Category: Informatics

The Nature of Nature — sticky

THE NATURE OF NATURE is now finally out and widely available. If you haven’t bought it yet, let me suggest Amazon.com, which is selling it for $17.94, which is an incredible deal for a 7″x10″ 1000-page book with, for most of us, no tax and no shipping charge (it costs over $10 to ship this… more

The MathGrrl files: Reestablishing what we know

MathGrrl’s friends have been discussing her recent post( here), on measuring complex specified information, which garnered 324 comments and counting.* Not being a mathie, I couldn’t follow most of the discussion here, but certain turns in the discussion reminded me of something I’d heard before: more

Freeman Dyson: ” … science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries”

In a review of a very interesting-sounding book on information systems through the ages, beginning with African drumming (James Gleick:  The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood), Freeman Dyson discusses information theory. The story of the drum language illustrates the central dogma of information theory. The central dogma says, “Meaning is irrelevant.” Information is… more

Robert Marks interviewed by Tom Woodward

Tom Woodward, author of DOUBTS ABOUT DARWIN and DARWIN STRIKES BACK, interviewed Robert J. Marks about his work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab. For the podcast, go here: “Darwin or Design?” (program starts at 5:08 | actual interview starts at 7:52) more

The Limits of Self Organisation

I’m writing to tell people about a paper of mine that was published in Synthese last month, titled:  “Self-organisation in dynamical systems: a limiting result”.  While the paper doesn’t address intelligent design as such, it indirectly establishes strict limits to what such evolutionary mechanisms as natural selection can accomplish.  In particular, it shows that physical… more

A simple statistical test for the alleged “99% genetic identity” between humans and chimps

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Typical figures published in the scientific literature for the percentage similarities between the genomes of human beings (Homo sapiens) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) range from 95% to 99%. However, in press releases intended for popular consumption, evolutionary biologists frequently claim that human and chimpanzee genomes are 99% identical. Skeptics of neo-Darwinian evolution have repeatedly punctured… more

Responding to Merlin Part III – Merlin’s Delineation Between Darwinian and non-Darwinian Mutations and How It Falls Short

This is a multi-part post in response to Merlin’s paper, “Evolutionary Chance Mutation: A Defense of the Modern Synthesis’ Consensus View”. See introduction and table of contents. Merlin spends a large part of the paper trying to establish what does and does not constitute a directed mutation. Merlin, I think, fails in her attempt to… more

Search for Search Paper Finally Out

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II, “The Search for a Search: Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search,” Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Vol.14, No.5, 2010, pp. 475-486. LINK more

Darwinism from an informatics point of view

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As everyone knows, life in all its countless instances (organisms) involves internal instructions, as well as processors that run them. Without these instructions, no organism would be able to originate in the first place, let alone develop or survive. The discovery of these instructions – contained in DNA/RNA macromolecules and the molecular machinery that reads… more

New Peer-Reviewed ID Paper — Deconstructing the Dawkins WEASEL

Winston Ewert, George Montañez, William A. Dembski, Robert J. Marks II, “Efficient Per Query Information Extraction from a Hamming Oracle,” Proceedings of the the 42nd Meeting of the Southeastern Symposium on System Theory, IEEE, University of Texas at Tyler, March 7-9, 2010, pp.290-297. Abstract: Abstract—Computer search often uses an oracle to determine the value of… more

Winston Ewert — With pro-ID grad students like this, Darwinian profs don’t stand a chance

Graduate Student Challenges Avida in Scientific Paper   Click here to listen. On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin interviews Winston Ewert, a graduate student in computer science at Baylor University who recently co-authored a paper titled, “Evolutionary Synthesis of Nand Logic: Dissecting a Digital Organism,” in Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on… more

Formulas and Forms

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In modern mathematics fractals are complex objects generated from simple formulas. Some have found also in biology forms that seem to have fractal shapes. Before the astonishing geometric shapes of fractals one might argue something like this: as the complexity of the fractal geometries arises from simple formulas, analogously the fractal biological complexity could come… more

Applied Intelligent Design, Part 1

This is the first of probably three posts on applied Intelligent Design. This is not an extensive list of applications of ID concepts, but I thought that giving people examples of how ID can be not only interesting and informative but actually useful in solving both biological and engineering problems. more

Can SETI’s algorithm detect intelligence?

TED granted Jill Tartar her wish to: “empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company”. TED and Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has set up SETIQuest.org to: . . . make vast amounts of SETI data available to the public for the first time. It will also publish… more

Deconstructing Avida

Back in 2003 NATURE (vol 423, pp 139-144) published an article by Richard Lenski, Charles Ofria, Robert Pennock, and Christoph Adami titled “The Evolutionary Origin of Complex Features.” The abstract reads: A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital… more

What is Intelligence?

In a previous UD discussion I started about incompleteness I made the following affirmation: intelligence and life are not computable. A commenter kindly asked me to provide justifications for my claim. Since at UD usually I try to separate different topics in different discussions, to be more focused and reader-friendly as possible, so here is… more

The Consummate WEASEL

Our friend and colleague Atom tha Immortal has finished up the WEASEL GUI at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (go here for the GUI). It implements every conceivable interpretation of Dawkins’s WEASEL program as outlined in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER. Thanks Atom for all your hard work! more

Jeff Shallit — leveling the charge of incompetence incompetently

Jeff Shallit charges Jonathan Wells with incompetence for claiming that duplicating a gene does not increase the available genetic information. To justify this charge, Shallit notes that a symbol string X has strictly less Kolmogorov information than the symbol string XX. Shallit, as a computational number theorist, seems stuck on a single definition of information.… more

How to become IDer in two weeks

This opportunity is dedicated to Darwinists/evolutionists or any ID denier who sincerely desire to become convinced IDer but failed the target until today. It is a great opportunity that unfortunately Darwin could not get at his times (you will understand why at the end). more

Turing machines, cells and why both are designed

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In a previous post (see here) I wrote: “necessary but not sufficient condition for a self-reproducing automaton is to be a computer”. Biological cells self-reproduce then for this reason work as computers. But “computer” is a very generic term (it means a device able to compute, calculate, process information, rules and instructions). Computer-science studies a… more

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