All this CSI...

A central claim for the ID movement is the notion that only intelligence can cause the appearance of CSI (complex specified information) such as that found in a computer program or a Shakespeare play. Biological systems in the absense of intelligence only has the ability to reshuffle already existing information but completely lacks the ability to create new such. I'm not going to argue anything about the validity of the claim that biological systems can't create new information but rather just give a quick note regarding the ability of intelligent agents to themselves to create new information. I think that what I am about to write about applies to just about anything ID proponents claim contains CSI.

Take the example of a Dan Brown book - such as "The Da Vinci code". It contains a lot of CSI. Individual letters of the alphabet are strung together into words which are strung together to make sentences that are found in paragraphs that are themselves found in chapters. All this writing describes a plot comprised of lots of different people, places and riddle-solving. Such a book obviously contains lots of information and we would not expect something non-intelligent to be able to produce such a work. But just how much of the information contained in one of Brown's books is new? If you - like me - have read more than one of his books (I must here admit that I'm not overly fond of his books and only really read them because I was given them as presents. Also I switched off the movie "The Da Vinci code" after roughly 15 minutes. It seemed terrible.) you will know that these are quite similar. "The Da Vinci Code", "Digital Fortress" and "Deception Point" all center around conspiracies and clever people who are good at breaking codes (and do it ad nauseum). It would, therefore, seem that each new Dan Brown book does NOT contain CSI proportional to the size of the book. A lot of the information contained within them has been "borrowed" from his previous work (this goes for most, if not all authors, btw). But even Brown's first work was hardly the 100% original CSI originator of all things. Conspiracies and code breaking featured in the literature long before Brown was even born. The people, places and plotlines outlined in his books have already been written about previously - maybe not explicitly, but at least these are similar enough to previous authors work that should best be described as reshuffling of already existing information. Certainly, Brown did not originate the words in his books - these he would have learned by reading. Again, nothing new. Is there anything in a Dan Brown book that could be classified as truly original - as being new information? Is there anything produced by any author that can be classified as being truly original? Does not every author base his writings on something he has previously learned, i.e. by taking pre-existing CSI and simply reshuffling it? I would like to answer a weak yes to these questions. Or at least a yes that allows for the odd, barely perceptible exception to the rule.

For those who are familiar with the intelligent design vs evolution debate, it is quite clear that whatever objections the ID crowd have against evolution, they really have nothing new to say. It has all already been said. Over and over again. They never produce any new CSI. And if we intelligent beings can't produce CSI, why would it matter what biological systems are capable of in the absense of intelligence?

It's in the code, don't you know?

PaV at uncommondescent is excited because someone has encoded Einstein's famous equation and the year he thought of it, as "e=mc^2 1905!" into DNA. Let's look at how the researchers actually did this. A bit technical, the message "e=mc^2 1905!" was converted to hexadecimal code according to the Keyboard scan code (set 2) and binary code was generated by four-bit representation of each hexadecimal number. The four nucleotide bases DNA (A, C, G and T) were used to represent the actual binary number using a scheme where AA=0000, CA=0001, GA=0010 etc. With this in mind, PaV asks:

If You Found E=mc2 in DNA, Would You Believe in ID?

In order for us to find the relevant message (e=mc^2 1905!) in the first place we have to know what kind of code the designer used when encrypting his message. This is helpfully supplied in the article where this research was published. The question is, then, how are ID proponents supposed to find any messages encoded by their designer? This designer sure didn't publish anything enabling us to decrypt it's messages. Are they going to search all possible encryption mechanism until they manage to find something that remotely resembles a message we can understand? As the first commenter to PaV's post, russ, writes:

Yes, but then the guy who “solves the code” will be labeled a creationist, fired from his job, and labeled a fraud. That’s because nature is quite capable of encoding “E=MC2″ and “1905″ if given enough time.

Actually, nature could encode that in no time. With an arbitrary choice of code, ANYTHING could read "e=mc^2 1905!". Is this going to turn into a "Bible code" circus?

Where is the logic here?

What are we to make of the following?

Writes Dembski:

I argue that the explantory filter is a reliable criterion for detecting design. Alternatively, I argue that the Explanatory Filter successfully avoids false positives. Thus whenever the Explanatory Filter attributes design, it does so correctly.

Writes Behe:

To falsify design theory a scientist need only experimentally demonstrate that a bacterial flagellum, or any other comparably complex system, could arise by natural selection. If that happened I would conclude that neither flagella nor any system of similar or lesser complexity had to have been designed. In short, biochemical design would be neatly disproved.

From "Debating Design" by Dembski and Ruse:

More generally, Dembski (1999, 2002) has argues that irreducible complexity is only a special case of complex specified information (CSI)...

