ppb: And the environment creates the information required for evolution to successfully locate a target how? Lots of environments lack the active information to conduct successful targeted searches.

I’m growing weary of these quibblings and thus shutting the comments off.

It appears to me that you merely asserted, without a careful analysis, that the Weasel algorithm does latch: Thus, since Dawkins does not make explicit in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER just how his algorithm works, it is natural to conclude that it is a proximity search with locking (i.e., it locks on characters in the target sequence and never lets go).

I do not see where you show, or even attempt to show, that “it doesn’t really matter.” Nor do I see where you refute, or attempt to refute, the careful analyses in that thread that showed that your assumptions were unwarranted. It may be that you don’t need to do that, if the distinction truly doesn’t matter, but where have you established that?

Squatney: I would re-read the paper. I know your side has quibbled about our characterization of Dawkins’ algorithm (which he did not clearly lay out in THE BLIND WATCHMAKER) as to whether it locks in correct characters or allows for their random alteration after they’ve been achieved. As I showed here, it doesn’t really matter.

Good catch. Dembski and Marks actually did leave the “latching” error in the article, rather than tell the associate editor that they needed to make a minor change.

The active information you measure is not introduced by Dawkins, but by you in treating the Weasel sentence as an all-or-nothing target of the evolutionary process. The fact is that many sentences have some degree of fitness in Dawkins’ example. This is intrinsic to the problem that Dawkins set up. You make Dawkins “active” by saying, in effect, that he extrinsically introduced degrees of fitness in order to make the Weasel program achieve the “real” end he had in mind. Again, this is not what he did.

A few small remarks:
- The formulas for p and q in the first few paragraphs of chapter II are strange. How is, for example, q = 1?(3117/3125)= 2.56 x 10e?3?

- Did Dawkins really use a Partitioned Search? From my limited knowledge it seems he did not. He used a evolutionary strategy that could better be discussed in your “Random Mutations” chapter. Your main point (active information is present) might still be valid of course!

- Surprisingly (for me, at least!), you seem to agree with those Darwinian biologists out there: The environment selects the fittest children of a generation and therefore provides some of the active information which is needed for evolution. So, at which point enters the I-Designer the equation? When designing the environment?