[QUOTE]Originally posted by John Paul:
[b] [QUOTE]1)joz, have you read The Design Inference or Dembskis new book, No Free Lunch? If you answer No, then I would have to surmise you dont know what the heck you are talking about (which is obvious to me regardless of what you say you have read). Believe me when I tell you he gets more in-depth on the concept than I did in my post.
2)What answer did you come up with for the 100 rows x 100 rows of pine trees?
3)No joz- Its called a
design inference. Basically like I stated in my opening of my last post. If you want to learn I suggest doing some research. If you want to nit-pick from ignorance, I suggest you follow the path you are on. I asked you to present an example of a system that is naturally occurring that also exhibits CSI and you have refused to do so. Is that because the only example is the one you gave? And that one is far from being shown to have originated via purely natural processes?
4)So again- give us something that we know originated via purely natural processes that also exhibits CSI and we will have something to discuss. Its not my fault if you cant falsify Dembskis filter.
5)As Dembski puts it, "Eliminating chance through small probabilities has a long history." He sites Borel, then corrects Borel's Single Law of Chance with the Law of Small Probability.
6)NS doesnt design from scratch. It works on what is already there. What Dembski et al. are basically saying is specified complexity can't arise from a random process culled by NS.
7)You asked how we can differentiate between a natural system and a designed system. I answered that. In each one of the fields I mentioned that is what is being done- differentiating between nature (or chance) & design. If you want a more in-depth answer, do the research. Its not like ID is someones whim. Theres plenty of literature out there on ID.
8)What I posted from Behe covers that, thank you. Nice of you to ignore that part of my post. Your mistake seems to be that you think design voids evolution. It doesnt. Evolution is what happened to the design, once it was left in nature.
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1)No I haven`t if you want me to mail em to me. I`m not debating with Dembski but with you, its up to you to convince me. Quote the book if you want and if you think its essential to the debate I can give you my address and you can mail your copies to me to read. If he gets more in depth, and you can understand him, then so can you so post away old boy.
Also on the subject of reading things I did a search on
http://scirus.com for Dembski and got, wait for it .... no journal papers that he had authored. I did turn up this though
http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/dave/Dembski.html.
quote:
An hisotical aside - About 15 years ago, Bernd-Olaf Kuppers published a book - "Information and the Origin of Life". This sounds like something Bill Dembski should have read carefully if he REALLY wanted to see what other people have done in the field. I was pleasantly surprised to see that he did indeed site this book - but as proof that "random chance" is not sufficient to account for the origins of biological information. This is an accurate statement, but I think it is obvious that Dembski never has actually read the book. The reason I say this is that Dembski totally ignores Kuppers "third alternative". Section III of Kuppers' book ("The Question of the Origin of Biological Information") has one chapter each for three different perspectives - ch. 6 is "The Chance Hypothesis", and Kuppers agrees with Dembski on this one - it just simply is not going to happen on a random basis alone. ch. 7 is "The Teleological Approach", where he actually takes Michael Polanyi to task for his "irreducible structures in biology" - this pre-dates Behe, by the way. (Polanyi is the person who they named Dembski's Institute for at Baylor University.) Anyway, Polanyi essentially argues that biology CANNOT be reduced to physics and math. The "third approach" is the idea that "...biological information has arisen by self-organisation and evolution of biological macromolecules. It was first developed by Manfred Eigen and later in mathematical form by Eigen and Peter Schuster..." (here he gives 3 references, one of which is another book he's written called "Molecular Evolution", published in 1985). Somehow Dembski seems to have missed the third approach altogether, and assumes a more simple EITHER/OR - EITHER it has to be random chance, OR it's a miracle. But there's a third explanation, called "chemistry" - that says that the sequence (of DNA or RNA or protein) determines its shape which determines its function. There are only a relatively small handful of possible SHAPES, and hence the amount of possible "information" is more limited than Dembski claims.
Compare 1 in 10^135 vs. 1 in 10^8
Which number sounds more likely to you? The former is the number of possible SEQUENCES for a protein made up of 100 amino acids. The latter is the estimated number of different protein shapes that any protein of 100 amino acids could adopt. I agree with Dembski that the former number is essentially impossible. However, I think he's missing the point - it is the SECOND number which is important from a structural perspective - and there is plenty of evidence for the idea that structure determines function (hence "information") is correct.
Then there's also the problem of whether his starting assumption, that the DNA sequence in an organism can be viewed as a type of computer programme. This is a very common assumption, but as early as 1985, people were already starting to question its validity. An excellent discussion of this can be found in the chapter "Is there an Organism in this Text?", written by science historian Evelyn Fox Keller (from Controlling Our Destinies). See also Susan Oyama's book, The Ontongeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution. (Just from the title alone, this sounds like another good book Dembski should have read carefully and discussed (but didn't).
Interesting sounds like someone else could do with doing some reading....
2)Designed, but if you knew sod all about chemistry and physics and saw a crystal for the first time you would think that that was designed as well.
3)Actually I gave what I considered to be an example, you disagreed (as is your wont), when pressed on the subject of why you disagreed the only response was its designed coz it is. Finally you posted the mechanism you used to arrive at this conclusion of design and surprise surprise Dembskis filter (at least as you expressed it) is semantically equal to CSI is designed coz it is...
4)The real discussion now is how justified your assertion that CSI must be designed is. On the subject of Dembskis filter it firstly is only relevant if evolution were driven primarily by chance (mutation), it isn`t look into it sometime. Secondly it filters by saying that any CSI must be designed, what is this based on? You, JP, have offered up the filter as an argument from (questionable) authority yet have not posted information as to how it was derived....
5)Fine as long as ONLY chance applies which is not the case here JP....
6)No what Dembski is saying is that CSI can`t arise from chance (which is an interesting statement mathmaticaly all on its own) he (in the filter you quoted) fails to address NS at all....
7)You may have said that you personaly think that Dembskis filter is good enough but you have not justified that view. You have the book that explains how the filter was derived you should have no difficulty convincing me (if the maths is solid).
On another note a search of
http://scirus.com revealed no journal papers on ID.... So tell me where can I read a peer reviewed paper on ID?
8)Ok I`m going to do an impression *drumroll*
"We don`t know so Goddidit."
Sound familiar.
Behe`s entire argument is the tired old God of gaps nonsense dressed up for a new generation.
Read these and ask yourself honestly if you think Behe`s got it right...
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/feb97.htmlOn blood clotting cascade
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe/publish.htmlrefutes Behe`s assertion of silence on the subject ofmolecular evolution.
Did someone else skip a bit of research?
[This message has been edited by joz, 01-30-2002]
[This message has been edited by joz, 01-30-2002]
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