Part of the series on Creationism

History of creationism Creation in Genesis Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection. ... Irreducible complexity is a controversial concept which considers that the generally accepted scientific theory that life evolved through biological evolution by natural selection alone is incomplete and flawed and that some additional mechanism is required to explain the origins of life. ... The term fine-tuned universe refers to a collection of ideas that state the existence of life in the Universe is the result of the universes physical constants being created in a specific manner that is hospitable for life. ... An intelligent designer is the entity or entities that the intelligent design movement argue had some role in the origin and/or development of life and who supposedly has left scientific evidence of this intelligent design — an idea that is a pseudoscientific assertion. ... The Intelligent Design movement, which began in the early 1990s, is an organized campaign promoting a Neo-Creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. ... The Discovery Institute is a conservative Christian think tank, structured as a non-profit educational foundation, founded in 1990 and based in Seattle, Washington, USA. Its areas of interest, social and political action include intelligent design, public school education, and transportation and bi-national cooperation in the international Cascadia region. ... The Center for Science and Culture (CSC), formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC), is part of the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank in the United States. ... The Wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, an organization that works to promote a Neo-Creationist religious agenda centering around intelligent design, and hub of the intelligent design movement. ... Teach the Controversy is a controversial political-action campaign promoted by the intelligent design movement originating from the Discovery Institute that seeks to advance an education policy for US public schools that introduces intelligent design to public-school science curricula and seeks to redefine science to allow for creationist explanations... The intelligent design movement has conducted a far-reaching organized campaign largely in the United States that promotes a Neo-Creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design. ... The introduction of this article does not provide enough context for readers unfamiliar with the subject. ... This article is about the Abrahamic belief; creationism can also refer to origin beliefs in general or, centuries earlier, to an alternative to traducianism. ... Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... The history of creationism is tied to the history of religions. ... Creation according to Genesis refers to the description of the creation of the heavens and the earth by God, as described in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. ...

Types of creationism: Young Earth creationism - Creation science Old Earth creationism Omphalos creationism Theistic evolution Neo-Creationism Islamic creationism Intelligent design - Intelligent design movement Modern geocentrism Created in Gods image, complete with navel. ... Creation science is a part of the creationist movement that claims to offer scientific evidence compatible with creation according to Genesis. ... Old Earth creationism is a variant of the creationist view of the origin of the universe and life on Earth. ... The omphalos hypothesis was named after the title of an 1857 book by Philip Henry Gosse in which he argued that in order for the world to be functional, God must have created the Earth with mountains, canyons, trees with growth rings, Adam and Eve with hair, fingernails, and navels... Theistic evolution, or the less common term, Evolutionary Creationism, is the general belief that some or all classical religious teachings about God and creation are compatible with some or all of the scientific theory of evolution. ... Neo-Creationism is a movement whose goal is to restate creationism in terms more likely to be well-received by the public, policy makers, educators, and the scientific community. ... Islamic creationism – While contemporary Islam tends to take religious texts very literally, it sees Genesis as a corrupted version of Gods message. ... Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection. ... The Intelligent Design movement, which began in the early 1990s, is an organized campaign promoting a Neo-Creationist religious agenda calling for broad social, academic and political changes centering around intelligent design in the public sphere, primarily in the United States. ... The term modern geocentrism refers to a belief currently held by certain groups that the Earth is the center of the universe and does not move. ...

Controversy: Creation vs. evolution ... in public education Associated articles Teach the Controversy The creation-evolution controversy (also termed the creation vs. ... The legal status of creation and evolution in public education is the subject of a great deal of debate in legal, political and religious circles, mainly in the United States. ... The following is a clearinghouse of articles which refer to terms often used in the context of the creation-evolution controversy: // Origins Main article: Origin beliefs The creation-evolution controversy often is cast as a controversy surrounding the origin beliefs. ... Teach the Controversy is a controversial political-action campaign promoted by the intelligent design movement originating from the Discovery Institute that seeks to advance an education policy for US public schools that introduces intelligent design to public-school science curricula and seeks to redefine science to allow for creationist explanations...

