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So all I have heard is that Dembski and Gitt are wrong. Do any of you purpose any other way of differentiating between random key strokes and the written English language?

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Of course the problem domain we are concerned with is NOT written English language so even if Dembski's and Gitt's methods worked there, there is no reason to think that they would necessarily be good when applied to biology.In fact it is easy to come up with a method better than Dembski's - instead of leaving design as the default hypothesis, to be assumed whenever a result appears sufficiently interesting we could make design a positive hypothesis to be compared with other explanations. Doing so also avoids the problem that Dembski's method requires probability calculations which may not be practical in non-trivial cases.And Gitt's method is only applicable to genuine languages, so for any other field any workable method would be better !

Dembski does make some really stupid statements doesn't he.What are the odds of lightning striking a particular leaf in a field?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I can differentiate between them because I have been trained to know how the English language works. I could not, however, necessarily differentiate between the Cletic language and a bunch of random keystrokes (I think the Celtic language IS just a buynch of random keystrokes, but that's neither here nor there). Nor could I differentiate between Arabic script and some strange little swirls on a piece of paper.The thing is, in DNA, there really is no such thing as random keystrokes. any 3 nucleotides will code for something, so any combination of nucleotides will make something "legible" to the RNA that "reads" it. Thus, the correct question you should be asking is, can you differentiate between the English language, and the English language. If you can, I'm quite impressed.

We shouldn't really be saying Dembski and Gitt are wrong. It's more the case that their ideas are undemonstrated. The only people claiming to have successfully applied the concepts of Dembski and Gitt information to demonstrate the existence of a designer are Dembski and Gitt, and their approaches are not the same. You haven't even shown us that you have a way of doing this, yet. Show us the approach we should use to tell that this is gibberish: And this isn't: You also haven't successfully made the case that this is a problem for evolution, which is the topic of this thread. We've observed evolution in action, we know how it works, even quite a bit about how it works at the molecular level. If there's a designer mucking around in there he must be very, very subtle, but even if he does exist the processes of evolution are still very real and observable processes. How would proving the existence of the designer be a problem for evolution that we can see happening?Knowing that there was a designer (which would probably involve developing an understanding of how he carried out his changes) would force us to reinterpret evolutionary history with an eye toward figuring out what things evolution did and what things the designer did, but it wouldn't mean there's no such thing as evolution.--Percy

I have given you two different ways purposed to measure information content or specified complexity. You guys don’t like them and have poked holes in these arguments. I have seen no one point to a better way to measuer it.Actually it is hard to get any of you to admit that there is any difference in random information (random keystrokes) and specified complexity (like the English language).

Actually, you've also heard why. Knowing how to read English has always worked for me. But as I pointed out, this has no general application. In particular, I can't use this skill to distinguish between a DNA sequence that was designed, one that was evolved, and one that was produced by rolling four-sided dice.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

This would be explaind by Dembskis Law filter. The nature of lightning would cause it to strike somewhere. There is nothing intrinsic in DNA that causes it to code for one thing over the other. To take your analogy further you should look for lighting to repeatedly strike a corn field in a way that leaves a picture of Darwin scorched in the field. Then you would have a point.

So there is a difference but since it doesnt fit well with your theory you just leave it alone?

Well, no you haven't.A method for measuring the information content of a string involves an algorithm where you take a string as an input and get a number as an output. The difference in that particular case is that one is random keystrokes and the other is in the English language.Where do we go from here?---Incidentally, what if I wrote a program that would randomly combine English words into sentences constrained by English grammar (which I could do in a matter of minutes). Would the sentences so produced have a designer? Would they have specified complexity? Could you tell whether they had specified complexity just by looking at them, or would you have to know whether they were produced by (a) my computer program (b) an intelligent albeit Surrealist poet?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Do you mean you've *claimed* there are ways to measure specified complexity? Or do you mean you've *shown* us how to actually calculate specified complexity? If the latter then I somehow missed it, and could you cut-n-paste the technique for calculating specified complexity into your reply? Thanks!--Percy

Too funny.Guess what, we don't see the picture drawn by lightning and we don't see DNA coding for some pre-determined output either.Neat isn't it.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I have never "left alone" the difference between the English language and gobbledigook. Indeed, permit me to observe that you are verging on the latter.What you mean by my "theory" in this context is obscure. It is you who are being asked to develop a theory, or at least a coherent hypothesis.But more obscure yet is the relevance of all this to the question of design detection in DNA. How is my ability to recognize English useful in recognizing whether a certain DNA sequence was produced by design or evolution?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

What if we repeatedly (beyond explanation by chance alone) find that the points struck by lightning tend to be elevated above the rest of the local landscape? And what if we repeatedly (beyond explanation by chance alone) find that the DNA sequences prevalent in nature are those that would be favored or at least tolerated by natural selection?

Realy so mutation is no longer random? Answer carefully your entire world view hangs in the balance. So we did not know that hieroglyphics were language before finding the Rosetta stone? You guys are punishing yourselves to avoid the obvious. Language is language and code is code only because of specified complexity and nothing intrinsic in DNA would lead to this occurrence. And every known code has a code maker. This is just a fact of life.

Yes you an intellegent person could creat program that results in specified complexity. However an earth quake at the scrabble store will never write a novel.