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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Specified Complexity

Form

William Dembski's argument (The Design Inference, 1998; No Free Lunch, 2002):

  1. Any event is explained by regularity (law), chance, or design, and the "explanatory filter" tests them in that order.
  2. An event that is complex (improbable: below Dembski's "universal probability bound" of 1 in 10^150) and specified (matching a pattern that can be given independently of the event) cannot be explained by law or chance. A random string of letters is complex but not specified; "the" repeated is specified but not complex; a sonnet is both.
  3. Biological systems exhibit complex specified information (CSI).
  4. Therefore they were designed.
  5. Further, by a "law of conservation of information", natural processes cannot generate CSI, only shuffle it; so the information in living things must have been put in from outside.

My Positions

  1. The filter cannot see evolution. It tests law and chance separately, but natural selection is law and chance together: random variation filtered by a lawful environment. Dembski's calculation for the flagellum computes the probability of its proteins assembling at random in one step, which is an event nobody proposes. A filter that cannot represent the hypothesis it is meant to exclude will "detect design" in anything evolution produced.
  2. "Specification" is never calculated for a biological object, only asserted. The specification is read off the thing after it exists ("it functions as a motor"), which is drawing the target around the arrow (Texas Sharpshooter). Dembski's own later definition of specification was changed repeatedly, and no one, including Dembski, has ever published a worked calculation of the CSI of any organism.
  3. The No Free Lunch theorems do not say what the book says. They concern averages over all possible fitness landscapes, including nonsensical ones; they say nothing about the actual landscape, which is structured by physics and chemistry. David Wolpert, who proved the theorems, described Dembski's use of them as "written in jello". The "law of conservation of information" is not a law of anything; it has no derivation and is contradicted by every evolutionary algorithm.
  4. Evolutionary algorithms produce CSI by Dembski's measure. Thomas Schneider's ev, the Avida platform, and NASA's evolved antenna all generate specified, improbable, functional structure from random starts. Dembski's reply, that the information was "smuggled in" by the fitness function, concedes the point: the fitness function is the environment, and the environment plus selection is exactly the explanation he is denying.
  5. The filter gives false positives. A specific snowflake, the hexagonal columns of the Giant's Causeway, the regular eruptions of Old Faithful, and the orbit of the Moon are improbable and pattern-matching. Humans see patterns everywhere (Pareidolia); a method for detecting design that relies on a human noticing a pattern is a method for detecting humans noticing patterns.
  6. It has never detected a design. No archaeologist, cryptographer, or forensic scientist uses the explanatory filter, and no instance of design has ever been identified with it, in biology or anywhere else. It was published through a religious press and an intelligent-design foundation, and the court at Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) heard it dismantled.

Sources

  • Dembski, W., The Design Inference (1998); No Free Lunch (2002)
  • Elsberry, W. and Shallit, J., "Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski's 'complex specified information'", Synthese 178 (2011)
  • Wolpert, D., "William Dembski's treatment of the No Free Lunch theorems is written in jello", Mathematical Reviews (2003)
  • Häggström, O., "Intelligent design and the NFL theorems", Biology and Philosophy 22 (2007)
  • Perakh, M., Unintelligent Design (2004)
  • Schneider, T. D., "Evolution of biological information", Nucleic Acids Research 28 (2000)

Also see