Specified complexity is a concept developed by intelligent design proponent William Dembski. The concept is intended to formalize a property that singles out patterns that are both specified and complex. Dembski claims that specified complexity is a reliable marker of design by an intelligent agent, a central tenet to intelligent design and which Dembski argues for in opposition to modern evolutionary theory. Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection. ... William Dembski Dr William Albert Bill Dembski (born July 18, 1960) is an American mathematician, philosopher and theologian known for advocating the controversial idea of intelligent design. ... Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection. ... A phylogenetic tree of all living things, based on rRNA gene data, showing the separation of the three domains, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, as described initially by Carl Woese. ...

In Dembski's terminology, a specified pattern is one that admits short descriptions, whereas a complex pattern is one that is unlikely to occur by chance. Dembski argues that it is impossible for specified complexity to exist in patterns displayed by configurations formed by unguided processes. Therefore, Dembski argues, the fact that specified complex patterns can be found in living things indicates some kind of guidance in their formation, which is indicative of intelligence. Dembski further argues that one can rigorously show by applying so-called no free lunch theorems the inability of evolutionary algorithms to select or generate configurations of high specified complexity. Specified complexity is also referred to by Dembski as "complex specified information" (CSI). It has been suggested that No-free-lunch theorem be merged into this article or section. ...

In intelligent design literature, an intelligent agent is one that chooses between different possibilities and has, by means and methods not identified, caused life to arise. Specified complexity is what Dembski terms an "explanatory filter" which can recognize "design" by detecting complex specified information. The filter is based on the premise that the categories of regularity, chance, and design are, according to Dembski "mutually exclusive and exhaustive." Complex specified information detects design because it detects what characterizes intelligent agency; it detects the actualization of one among many competing possibilities. An intelligent designer is the entity or entities that the intelligent design movement argue had some role in the origin and/or development of life and who supposedly has left scientific evidence of this intelligent design — an idea that is a pseudoscientific assertion. ...

The concept of specified complexity and related work is widely regarded as unsound^{[1][2] [3]}. One study states "Dembski's work is riddled with inconsistencies, equivocation, flawed use of mathematics, poor scholarship, and misrepresentation of others' results." ^[4]. Another objection concerns Dembski's calculation of probabilities. According to Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and evolutionary biology "We cannot calculate the probability that an eye came about. We don't have the information to make the calculation"^[5]. Critics also reject applying specified complexity to infer design as an argument from ignorance. A German eye doctor and amateur mathematician, Dr. Martin Nowak of Michelfeld, Germany discovered the worlds largest prime number after a 50-day search using his personal computer. ... The argument from ignorance, also known as argumentum ad ignorantiam or argument by lack of imagination, is the assertion that if something is currently inexplicable to some people, then it did not (or could not) happen, or that if evidence of something has not been scientifically proven to their satisfaction...

Definition

Orgel's original use

The term "specified complexity" was originally coined by origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel to denote what distinguishes living things from non-living things: Pre-Cambrian stromatolites in the Siyeh Formation, Glacier National Park. ... Leslie Eleazer Orgel (born Jan 12, 1927 in London) is a Chemist. ...

"In brief, living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well-specified structures, because they consist of a very large number of identical molecules packed together in a uniform way. Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures that are complex but not specified. The crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; the mixtures of polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity."^[6]

The term was later employed by physicist Paul Davies in a similar manner. Paul Charles William Davies (born April 22, 1946) is a British-born, internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, who holds the position of Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney. ...

Dembski's definition

For Dembski, specified complexity is a property which can be observed in living things. However, whereas Orgel used the term for that which, in Darwinian theory, is supposed to be created through (undirected) evolution, Dembski uses it for that which, per his own theory, cannot be created through undirected evolution—and concludes that it allows one to infer intelligent design. While Orgel employed the concept in a qualitative way, Dembski's use is intended to be quantitative. Dembski's use of the concept dates to his 1998 monograph The Design Inference. Specified complexity is fundamental to his approach to intelligent design, and each of his subsequent books has also dealt significantly with the concept. He has stated that, in his opinion, "if there is a way to detect design, specified complexity is it."^[7] The books cover The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities is a controversial 1998 book by the American mathematician, philosopher and theologian William Dembski. ...

