolution has shaped humans to act in a way to increase their relative reproductive success, and one evolved strategy to increase this success is seeking and maintaining social status.
Caputo's status depended on his respect from other Democrats, and his neural network, with its limited look-ahead capabilities, evaluated a fitness function that resulted in the strategy of placing Democrats first in order to maximize this status. Yet more Intelligently Designed excuses.

Quote William Dembski
The Explanatory Filter represents our ordinary practice of sorting through things we alternately attribute to law, chance, or design. In particular, the filter describes

how copyright and patent offices identify theft of intellectual property

how insurance companies prevent themselves from getting ripped off

how detectives employ circumstantial evidence to incriminate a guilty party

how forensic scientists are able reliably to place individuals at the scene of a crime

how skeptics debunk the claims of parapsychologists

how scientists identify cases of data falsification

how NASA's SETI program seeks to identify the presence of extra- terrestrial life, and

how statisticians and computer scientists distinguish random from non-random strings of digits.

J C · 21-01-2012 08:01PM

What are we trying to say in this list of possibilities, some less serious than others? Simply that if Caputo flipping a fair coin is one of the possibilities to be eliminated, it is unclear why Caputo himself cannot figure in other chance hypotheses we would like to eliminate. Some of these chance hypotheses, such as (b), involve Caputo, but do not involve design as we understand the word. Like I have already said, hypothesis (b) has no credibility what-so-ever as the proposed 'disease' has never been observed.
Others involve design as generally understood. Hypothesis (e), which could well be the correct explanation, is based on a very complex causal chain of billions of steps, most of which we will probably be unable to judge the probability of with any certainty. Currently we cannot rule (e) in or out based solely on estimates of probability; we must rely on its consilience with other facets of science, including evolutionary biology, psychology, and neuroscience. It can easily be ruled out on the basis of the probability of specific biomolecules forming by a combination of chance and determininsm ... which are in excess of 10^100 for most individual biomolecules ... to say nothing about the (multiplicative) probability that they could randomly or deterministically organise themselves into biological systems, organs and body plans.
This leads us to what we see as one of the weakest points of Dembski's argument: if, as he suggests, design is always inferred simply by ruling out known hypotheses of chance and necessity, then any observed event with a suffciently complicated or obscure causal history could mistakenly be assigned to design, either because we cannot reliably estimate the probabilities of each step of that causal history, or because the actual steps themselves are currently unknown. We call this the "Erroneous Design Inference Principle", or EDIP.
It is known that all complex specified functional information, where the origin can be established, is intelligently designed ... so the people 'grasping at unfounded straws' are those who claim that this is not always the case ... and chance and necessity can produce CSI ... without a single example of where this has occurred being cited - either in theory or in practice

EDIP therefore remains an unfounded hypothesis in relation to ID ... because the test of Complex Specified Functional Information can be used used to definitively determine Intelligent Design, therby ruling out EDIP in relation to Intelligent Design.

The existence of EDIP receives confirmation from modern research in psychology. For one thing, humans are notoriously poor judges of probability [44]. Humans don't need to subjectivley assess the probability of living systems arising spontaneously ... it can be mathematically and objectively assessed ... and therefore subjective judgement isn't a factor at all in definitively determining ID.
On the other hand, humans are good detectors of patterns, even when they are not there [7, 96, 39, 80]. Patterns can be formed by random and/or deterministic processes ... so detecting patterns doesn't have any proof value, one way or the other in relation to ID.
Humans also have "agency-detection systems" which are "biased toward overdetection", a fact some have explained as consonant with an evolutionary history where systems for detecting prey were strongly selected for [4]. Again 'agency detection' isn't part of Intelligent Design detection ... like I have said we can scientifically and definitively detect ID ... but scientifically establishing who/what was the Intelligent Agent(s) that designed life is so difficult, that it may never be scientifically established ... but this shouldn't stop scientists trying.
Taken together, these factors suggest that it will be common for design to be inferred erroneously, and perhaps explains the large number of cases falling under the EDIP: ghosts, UFO's, and witchcraft. Ghosts, UFO's and witchcraft are not accessible to repeated physical observation and detection ... and thus are not within the cometence of science to assess.
Living systems are physically present and thus are accessible to scientific evaluation ... and this has been done ... and CFSI has been unambiguously detected in genetic information ... and thus life has been scientifically deemed to be of intelligent origin.

pH · 21-01-2012 08:48PM

I guess we can file all the above under the general heading of "be careful what you ask for (multiple times in many posts!).

