Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
3 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,806 Year: 3,063/9,624 Month: 908/1,588 Week: 91/223 Day: 2/17 Hour: 0/0


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Dembski published in peer reviewed journal
Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.7


Message 1 of 5 (520346)
08-21-2009 4:14 AM


Dembski's had a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, not a journal you've heard of? Me neither. It's a pretty low teir journal. That's the first thing to note. The second thing to note is that despite what I expect to see claimed of this paper: it has nothing to do with ID. No mention is made of it. No mention at all.
GoodMath has a good critique of the paper

Replies to this message:
 Message 2 by Percy, posted 08-21-2009 7:36 AM Dr Jack has not replied
 Message 4 by Rrhain, posted 08-24-2009 7:14 AM Dr Jack has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 2 of 5 (520365)
08-21-2009 7:36 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Dr Jack
08-21-2009 4:14 AM


Mr Jack writes:
Dembski's had a paper published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans, not a journal you've heard of? Me neither. It's a pretty low tier journal.
I've been a member of the IEEE (Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for over 30 years. Their technical journals are generally of very high quality, and I've published there myself. Peer review is strong in my field, about half my submissions have been rejected.
But the IEEE has over a hundred journals across many fields of electrical engineering, and I'm only familiar with the few that deal with my own technical field. I've never heard of this particular journal, but I'm not sure that Mark Chu-Carroll's "low tier" characterization is accurate.
IEEE Transactions of Systems, Man and Cybernetics began life in the IEEE's predecessor organization the IRE in 1960 under the title IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, and it's undergone several name changes since. The description of the journal:
Aims and Scope writes:
The fields of systems engineering and human machine systems: systems engineering includes efforts that involve issue formulation, issue analysis and modeling, and decision making and issue interpretation at any of the lifecycle phases associated with the definition, development, and implementation of large systems. It also includes efforts that relate to systems management, systems engineering processes, and a variety of systems engineering methods such as optimization, decision making, modeling, and simulation. Human machine systems includes cognitive ergonomics, system test and evaluation, and human information processing concerns in systems and organizations.
Here's the paper's abstract:
Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. Combinatorics shows that even a moderately sized search requires problem-specific information to be successful. Computers, despite their speed in performing queries, are completely inadequate for resolving even moderately sized search problems without accurate information to guide them. We propose three measures to characterize the information required for successful search: 1) endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search; 2) exogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem-specific information; and 3) active information, which, as the difference between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target. This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.
Sounds pretty innocuous. Even for IEEE members, journal access for each journal must be paid for, so I can't access the paper through the IEEE , but it's available elsewhere on-line, this copy is at Dembski's co-author's website: Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success
At first I thought Cho-Carroll's criticisms must stem from his familiarity with an ID version of the same paper, but as I started browsing through the paper I found this right on page 1 (page 1051, actually):
Dembski and Marks writes:
Such information does not magically materialize but instead results from the action of the programmer who prescribes how knowledge about the problem gets folded into the search algorithm.
There it is, bold as all get out, the central claim of creationists: there's no such thing as new information, and genetic algorithms work because the answers are preprogrammed in. Of course, that's not what Dembski and Marks really said. The peer reviewers, very likely unfamiliar with creationism and ID, interpreted this in the context of actual information theory and understood Dembski and Marks to be saying that search algorithms must have knowledge of the structure of the search space, but not of the content of the search space itself.
Given Cho-Carroll's and my own familiarity with the lingo of ID, this paper fairly cries out "bogus ID paper attempting to gain legitimacy by placement in a legitimate journal," but to electrical engineer peer-reviewers specializing in human/computer interactions it probably looked like a rather pedestrian but worthy paper. I think the journal was duped.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Fix formatting.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Dr Jack, posted 08-21-2009 4:14 AM Dr Jack has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by Wounded King, posted 08-24-2009 6:01 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Wounded King
Member
Posts: 4149
From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Joined: 04-09-2003


Message 3 of 5 (520818)
08-24-2009 6:01 AM
Reply to: Message 2 by Percy
08-21-2009 7:36 AM


I haven't read the paper, but from the reviews Dembksi and Marks seem to be really saying little not consistent with evolution. In fact one of their themes, that information increase in genomes are directed by interaction with the environment, is something I have often said here myself. The new tack seems to be that the intelligent designer is shaping the environment, and therefore the fitness landscape, and thereby driving natural selection in a particular direction.
One bad thing here is the creation of even more new 'types' of information, 'endogenous', 'exogenous' and 'active', for people to get confused about and fail to define usefully.
TTFN,
WK

This message is a reply to:
 Message 2 by Percy, posted 08-21-2009 7:36 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

  
Rrhain
Member
Posts: 6351
From: San Diego, CA, USA
Joined: 05-03-2003


Message 4 of 5 (520821)
08-24-2009 7:14 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Dr Jack
08-21-2009 4:14 AM


That creationists get published is no surprise. Behe is an active researcher in biochemistry and has published quite a number of articles.
None of his claims regarding "irreducible complexity" or any of his other attempts to justify creationism have ever survived peer review.
It would seem Dembski is now in the same position: Able to do science but unwilling to do so for his pet belief.

Rrhain

Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Dr Jack, posted 08-21-2009 4:14 AM Dr Jack has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 5 by DevilsAdvocate, posted 08-24-2009 8:59 PM Rrhain has not replied

  
DevilsAdvocate
Member (Idle past 3101 days)
Posts: 1548
Joined: 06-05-2008


Message 5 of 5 (520903)
08-24-2009 8:59 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by Rrhain
08-24-2009 7:14 AM


Rrhain writes:
It would seem Dembski is now in the same position: Able to do science but unwilling to do so for his pet belief.
I would suggest he is more "unable" than "unwilling" to conduct science for his pet belief. I am sure he is more than willing given the opportunity however he cannot provide the necessary scientific, emperical evidence for creationism aka ID to make it a credible scientific theory and win the approval as a submission in a peer-review scientific journal.

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4 by Rrhain, posted 08-24-2009 7:14 AM Rrhain has not replied

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024