It has quite a bit to do with the way sexual reproduction works.

You may want to read about it.

Sexual selection is another big player that keeps mutants in check.

Do you have a reference that isn’t the same Sermonti quote you used before?

What we want from the Darwinists is not an explanation, but a probability calculation. All you need to do is provide us with a computer model showing that the likelihood of a structure such as a ribosome (or for that matter, a protein) arising in a realistic simulation of the prebiotic earth, through unguided processes (I don’t care what they are, so long as no intervention by human agents is required during the execution of the program) exceeds Dembski’s probability bound. If you can’t, then I’ll turn my attention to the only process I know that can produce such structures: intelligent agency – presumably involving an agent who is a lot more intelligent than myself.

The only intelligent agent for which we have any evidence, namely ourselves, did not, as far as we know, design those biological structures which ID proponents allege were designed. Moreover, some of those structures, even from the viewpoint of what is presumably inferior human design, are judged to have been poorly designed. They look more like something that was cobbled together by some process of ad hoc adaptation than being the product of carefully-optimized design. While there are some features that do not look half bad, the overall impression of biological ‘design’ is that it is something of a curate’s egg.

As for the lack of a probability calculation, you have to ask yourself which is more valuable to science: an estimation of odds of something happening or hard evidence that it happened? Would calculating the likelihood of finding the Tiktaalik fossils have been more useful than actually finding them or more useful even than the theory which predicted where to find them?

In other words, both ID proponents and Darwinists are being held to the same standard: calculate the probabilities, please. Do the math. Only if ID proponents can rigorously demonstrate that the complex structures exhibiting “specified complexity” do indeed fall below Dembski’s probability bound are they entitled to “claim” them as products of intelligent agency. I believe that Dr. Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” represents a major advance in this regard – for he has clearly done his homework, and he has come up with some hard numbers.

I suspect you do not realise just how clearly this reveals the weakness of Intelligent Design’s claims. Let us suppose a statistician in the late nineteenth century had calculated the probability of an obscure German theoretical physicist working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern devising a revolutionary theory which would overturn Newtonian mechanics. Which would have had a greater influence on the progress of physics, those odds or the observations of Eddington and others which confirmed the predictive and, hence, descriptive power of that physicist’s theory? This is not to diminish the importance and power of mathematics but hard evidence is going to trump the odds every time.

Of course, proponents of Intelligent Design are bound to stress probability calculations because when it comes right down to it, that is pretty much all they have. The Argument from Design, the Explanatory Filter, irreducible complexity and CSI are all basically claims about probability. There is nothing else. Set that against, for example, Tiktaalik, the peppered moth, nylonase and antibiotic-resistant bacteria and you can see the force behind the saying “Them that count, do. Them that don’t, count.”

Thank you for your post. You ask:

Why would explaining the configuration of a material medium not also explain the information entailed by that configuration?

If by “configuration” you mean shape and sequence, then I agree it would. But explaining the configuration, in this sense, is a formal explanation.

Aside from that, my point is simply that for proteins, the configuration appears to be fantastically improbable.

By the way, I have since learned that John Wilkins (whose paper I cited above) is an Assistant Professor at Bond University. His online paper (which addresses the explanatory power of the term “information,” when applied to biological structures, but not the probability of life arising by undirected processes) is still in a draft stage, and I am sure that the finished version will be very interesting to read.

If you want to transform the information content of a piece of paper without changing its mass,

I have no doubt that we can change the information content of something without changing its mass. (Although in some cases, information is stored by adding mass to or subtracting mass from the medium. According to Meyer’s computer disk logic, it would seem that information has positive or negative mass in these cases. But that’s all beside the point.)

The fact that information is massless and immaterial does not make it abstract. It simply means that information is formal. Information does not need to exist in some shadowy Platonic realm. Just think of the old distinction between shape and stuff.

Hope that helps.

It does. But to be clear, I’m simply repeating arguments I’ve heard from the ID side (quotes available on request). And although Meyer doesn’t use the word “abstract”, he does argue that material causes cannot explain the origin of information because information is immaterial. So the question remains: Why would explaining the configuration of a material medium not also explain the information entailed by that configuration?

That is what all observations and experiments support.

A couple of citations would not go amiss then. Can you be so kind?

It has quite a bit to do with the way sexual reproduction works.

You may want to read about it.

Sexual selection is another big player that keeps mutants in check.

Referenes? Or have you made a blog post yourself previously about this?

I do not know why it wouldn’t.

What’s the difference between FSCI and CSI then? Can you give me an example of a couple of situations where one would be used rather then the other?

If these tools (EF, CSI, FSCI) do what you claim then examples like I ask for should be close at hand, no?

However in the absence of design or special creation that is basically all that is left.

What’s the difference between design and special creation?

Why’s that then?

That is what all observations and experiments support.

It has quite a bit to do with the way sexual reproduction works.

You may want to read about it.

Sexual selection is another big player that keeps mutants in check.

Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter.

Does that also apply to FSCI and CSI?

I do not know why it wouldn’t.

Joseph, your position that everything comes down to sheer dumb luck is totally vacuous.

That is not my position.

However in the absence of design or special creation that is basically all that is left.

So please provide evidence for your position or stop making the claim (ideally!).

Sex, the mechanism that put and end to Common Descent.

Why’s that then?

Information is neither a physical nor a chemical principle like energy and matter

Does that also apply to FSCI and CSI?