Sarky · 21-01-2012 09:05PM

Except we actually asked for a debunking. I'm sure I would have remembered asking for a shoddy disagreement devoid of evidence.

J C · 21-01-2012 09:12PM

Assigning intelligent agency based on ignorance of the precise causal history of an event or the probabilities associated with a hypothesized route seems in opposition to Dembski's assertion that "frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that cannot in the end be adequately justified" [19, p. 316]. The target
of this assertion is "Darwinism", but it seems to us far more apposite to Dembski's own conclusions about design. Darwinism is indeed based on unfounded beliefs in the powers of random and deterministic processes to produce CFSI ... even though these processes have never been observed to do so.
Intelligent Agency can be ascibed despite ignorance of the causal history of any artifact that contains CFSI.
The example of a sheet of paper with a written language printed on it can be definitively ascribed to an Intelligent Agency despite ignorance of the causal history of the sheet of paper ... and somebody could be convicted and hanged upon this certainty.

But back to our analysis of the Caputo case. If the only chance hypothesis that is being considered is that the sequence of ballot assignments resulted from the flips of a fair coin, then Dembski's analysis has little novelty to it. Dembski's Explantory Filter consists of Law (or determinism), Chance (or probability) and finally (Intelligent) Design
As Laplace wrote in 1819 [57, pp. 16{17]:In the game of heads and tails, if heads comes up a hundred times in a row then this appears to us extraordinary, because the almost infinite number of combinations that can arise in a hundred throws are divided in regular sequences, or those in which we observe a rule that is easy to grasp, and in irregular sequences, that are incomparably more numerous. True
Laplace's argument has been updated in modern form to reflect Kolmogorov complexity; see, for example, the wonderful article [51]. The probability that a string x of length n (whose bits are chosen with uniform probability p = 1/2) will have C(x) <=m can be shown to be <=2^m+1-n. The Kolmogorov complexity of c is very low (we cannot compute it exactly, but let's say for the sake of argument that C(c) <= 10). Thus the hypothesis that c is due flipping a fair coin has probability <= 2^-30, or about 1 in a billion, and it seems fair to reject it. This wouldn't be conclusive ... as the Law of Big Numbers would mean that if the experiment was repeated a billion times (which is only in Lotto orders of magnitude) the probability would be 'evens' that it would occur on one of these experiments.
However, the Kolmogorov complexity of a 100 chain amino acid critical sequence biomolecule choosing from 20 AAs at each point on the chain is <=10^-131 which is orders of magnitude beyond the estimated number of electrons in the Universe ... and thus it is a statistical impossibility to produce such specific functional bio-molecules using non-intelligently directed processes.

J C · 21-01-2012 09:20PM

Sarky wrote: »

Except we actually asked for a debunking. I'm sure I would have remembered asking for a shoddy disagreement devoid of evidence.

I have carefully and comprehensively addressed every claim in the paper so far.

I have quoted the paper in its entirety as I have progressed to avoid the charge of 'cherry picking' what I have answered ... or the charge of quote mining or selective quoting.

I'll let the thread followers judge whether I have debunked it or not.

I'll stop now for tonight ... to give you guys a chance to respond with something more substantial than the nit-picking ad hominism that ye have engaged in, since I started reviewing the paper.

Mr. Boo · 21-01-2012 09:25PM

J C wrote: »

I have carefully and comprehensively addressed every claim in the paper so far.

I'll let the thread followers judge whether I have debunked it or not.

I'll stop now to give you guys a chance to respond with something more substantial than the nit-picking ad hominism that ye have done to date, since I started reviewing the paper.

No, the blue text is just a bunch of unfounded opinions. The opinions are completely devoid of referenceing. You are wasting your time because you are not proving/disproving anything.

Sarky · 21-01-2012 09:29PM

I was honestly wondering how far he'd get before running out of steam. I have the depressing suspicion he'd have done that all the way to the end without a trace of irony. I'm just not cruel enough to let him do that to himself.

If you're going to do it J C , do it PROPERLY. Anything else is a massive waste of time, mostly your own.

J C · 21-01-2012 09:52PM

... so ye guys cite a paper ye claim to debunk ID ... I read it and say that it doesn't ... and I ask ye to show me where it does this.