Dembski asserts that specified complexity is present in a configuration when it can be described by a pattern that displays a large amount of specified information and is also complex, which he defines as having a low probability of occurrence. He provides the following examples to demonstrate the concept: "A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified." ^[8]

In his earlier papers Dembski defined complex specified information (CSI) as being present in a specified event whose probability did not exceed 1 in 10¹⁵⁰, which he calls the universal probability bound. In that context, "specified" meant what in later work he called "pre-specified", that is specified before any information about the outcome is known. The value of the universal probability bound corresponds to the inverse of the upper limit of "the total number of [possible] specified events throughout cosmic history," as calculated by Dembski. ^[9] Anything below this bound has CSI. The terms "specified complexity" and "complex specified information" are used interchangeably. In more recent papers Dembski has redefined the universal probability bound, with reference to another number, corresponding to the total number of bit operations that could possibly have been performed in the entire history of universe. A universal probability bound is a value, in the form of a probability, intended to be used to gauge whether it is likely that a given event could have occurred by chance, given all the opportunities for events to occur, by any means, in the history of the universe. ...

Dembski asserts that CSI exists in numerous features of living things, such as DNA and other functional biological molecules, and argues that it cannot be generated by the only known natural mechanisms of physical law and chance, or by their combination. He argues that this is so because laws can only shift around or lose information, but do not produce it, and chance can produce complex unspecified information, or unspecified complex information, but not CSI; he provides a mathematical analysis that he claims demonstrates that law and chance working together cannot generate CSI, either. Moreover, he claims that CSI is holistic, with the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, and that this decisively eliminates Darwinian evolution as a possible means of its creation. Dembski maintains that by process of elimination, CSI is best explained as being due to intelligence, and is therefore a reliable indicator of design. A physical law or a law of nature is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations. ... Chance can be used in any of the following contexts: Probability Luck Randomness Chance is also a 2002 film starring Amber Benson. ... Holism (from holos, a Greek word meaning whole) is the idea that the properties of a system cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its components alone. ... Intelligence is usually said to involve mental capabilities such as the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. ... Usually considered in the context of the applied arts, engineering, architecture, and other such creative endeavours, design is used as both a noun and a verb. ...

Law of conservation of information

Dembski formulates and proposes a law of conservation of information as follows:

"This strong proscriptive claim, that natural causes can only transmit CSI but never originate it, I call the Law of Conservation of Information.

Immediate corollaries of the proposed law are the following:

1. The specified complexity in a closed system of natural causes remains constant or decreases.
2. The specified complexity cannot be generated spontaneously, originate endogenously or organize itself (as these terms are used in origins-of-life research).
3. The specified complexity in a closed system of natural causes either has been in the system eternally or was at some point added exogenously (implying that the system, though now closed, was not always closed).
4. In particular any closed system of natural causes that is also of finite duration received whatever specified complexity it contains before it became a closed system." ^[10]

The paper^[11] carefully analyzes Dembski's "Law of Conservation of Information". In it the author concludes "that the Law of Conservation of Information is mathematically unsubstantiated."

Dembski notes that the term "Law of Conservation of Information" was previously used by Peter Medawar in his book The Limits of Science (1984) "to describe the weaker claim that deterministic laws cannot produce novel information."^[12] The actual validity and utility of Dembski's proposed law are uncertain; it is neither widely used by the scientific community nor cited in mainstream scientific literature. Sir Peter Brian Medawar (February 28, 1915-October 2, 1987) was a Brazilian-born English scientist best known for his work on how the immune system rejects or accepts organ transplants. ...

Specificity

In a more recent paper^[13], Dembski provides an account which he claims is simpler and adheres more closely to the theory of statistical hypothesis testing as formulated by Ronald Fisher. In general terms, Dembski proposes to view design inference as a statistical test to reject a chance hypothesis P on a space of outcomes Ω. One may be faced with the problem of making a definite decision with respect to an uncertain hypothesis which is known only through its observable consequences. ... Sir Ronald Fisher Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British eugenicist, evolutionary biologist, geneticist and statistician. ...

