I promise to read NFL chapter 5 (revised)if you read this article:

http://www.talkreason.org/articles/jello.cfm

I am unaware that the criticisms therein have yet been addressed. And I second your request to TomG.

“I would like to know if the explanatory filter has been successfully applied to a biological system.

Who is defining success here? ID theorists are saying yes–and they’re inviting others to work the same question, asking only that they have an open mind to what they may find. Ask anyone at Panda’s Thumb, and you’ll get a quick knee-jerk “no.” As Donald M said so well in comment # 27,

“One trend I’ve noticed among Darwinists is that they are never satisfied with any response and continually whine that “so and so has never answered his/her critics.” What that charge boils down to is that responses did not meet the unspoken expectations of the critics or that they didn’t like the answer they got.”

Well, where do you start? What aspect of a biological system do you consider? Keeping with the prokaryote flagellum, do you consider its structure in terms of the types and number of proteins from which it is constructed, how it develops in the daughter cell after cell division, does the genetic encoding for its structure enter the equation? What about its functionality, the energy input for the “motor”? Defining the boundary of the (biological) system you propose to analyse doesn’t seem that straightforward to me.

I never made a secret of the fact. I made the fact known myself. I am pleasantly surprised that I am still permitted to post here. This refutes the allegation that Dr Dembski censors all criticism.

Apparently they can deny that “Darwinism” can be defined as Darwinism and deny that a distinction between “macroevolution” and micro even exists. In fact, it is rather amusing that some Darwinists are condemning the very definitiion of using the terms macro and micro as something that only ignorant Creationists would do. Yet these terms are used in the writings of Darwinists themselves.

I think I’ll stick with “Darwinists”…although given the urge to merge typical to Darwinists they will probably keep trying to definition in some way. Another example of such avoidance is the reliance on a pollution of language like the blurred term “evolution” which merges all mythological narratives of Naturalism in with basic facts like, “When some organisms die then there may be more of these other ones and stuff.”

The flagellum does not arise from bacterial populations lacking one via any known deterministic law; the flagellum has extremely small probability of arising due to chance (see chapter 5 of No Free Lunch); the bacterial flagellum is specified (conforms to a pattern detachable from the object itself); hence, it exhibits specified complexity and induction tells us it was designed.

However, that is a criticism I have heard, and I don’t know where Dembski has formally analyzed the flagellum according to the EF, so I guess the criticism is valid. It mirrors my own criticism of Dembski in that he doesn’t provide the baby-stepped analysis and application of IC or the EF to any biological structure. But the astute reader might do such an analysis himself.