Ye refused to do so ... and ye ask me to critically evaluate the paper ... even though it wasn't my cited paper, in the first place.

... and ye badgered me to do so for the past year...

... and when I have begun to comprehensively evaluate the claims in the paper all ye can now respond with is nit-picking ad hominisms ... and not even a mention of any claim in the paper.

Lucy8080 · 22-01-2012 02:42AM

im taking no position here.( bar my own) id even like to play with both sides...or explore...depending on my humour.

but i will say this...

j.c. has risen to the challenge...and i respect him/her for doing so.

has been polite. has asked for an easing up of personal attack...an honourable request i.m.o.

and put in time to engage.

science should work without prejudice...

and if j.c. comes up with some new science..

it by no means proves a religion/or disproves...it just gives us new science.

gl both sides. play nice.

J C · 22-01-2012 01:52PM

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

Science should work without prejudice if the argument can be backed up by any scientific evidence.

Science should be without prejudice, full stop.
If an argument isn't backed up by any repeatably observable (i.e. scientific) evidence then this fact should be politely pointed out with specific examples of where these errors have been committed ...

... and 'strawmanning' about giant rats and gravity ... when neither the 'paper' or myself are talking about rats or gravity isn't addressing the points at issue in relation to the ID paper.

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

If I claimed gravity isn't actually a thing, and its effects can more accurately be explained by a giant rat which orbits the globe at light speed, using its RDGI (Made up acronym) to exert force on the earth, would i expect to be taken seriously? Of course not. Because it's ridiculous, and there isn't a shred of scientific evidence to back it up.

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

If J.C could prove himself correct, I'd have absolutely no issue with coming on here and eating humble pie. Becuase as someone with a background in science, new knowledge is an excellent thing in my eyes. And I think the same could be said for most others on this thread.

Evolutionists don't do 'humble pie' ... and I don't particulary want them to eat it either ... I just wish they would do themselves a little more justice, rather than making a show of themselves by 'strawmanning', 'hand-waving' and engaging in ad hominisms ... instead of addressing the scientific issues at hand.

I used be an Evolutionist ... and I too denied that 'M2M' ('Microbes to Man') Evolution was a load of baloney for a long time ... so I understand and feel your pain.;)

Sarky · 22-01-2012 02:05PM

So are you going to edit all the evidence into your posts so far, or are you going to start again with an actual scientific critique? Because what you've done so far is, honestly, rubbish, just unfounded opinions and disagreeing. Not a single reference, not one mathematical example. You haven't backed up a single sentence. That's not science, J C, that's preaching. Try harder. Act like someone with the scientific credentials you keep telling us you have.

J C · 22-01-2012 02:14PM

Sarky wrote: »

So are you going to edit all the evidence into your posts so far, or are you going to start again with an actual scientific critique? Because what you've done so far is, honestly, rubbish, just unfounded opinions and disagreeing. Not a single reference, not one mathematical example. You haven't backed up a single sentence. That's not science, J C, that's preaching. Try harder. Act like someone with the scientific credentials you keep telling us you have.

I have reviewed the paper so far in a scientifically valid manner ... what I have been reviewing to date are various assertions made in the 'paper' about ID in general and Dembski's published papers in particular ... and my approach is therefore scientifically valid.

If you feel that I have made any errors of logic or fact, please point them out.

... otherwise, please sit back ... and read on ... you might learn something you don't appear to know already ... that ID is scientifically valid ... and 'M2M' Evolution only exists in the minds of assorted Materialists.;)

With love ... J C.

Sarky · 22-01-2012 02:18PM

So you're not going to bother with backing up your claims with so much as a single reference?

J C · 22-01-2012 02:33PM

Sarky wrote: »

So you're not going to bother with backing up your claims with so much as a single reference?

Later in my review perhaps ... in any event, references to ID and Creation Science research are unlikely to satisfy you anyway.

ID research is 'cutting edge' ... and it doesn't appear to have been replicated by 'M2M' Evolutionist scientists ... they seem to be like the Medieval Popes with heliocentrism ... in denial of the whole thing ... and not prepared to even consider it!!!:)

It seems to be against their religion !!!:):D

Mr. Boo · 22-01-2012 04:10PM

Right. So it's (c) then. You're trolling.

I think that wraps it up nicely.

"The Origin of Specious Nonsense"

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