Dembski's proposed test is based on the Kolmogorov complexity of a pattern T that is exhibited by an event E that has occurred. Mathematically, E is a subset of Ω, the pattern T specifies a set of outcomes in Ω and E is a subset of T. Quoting Dembski (loc. cit. p 16) In computer science, the Kolmogorov complexity (also known as descriptive complexity, Kolmogorov-Chaitin complexity, stochastic complexity, algorithmic entropy, or program-size complexity) of an object such as a piece of text is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object. ...

"Thus, the event E might be a die toss that lands six and T might be the composite event consisting of all die tosses that land on an even face."

Kolmogorov complexity provides a measure of the computational resources needed to specify a pattern (such as a DNA sequence or a sequence of alphabetic characters)^[14]. Given a pattern T, other patterns may have Kolmogorov complexity no larger than that of T. The number of such patterns is denoted by φ(T). The number φ(T) thus provides a ranking of patterns from the simplest to the most complex. For example, for a pattern T which describes the bacterial flagellum, Dembski claims to obtain the upper bound φ(T) ≤ 10²⁰. A flagellum (plural, flagella) is a whip-like organelle that many unicellular organisms, and some multicellular ones, use to move about. ...

Dembski defines specified complexity of the pattern T under the chance hypothesis P as

where P(T) is the probability of observing the pattern T, R is the number of "replicational resources" available "to witnessing agents". R corresponds roughly to repeated attempts to create and discern a pattern. Dembski then asserts that R can be bounded by 10¹²⁰. This number is supposedly justified by a result of Seth Lloyd^[15] in which he determines that the number of elementary logic operations that can have performed in the universe over its entire history cannot exceed 10¹²⁰ operations on 10⁹⁰ bits.

Dembski's main claim is that the following test can be used to infer design for a configuration: There is a target pattern T that applies to the configuration and whose specified complexity exceeds 1. This condition can be restated as the inequality

Dembski's explanation of specified complexity

Dembski's expression σ is unrelated to any known concept in information theory, though he claims he can justify its relevance as follows: An intelligent agent S witnesses an event E and assigns it to some reference class of events Ω and within this reference class considers it as satisfying a specification T. Now consider the quantity φ(T) × P(T) (where P is the "chance" hypothesis):

Possible targets with complexity ranking and probability not exceeding those of attained target T. Probability of set-theoretic union does not exceed φ(T) × P(T)

"Think of S as trying to determine whether an archer, who has just shot an arrow at a large wall, happened to hit a tiny target on that wall by chance. The arrow, let us say, is indeed sticking squarely in this tiny target. The problem, however, is that there are lots of other tiny targets on the wall. Once all those other targets are factored in, is it still unlikely that the archer could have hit any of them by chance?"

"In addition, we need to factor in what I call the replicational resources associated with T, that is, all the opportunities to bring about an event of T's descriptive complexity and improbability by multiple agents witnessing multiple events."

According to Dembski, the number of such "replicational resources" can be bounded by "the maximal number of bit operations that the known, observable universe could have performed throughout its entire multi-billion year history", which according to Lloyd is 10¹²⁰. In set theory and other branches of mathematics, the union of a collection of sets is the set that contains everything that belongs to any of the sets, but nothing else. ...

However, according to Ellsberry and Shallit^[16], "[specified complexity] has not been defined formally in any reputable peer-reviewed mathematical journal, nor (to the best of our knowledge) adopted by any researcher in information theory."

Calculation of specified complexity

Thus far, Dembski has made only one attempt at calculating the specified complexity for a naturally occurring biological structure—the bacterial flagellum of E. coli—in his book, No Free Lunch. This structure can be described by the pattern "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller". Dembski estimates that there are at most 10²⁰ patterns described by four basic concepts or fewer, and so his test for design will apply if A flagellum (plural, flagella) is a whip-like organelle that many unicellular organisms, and some multicellular ones, use to move about. ... Binomial name Escherichia coli T. Escherich, 1885 Escherichia coli (usually abbreviated to E. coli) is one of the main species of bacteria that live in the lower intestines of warm-blooded animals (including birds and mammals) and are necessary for the proper digestion of food. ...

However, Dembski says that the precise calculation of the relevant probability "has yet to be done", although he also claims that some methods for calculating these probabilities "are now in place".

