From: Morgan Grey <cynical_prophet@yahoo.com>
To: <DebunkCreation@yahoogroups.com>
Reply-to: <DebunkCreation@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Mon Sep 10, 2001 9:58 am
Message: 21397
Subject: Re: Re[2]: [DebunkCreation] Any books on evolution?


--- Dave Oldridge <doldridg@s...> wrote:
(snip)
> And, while rigorously mathematical, that definition
> [i.e. Dembski's] places all events that are produced
> by a COMBINATION of regularity AND chance directly
> under the heading of "designed." Thus all evolution
> IS, by his definition, "design."
>
> Yet, he and others are quick to equivocate this
> definition when they get et outside the academic,
> mathematical environment. And such equivocation in
> a trained mathematician is either gross incompetence
> or a sin.

Further equivocation on Dembski's part happens when
someone challenges his claims with examples of genetic
algorithm producing CSI. He has two similar tactics:

Define "information" in such a way that it *by
definition* cannot be produced by genetic algorithms.
I'm at school, and doesn't have it handy, but in his
"Intelligent Design", most of his discussion about
natural selection as a "designer" consists of defining
his way out of the issue. Of course, if "information"
is defined so that it depends on how the structure in
question came about, Dembski's "design inference" is
useless, since it attempts to determine the "design"
of something *without* knowing the causal story of the
event in question.

The other tactic is similar, and also depends on
re-defining "design" in such a way that its status
suddenly depends on its causal story. In
<http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-specified.html>,
Dembski introduces a split between "appearant" and
"actual CSI", and claims that "[j]ust as the Darwinian
mechanism does not generate actual design but only its
appearance, so too the Darwinian mechanism does not
generate actual specified complexity but only its
appearance."

Of course, if something is CSI only if we know it to
have not been generated by "the Darwinian mechanism",
Dembski's claim that life contains CSI is no longer
valid, since it is not known that life was not
generated by "the Darwinian mechanism".

Either way, his re-definition of terms used in TDI (or
invention of terms not used there) while at the same
time referring to TDI as "the book that supports all
of this", makes me seriously suspicious of his
integrity.


=====
Morgan

"Evolution is to the social sciences as statues are to
birds: a convenient platform upon which to deposit badly
digested ideas." (Steve Jones, 2000, "Darwin's Ghost", pp.
xxvii)

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