Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s “Complex Specified Information”
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/eandsdembski.pdf
What if purpose, intelligence, and design are words we assign to emergent properties of complex systems? Evidence points to the fact that intelligence cannot emerge from pure matter, since both are essentially different.
But in fact the only chance hypothesis that Dembski considers is that Caputo’s selections
arose by the flipping of a fair coin. He does not consider other possibilities, such as
(a) Caputo really had no choice in the assignment, since a mobster held a gun to his head on all but one occasion. (On that one occasion the mobster was out of town.)
That would be physical necessity. Applied to biology, if physical necessity were the case, we would only observe planets in the universe producing life. Since that is not the case, we can exclude this hypothesis.
(b) Caputo, although he appears capable of making choices, is actually the victim of a severe brain disease that renders him incapable of writing the word “Republican”. On one occasion his disease was in remission.
If he were capable of making choices, if falls to the category of design.
(c) Caputo was molested by a Republican at an early age, and the resulting trauma has caused a pathological hatred of Republicans. He therefore tends to favor Democrats, but on one occasion a Republican bought him a beer immediately prior to the ballot assignment.
If he were capable of making choices, if falls to the category of design.
(d) Caputo attempted to make his choices randomly, using the flip of a fair coin, but unknown to him, on all but one occasion he accidently used a two-headed trick coin from his son’s magic chest. Furthermore, he was too dull-witted to remember assignments from previous ballots.
In that case, not chance, but physical necessity was in play. Chance can only act on variation.
(e) Caputo himself is the product of a 3.8-billion-year-old evolutionary history involving both natural law and chance. The structure of Caputo’s neural network has been shaped by both this history and his environment since conception. Evolution has shaped humans to act in a way to increase their relative reproductive success, and one evolved strategy to increase this success is seeking and maintaining social status. Caputo’s status depended on his respect from other Democrats, and his neural network, with its limited look-ahead capabilities, evaluated a fitness function that resulted in the strategy of placing Democrats first in order to maximize this status.
That would fall into the category of chance acting upon mutations, which permit natural selection. But evolution can only act upon functional self replicating cells, which could not emerge through evolution, since evolution depends on dna replication to act.
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/eandsdembski.pdf
What if purpose, intelligence, and design are words we assign to emergent properties of complex systems? Evidence points to the fact that intelligence cannot emerge from pure matter, since both are essentially different.
But in fact the only chance hypothesis that Dembski considers is that Caputo’s selections
arose by the flipping of a fair coin. He does not consider other possibilities, such as
(a) Caputo really had no choice in the assignment, since a mobster held a gun to his head on all but one occasion. (On that one occasion the mobster was out of town.)
That would be physical necessity. Applied to biology, if physical necessity were the case, we would only observe planets in the universe producing life. Since that is not the case, we can exclude this hypothesis.
(b) Caputo, although he appears capable of making choices, is actually the victim of a severe brain disease that renders him incapable of writing the word “Republican”. On one occasion his disease was in remission.
If he were capable of making choices, if falls to the category of design.
(c) Caputo was molested by a Republican at an early age, and the resulting trauma has caused a pathological hatred of Republicans. He therefore tends to favor Democrats, but on one occasion a Republican bought him a beer immediately prior to the ballot assignment.
If he were capable of making choices, if falls to the category of design.
(d) Caputo attempted to make his choices randomly, using the flip of a fair coin, but unknown to him, on all but one occasion he accidently used a two-headed trick coin from his son’s magic chest. Furthermore, he was too dull-witted to remember assignments from previous ballots.
In that case, not chance, but physical necessity was in play. Chance can only act on variation.
(e) Caputo himself is the product of a 3.8-billion-year-old evolutionary history involving both natural law and chance. The structure of Caputo’s neural network has been shaped by both this history and his environment since conception. Evolution has shaped humans to act in a way to increase their relative reproductive success, and one evolved strategy to increase this success is seeking and maintaining social status. Caputo’s status depended on his respect from other Democrats, and his neural network, with its limited look-ahead capabilities, evaluated a fitness function that resulted in the strategy of placing Democrats first in order to maximize this status.
That would fall into the category of chance acting upon mutations, which permit natural selection. But evolution can only act upon functional self replicating cells, which could not emerge through evolution, since evolution depends on dna replication to act.