These methods assume that all of the constituent parts of the flagellum must have been generated completely at random, a scenario that biologists do not seriously consider. He justifies this approach by appealing to Michael Behe's concept of "irreducible complexity" (IC), which leads him to assume that the flagellum could not come about by any gradual or step-wise process. The validity of Dembski's particular calculation is thus wholly dependent on Behe's IC concept, and therefore susceptible to its criticisms, of which there are many. Michael Behe Michael J. Behe (born 1952) is a American biochemist and intelligent design advocate. ... Irreducible complexity is a controversial concept which considers that the generally accepted scientific theory that life evolved through biological evolution by natural selection alone is incomplete and flawed and that some additional mechanism is required to explain the origins of life. ...

To arrive at the ranking upper bound of 10²⁰ patterns, Dembski considers a specification pattern for the flagellum defined by the (natural language) predicate "bidirectional rotary motor-driven propeller", which he regards as being determined by four independently chosen basic concepts. He furthermore assumes that English has the capability to express at most 10⁵ basic concepts (an upper bound on the size of a dictionary). Dembski then claims that we can obtain the rough upper bound of

for the set of patterns described by four basic concepts or fewer.

From the standpoint of Kolmogorov complexity theory, this calculation is problematic. Quoting Ellsberry and Shallit [loc. cit p 24] "Natural language specification without restriction, as Dembski tacitly permits, seems problematic. For one thing, it results in the Berry paradox". These authors add: "We have no objection to natural language specifications per se, provided there is some evident way to translate them to Dembski's formal framework. But what, precisely, is the space of events Ω here?" The Berry paradox is the apparent contradiction that arises from expressions such as the following: The smallest positive integer not nameable in under eleven words. ...

Criticisms

The soundness of Dembski's concept of specified complexity and the validity of arguments based on this concept are widely disputed. A frequent criticism (see Elsberry and Shallit) is that Dembski has used the terms "complexity", "information" and "improbability" interchangeably. These numbers measure properties of things of different types: Complexity measures how hard it is to describe an object (such as a bitstring), information measures how random a probability distribution is and improbability measures how unlikely an event is given a probability distribution.

When Dembski's mathematical claims on specific complexity are interpreted to make them meaningful and conform to minimal standards of mathematical usage, they usually turn out to be false. Dembski often sidesteps these criticisms by responding that he is not "in the business of offering a strict mathematical proof for the inability of material mechanisms to generate specified complexity"^[17]. Yet on page 150 of No Free Lunch he claims he can prove his thesis mathematically: "In this section I will present an in-principle mathematical argument for why natural causes are incapable of generating complex specified information." Others have pointed out that a crucial calculation on page 297 of No Free Lunch is off by a factor of approximately 10^65[18]. In mathematics, a proof is a demonstration that, given certain axioms, some statement of interest is necessarily true. ...

Dembski's calculations show how a simple smooth function (such as y = x²) cannot gain information, he therefore concludes that there must be a designer to obtain CSI. However, natural selection has a branching mapping from one to many (replication) followed by pruning mapping of the many back down to a few (selection). These increasing and reductional mappings were not modeled by Dembski. In other words, Dembski's calculations do not model birth and death. This basic flaw in his modeling renders all of Dembski's subsequent calculations and reasoning in No Free Lunch irrelevant because his basic model does not reflect reality. Since the basis of No Free Lunch relies on this flawed argument, the entire thesis of the book collapses^[19].

According to Martin Nowak, a Harvard professor of mathematics and evolutionary biology "We cannot calculate the probability that an eye came about. We don't have the information to make the calculation"^[20].

Dembski's critics note that specified complexity, as originally defined by Leslie Orgel, is precisely what Darwinian evolution is supposed to create. Critics maintain that Dembski uses "complex" as most people would use "absurdly improbable". They also claim that his argument is a tautology: CSI cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus. They argue that to successfully demonstrate the existence of CSI, it would be necessary to show that some biological feature undoubtedly has an extremely low probability of occurring by any natural means whatsoever, something which Dembski and others have almost never attempted to do. Such calculations depend on the accurate assessment of numerous contributing probabilities, the determination of which is often necessarily subjective. Hence, CSI can at most provide a "very high probably", but not absolute certainty. In logic, a tautology is a statement which is true by its own definition. ...