Dembski's explanatoty filter yields no false positives.
The explanatory filter detects design by measuring CSI (complex specified information).
IC (irreducible complexity) is a special case of CSI.
The identification of an IC structure should, then, also yield no false positives.
If there was an IC structure found that could form in the absense of intelligence, then only more "complex" structures would be considered irreducibly complex.
But that would entail that the first IC structure that turned out to not be IC was a false positive. So, the explanatory filter, while yielding no false positives, is quite happy to accomodate false positives. Go figure.

Not that it matters...

No doubt due to his failure to propose any valid scientific work in the area of evolution and intelligent design, William Dembski is now attempting to use an argument from authority - or rather an argument from lack of authority. The subject of Dembski's inquest is Richard Dawkins, one of a myriad of intelligent design opponents. Dembski is (as per usual, actually) mostly quoting someone else (I'm not sure whom, but the person in question talks about a Dr Greg Clarke) who claims that Dawkins should not call himself a scientist since he only has one publication under his belt and that this publication only has been cited once. Dembski calls for others to check if this is true. Why not. I'll take a stab at it. After a three-minute search, I found someone who has compiled a list of Dawkins' writings. A selection is included here:

• The ontogeny of a pecking preference in domestic chicks. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 25, 170-186. (1968)
• Bees are easily distracted. Science 165, 751. (1969)
• Selective neurone death as a possible memory mechanism. Nature 229, 118-119. (1971)
• Hierarchical organisation: a candidate principle for ethology. In Growing Points in Ethology (eds P. P. G. Bateson & R. A. Hinde), pp. 7-54� (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1976)
• The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976)
• Replicator selection and the extended phenotype. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 47, 61-76. (1978)
• In defense of selfish genes. Philosophy 56, 556-573 (1979)
• Twelve misunderstandings of kin selection. Zeitschrift fŸr Tierpsychologie 51, 184-200. (1979)

The actual list is probably about ten times longer.

After a quick look at scholar.google.com I also found some more:
"Arms race between species". Dawkins & Krebs. Proc R. Soc. Lond. 1979
"Parental investment, mate desertion and a fallacy". Dawkins & Carlisle. Nature. 1976

It has to be said that most of these writings do NOT entail original research. A few are book reviews. Some are not in peer-reviews journals.

Greg Clarke is right about one thing. Dawkins does not appear on ISI. Seems that ISI doesn't list all of Dawkins' publications.

Why does this all matter? Well, as Dembski's anonymous friend writes: "He (Dawkins) has no more scientific authority than a suburban school teacher."

Apart from being mostly irrelevant, the above claim is also wrong. It is irrelevant because the weight of science rests on the arguments, evidence and hypotheses proposed, not on who proposes them. It is also wrong since Dawkins surely knows more about science than your average suburban school teacher. So Dawkins ability to speak authoritarily about scientific matters is also greater than that of said teachers.

What is the reason for Dembski to go over this? Apart from obviously attempting to discredit Dawkins, he also states:

Richard Dawkins, in his recent videos and books, portrays himself as justified in taking the hard line he does against religion because he is a scientist.

I don't know if Dawkins does this. Taking a hard line against religion is not a scientific endevour but a philosophical one and so one's scientific standing in such an instant is irrelevant.

An interesting observation is that after performing a quick check of Dembski's scholary achievements using scholar.google.com, searching for "author:Dembski, wa" gives 83 hits. Most of these are from our Dembski. If you exclude writings published in religious material and his books, I could only find one paper published in a peer-reviews journal:

"Uniform probability". Journal of Theoretical Probability. Volume 3, Number 4 / October, 1990. 4 citations.

Does this mean that Dembski should not be able to talk authoritatively about science?


Edited to add: Seems like the offending page I based this post on has been deleted. I take it that rather than admitting that he made a rather illfounded attempt at character assasination, Dembski took the easy way out and tried to erase all signs of his lack of ability to do a simple search for someones publication list. Go figure. (Yes, I see the irony in this statement if I am wrong in my assumption)

Luskin is SO predictable!

Duracell bunny. Broken record. Bushism. Some things just never stop going on and on. Yet again, we have Casey Luskin claiming that ID predicts something about junk DNA:

Science wouldn't publish his letter, but it now appears that another prediction of intelligent design has been validated.

As I've stated numerous times, intelligent design "theory" is incapable of making predictions. Even William Dembski thinks so:

Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability.

Perhaps Luskin didn't get the memo?

Edited to add: John Pieret at "Thoughts in a Haystack" still has the energy to explain in detail what is wrong with Luskin's claim.

The most asinine design argument award goes to...

