The Design Revolution by William Dembski

DBlevins, Another good point.Thank you for making me think. My morality (as I have described it previously) is derived from me making observations, noting how it applies to others & ourselves, & then being consistent/logical about the application of it(being as concise as possible).Owzat?MarkThis message has been edited by mark24, 08-08-2004 06:57 PM

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

If you look at the Buddhist WAY, it is extremely logical and requires independant thought.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

From chapter 1, page 34: This is quite a promise. I hope that in the opening sentence that when Dembski says "design" he means intelligent design. He still has a lot of definitions to fill in, but we already know that he's going to define biological systems as complex, and that he's going to equate complexity with design, but one has to wonder how he will distinguish between evolution producing complexity in designs versus intelligence producing similarly complex designs. I hope that when he confidently states he has a method for identifying design in biological systems that he means he can tell the different between natural and intelligent (i.e., artificial) causes.A few paragraphs later on page 35 we have some definitions. He first provides the example of SETI receiving a list of prime numbers from 2 to 101, and he says we must infer that this indicates intelligence: If I picked up this book by accident when intending to pick up a textbook about probability and read the above paragraph, alarm bells would immediately have gone off in my head. "What kind of vague mumbo-jumbo definitions are these for something mathematical?" I would have thought to myself. My point is that these definitions don't raise my suspicions because they come from a book about intelligent design, but because they're inherently suspect.The most obvious problem is with the definitions of contingent and specification. It is not that they're vague, which they are, but that they seem to refer to pretty much the same thing. The explanation for contingent is that the prime sequence is a special set of radio signals, while that for specification is that the prime sequence is special set of mathematical symbols. He could as easily have said the radio signals are specified because it is a special set of radio signals, while the prime sequence is contingent because it is a special set of mathematical symbols. I think he's just created synonyms while adding complexity at the same time! And what about complexity? He says the prime sequence is complex because it is long, but how long is long? His specified complexity is already lacking a bit of specificity! So what is he going to call contingent in biology? Is DNA contingent or specified because the chemical constituents are ordered into DNA and not some other more random chemical? Is messenger RNA contingent? Nucleotides? Ribosomes? Proteins? Amino acids?And we can fully expect that because DNA is ordered into nucleotide sequences that Dembski will say it is contingent and specified, and that because it is long it is complex. Voil! Intelligent design!But perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, he's only just introducing his terms. Perhaps the rigor will increase.--Percy

keep us posted ... I just hope the rigor won't be mortis

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Coincidentally, the latest Skeptic magazine arrived in the afternoon mail,

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Dontcha love Skeptic?I gave a subscription to Jim as a birthday gift about 8 years ago and we've never let it lapse.

"contingent" might get connoted without TACHION design IN REAL SPACE?And "specified" might be denoted with a data bank that ORTHGONALLY keeps records 'independent' in a sense I might discuss using Euginie Scott's notion of continum
EvC Forum: Evolution Vs. Creationism
to restrict the alleomorph symmetry relations of Wright(sorry for my own shorthand but I had thought the proposed topic where I was going to write this would have been opened)that is perhaps "bedeviling" use of the unreputed applied math Wright/Fisher "tension".I KNEW that Dembski MUST have meant *something* in New Jersey "specifically" but I have been unsure what that might have been and would, if, still be... Rather the problem is not one of "deception" in the D.Rather case @CBSDocumentation but of a perceptive one where ANY methodological natrualism is conceieved by any philosophical naturalist no matter the mind of EVERY latter. This is false but appeared to have occurred. It simply WAS not a matter of "leaps" of faith subjectively quantitized no matter the faith or not in ID. Again, there was reason that Gould referred to Freud in responding ON TV in "A glorious Accident" but to explain the inequalities in the alternative AT TRIAL is a gain of no simplicity, as would be required in the "specified" information able to make contigent what would have logically been at most a transItive asymmetrical relation of cause and effect. Still we/i don't seperate far enough (in print) to get out of ids; Bateson's simple-picture in front of the CU AGSCHOOL {or} his wish to the mathmematician Hardy, that... indeed there still is hardly all math in biology at all.Scientific realism is not this real under conditions that I KNOW but it might be able to recondition the failure to get beyond the psychological attiude that binds "leaps of faith" of any stripe or

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urgent duty of protecting other lives, without illusion and without fear

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GWB, President of the United States of America.Toda;Percy was correct this is a *huge* promise. New Jersey is not ^that^ big.