Another criticism refers to the problem of "arbitrary but specific outcomes". For example, it is unlikely that any given person will win a lottery, but, eventually, a lottery will have a winner; to argue that it is very unlikely that any one player would win is not the same as proving that there is the same chance that no one will win. Similarly, it has been argued that "a space of possibilities is merely being explored, and we, as pattern-seeking animals, are merely imposing patterns, and therefore targets, after the fact."^[21] Critics also note that there is much redundant information in the genome, which makes its content much lower than the number of base pairs used.

Apart from such theoretical considerations, critics cite reports of evidence of the kind of evolutionary "spontanteous generation" that Dembski claims is too improbable to occur naturally. For example, in 1982, B.G. Hall claimed to have demonstrated that after removing a gene that allows sugar digestion in certain bacteria, those bacteria, when grown in media rich in sugar, rapidly evolve new sugar-digesting enzymes to replace those removed.^[22]

References

1. ^  Rich Baldwin, (2005). Information Theory and Creationism
2. ^  Mark Perakh, (2005). Dembski "displaces Darwinism" mathematically -- or does he?
3. ^ Jason Rosenhouse, (2001). How Anti-Evolutionists Abuse Mathematics The Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 23, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 3-8.
4. ^  Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit, (2003). Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information”
5. ^  Martin Nowak (2005). Time Magazine, 15 August 2005, page 32
6. ^  Leslie Orgel (1973). The Origins of Life, p. 189.
7. ^  William A. Dembski (2002). No Free Lunch, p. 19.
8. ^  William A. Dembski (1999). Intelligent Design, p. 47.
9. ^  William A. Dembski (2004). The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design, p. 85.
10. ^  William A. Dembski (1998) Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information.
11. ^  Erik (2002). On Dembski's law of conservation of information
12. ^  "Searching Large Spaces: Displacement and the No Free Lunch Regress (356k PDF)", pp. 15-16, describing an argument made by Michael Shermer in How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, 2nd ed. (2003).
13. ^  William A. Dembski (2005). Specification: The Pattern that Signifies intelligence
14. ^  Michael Sipser (1997). Introduction to the Theory of Computation, PWS Publishing Company.
15. ^  Seth Lloyd (2002), Computational capacity of the universe, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88(23):790 1- 4. See also arXiv:quant/ph0110141.
16. ^  Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit, (2003). Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information” page 14.
17. ^  William A. Dembski, (2002). If Only Darwinists Scrutinized Their Own Work as Closely: A Response to "Erik".
18. ^  Jeffrey Shallit (2002) A review of Dembski's No Free Lunch
19. ^  Thomas D. Schneider. (2002) Dissecting Dembski's "Complex Specified Information"
20. ^  Martin Nowak (2005). Time Magazine, 15 August 2005, page 32
21. ^  William A. Dembski (1998) Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information.
22. ^ B.G. Hall (1982). "Evolution of a regulated operon in the laboratory", Genetics (journal), 101(3-4):335-44. In PubMed.

The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design is a non-fiction book written by William A. Dembski in 2004 to clarify a number of issues regarding Intelligent Design. ... Michael Shermer (born 1954) is a science writer, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. ... Seth Lloyd is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research area is the interplay of information with complex systems, especially quantum systems. ... Genetics is a monthly scientific journal publishing investigations bearing on heredity and variation. ...

See also

• Intelligent design
• Evolution
• Arguments for the existence of God

Intelligent design (ID) is the concept that certain features of the universe and of living things exhibit the characteristics of a product resulting from an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to an unguided process such as natural selection. ... A phylogenetic tree of all living things, based on rRNA gene data, showing the separation of the three domains, bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes, as described initially by Carl Woese. ... Many arguments for the existence of God have been made over the years. ...

External links

• Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates - A critique of William Dembski's book No Free Lunch by Richard Wein, from TalkOrigins
• Information Theory and Creationism William Dembski by Rich Baldwin, from Information Theory and Creationism, compiled by Ian Musgrave and Rich Baldwin
• Critique of No Free Lunch by H. Allen Orr from the Boston Review
• Dissecting Dembski's "Complex Specified Information" by Dr. Thomas D. Schneider.