DaveScot at uncommondescent has presented a beautiful fairytale (May 5th, 2007):

A interesting thing to think about is that bacteria, along with all other life on the earth, is doomed in another several billion years when the sun turns into a red giant and fries the earth to a crisp. That means the bacteria that have survived for billions of years have lived about half their lifetime. The only way bacteria could survive longer is if they can somehow find a new habitable planet and translocate to it. This seems to require telescopes to locate habitable planets and spacecraft to get from here to there. Maybe that’s why we are here - to make sure all life doesn’t die when the earth is no longer habitable. Maybe that’s been the “plan” all along and this has happened before many times on many other worlds with ours just one more link in the chain. Why else would be building telescopes that can find planets around other stars and spacecraft that can escape the solar system? There’s no practical benefit in it except perhaps for this. Maybe it’s a biological imperative and we really have no choice about building telescopes and spacecraft.

A few question pop into my mind when I read this:
1. Why can't DaveScot do a quick search on the internet and find out that bacteria can survive extremes of pressure, temperature and radiation - perhaps even those existing when rocks are, after a meteorite-impact, ejected from an Earth-like planet and scattered through the universe (all without using telescopes and rockets)?
2. Why would the bacteria have to survive the death of the Sun at all?
3. Why didn't the designer just seed these other worlds straight away without using us as a vehicle?
4. How inane can one be in one's suggestions for the designer's intentions?
5. How much empty rhetoric can DaveScot espouse in the name of intelligent design?
6. Why should I go on asking more questions?

The irrelevancy of evolution to medicine

uncommondescent's scordova is adding on to Michael Egnor's claim that evolution is irrelevant when it comes to medicine. He claims that Catriona MacCallum, senior editor of PLoS Biology supports agrees with this sentiment. In her editorial, she wrote (emphasis added by scordova):

Charles Darwin, perhaps medicine’s most famous dropout, provided the impetus for a subject that figures so rarely in medical education. Indeed, even the iconic textbook example of evolution—antibiotic resistance—is rarely described as “evolution” in relevant papers published in medical journals. Despite potentially valid reasons for this oversight (e.g., that authors of papers in medical journals would regard the term as too general), it propagates into the popular press when those papers are reported on, feeding the wider perception of evolution’s irrelevance in general, and to medicine in particular

Writes scordova about this (emphasis added):

Darwinists claim how important Darwinism is to science, but MacCallum’s editorial makes an embarrassing admission of Darwinism’s irrelevance to medicine.

MacCallum says no such thing. She says - and you can read this in the quote that scordova supplies himself - that the term evolution is seldom used and that the gives a certain perception. What scordova didn't quote from MacCallum's writing (and probably for a rather good and obvious reason) is the sentence that follows immediately her writing above:

Yet an understanding of how natural selection shapes vulnerability to disease can provide fundamental insights into medicine and health and is no less relevant than an understanding of physiology or biochemistry.

The only thing that is embarrasing is scordova's lame attempt at quote mining.

Let this be the last time...

The ID crowd has been quite fond of saying that ID predicts this or ID predicts that. A recent example has been that of the supposed ID prediction that junk DNA should have function. One reason mentioned for this is that there tends to be little junk in human designs. Before I yet again claim that this is nonsense, let me delve deeper into the junk DNA issue. The journal Nature has an article (2007, vol 446, number 7138, p864) that describes how certain large non-coding sequences (previous "junk") in Drosophila appear to act as silencers to parasitic genetic elements known as transposons (more "junk" DNA). Off the top of my head, the best analogy to this that I can think of in terms of human designs, would be the case of an architect/builder building a wooden house, filling it with termites and then adding the odd anteater to stop the house from crumbling. Do you reckon any IDists predicted this?

As I - and anyone who has actually looked at what ID actually states - have frequently said, ID predicts nothing. It seems that some ID supporters agree with me, most notably William Dembski. In a document, "Is Intelligent Design Testable?", dated Jan 24th 2001 he writes (emphasis added):

But what about the predictive power of intelligent design? To require prediction fundamentally misconstrues design. To require prediction of design is to put design in the same boat as natural laws, locating their explanatory power in an extrapolation from past experience. This is to commit a category mistake. To be sure, designers, like natural laws, can behave predictably (designers often institute policies that end up being rigidly obeyed). Yet unlike natural laws, which are universal and uniform, designers are also innovators. Innovation, the emergence to true novelty, eschews predictability. Designers are inventors. We cannot predict what an inventor would do short of becoming that inventor. Intelligent design offers a radically different problematic for science than a mechanistic science wedded solely to undirected natural causes. Yes, intelligent design concedes predictability. But this represents no concession to Darwinism, for which the minimal predictive power that it has can readily be assimilated to a design-theoretic framework.

I'm glad we finally got that out of the way.