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And we can fully expect that because DNA is ordered into nucleotide sequences that Dembski will say it is contingent and specified, and that because it is long it is complex. Voil! Intelligent design!

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This really is the problem, finding specificity in DNA. By analogy, we could claim that water is intelligently designed to fit the bottom of a lake. The shape of the lake is both specific and complex and water perfectly matches it. Of course, water has no choice but to fit the shape of the lake. In the same manner, DNA has no choice but to conform to the forces of natural selection. Dembski also runs into problems by comparing length with complexity since there are single celled organisms that have 10 times the amount of DNA than a human being. If length does not result in multicellular complexity, then length is not a good measure of complexity.

I got a good distance into Dembski's book and still found nothing of substance. What I was hoping for was an indication of how a connection was established between Dembski's criteria for detecting design and the real world.Seeing no hint that this might be upcoming, I finally spent maybe an hour skimming the rest of the book. He presents his own flavor of information science, but never indicates how it was derived. One significant weakness was his use of word intelligence without ever giving it a satisfactory definition. Another was never applying his information science to a real world example. In the end his terms like specified complexity remained concepts only, and were never provided a mathematical foundation. If he claims to be able to objectively detect design then he should show, at least once, how he does it, but he never does.Without an established connection to the real world through observational and/or experimental approaches, the words of Dembski's terminology are left hanging in space. He has a well defined conceptual framework with no real-world application. I would have hoped to somewhere see a statement like, "The specified complexity of this particular nucleotide chain is 127.4, and since the maximum specified complexity that can be produced naturally is only 98.6, this nucleotide chain must have been designed." But there's nothing like this anywhere, not in Dembski's book, and not in any ID article I've ever read. After all this time, IDists still detect design just as subjectively as Paley: if it looks like it was designed, it was designed.This reminds me a little of my Transcendental Meditation (TM) period. In the early 80's a member of my team was into TM, and a couple other people in the larger group of which my team was a part were also into TM, and they had the local TM center give us a presentation at work. I was awestruck at all the graphs and charts showing the benefits of TM not only to the individual, but to society at large. I guess I'm a sucker for science.I entered the TM program, was given a mantra, and was shown how to meditate. I also joined a class built around a video taped series of lectures by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the leader of the TM movement, the same guy the Beatles followed for a while in the 60's. I wanted to understand the source of the pervasive energy they said that you drew upon when you did TM, and that made levitation possible. Normally I would have been more skeptical, but there were all those graphs and charts, so I went in with a pretty open mind.We watched two tapes per week, with class discussion afterwards, and it was a pretty long series. As the tape numbers gradually climbed I began to wonder when he was going to get to the core scientific foundation of TM. The Maharishi was peeling the onion pretty slowly. As we reached tape 14, tape 15, tape 16, I was becoming concerned that he was never going to get there, and I spoke to the instructor. She assured me that he was going to cover this soon.We finally reached the penultimate tape. It wasn't the last tape, but it was the one where the Maharishi talked about the force. "How do we know that the force exists and that we are connected to it?" he asked rhetorically, and I braced myself for the scientific information. "We know this is so because we can feel it."And that was the end of my dabbling with TM. The meditation techniques are great, the rest is garbage.And in the end, that's how I felt about Dembski's book. He paints a wonderful picture, but there's no connection to the real world, and when you peel the onion, there's nothing there.--Percy