PW: Undirected contingencies don't account for much of anything...maybe tumors.
OB: There is an entire field of evolutionary design and programming that contradicts this. You set up a few conditions that determine success and some basic starting point. You repeatedly generate a couple of thousand designs with small, random changes (random variation) and then pick out the ones the best fit the criteria (natural selection). You keep repeating this until you get the behavior you want. Among other things, I recall there was an antenna designed by this process, one that looked nothing like any previous antenna designed by humans, that worked better than a human-designed antenna.
By the way, tumors are also very sophisticated forms of life. Some have existed for generations, being passed on from animal to animal (or in the case of Hela cultures, Petri dish to Petri dish)
Not contradictory at all. You know that part "you set up a few conditions" and "You repeatedly generate" and "You keep repeating"...that's the intelligent design part.
Okay, lets throw out tumors as possible candidates and we are left with nothing.
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PW: Dembski has no desire to deny that rocks can be eroded to look like a face, but then again if you claim the faces on Mount Mushmore are merely a product of erosion, it is then he will have a problem with your claim.
OB: So would I. However, the reason is that, unlike the Man in the Mountain, Mt. Rushmore exhibits simplicity in it's design. Its faces are smooth, its lines are straight, its curves are steady. That's why it looks designed. That's why Complex Specified Information is an unworkable concept -- specifications are simplifications, thematically opposed to complexity.
Think of specified as useful patterns. The sculpted rocks of Mt. Rushmore may not have a use besides tourism, but the faces they were copied from do. We have 2 asymetric eyes on the front of our face so we can have depth perception as we move about on 2 feet.
Under your random/accidental system there is no reason to expect that the first place our eyes appeared were on the front of our faces. Why don't we have ancestors with eyes at the end of each boob or knee? or on the back of their heads? The existence of clunkers like that would really lend some credibility to your crazy *** theory.
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PW: The problem for Darwiniacs is that most, if not all, of our biological systems look like "Mount Rushmore."
OB: Mt. Rushmore has no dangling parts, jury-rigged systems, useless baggage, etc. (By contrast, the man in the Mountain does have many extraneous features). Our biological systems show all kinds of complexities, but that puts them in opposition to Mt. Rushmore.
If they had sculpted the entire bodies there would be 4 sets of dangling parts to admire.
But seriously, you seem to be implying that any existence of "flaws" in the system negates intelligent design. The only thing "flaws" negate are purity/perfection in the design/useful pattern.
You need to change that "does" to "did."
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PW: Formula (*) asserts that the information in both A and B jointly is the information in A plus the information in B that is not in A. Its point, therefore, is to spell out how much additional information B contributes to A. As such, this formula places tight constraints on the generation of new information. Does, for instance, a computer program, call it A, by outputting some data, call the data B, generate new information? Computer programs are fully deterministic, and so B is fully determined by A. It follows that P(B|A) = 1, and thus I(B|A) = 0 (the logarithm of 1 is always 0). From Formula (*) it therefore follows that I(A&B) = I(A), and therefore that the amount of information in A and B jointly is no more than the amount of information in A by itself.
Dembski's formula accounts for A & B when the two are "probablistically independent" so your book could be divided into the 1st half and the second half. There is no more information in the second half than in the first half.
OB: I take it you are responding to my point that, when you join the two copies of a book together end-to-end, the result has more information than the original book. To be clear, I agree that there is no more information in the second half of the book than in the first half. It is also true that the joining of the two copies together has more information than either half does, often significantly more.
That was an interesting conflation of a point you never made and a point I did.
Either way. If you have 2 seperate books with the same story or if there are two copies of the story in one book the formula accounts for both.
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PW: Okay, I read more thoroughly and found where Dembski addresses chance (random mutation) paired with necessity (natural selection):
Because information presupposes contingency, necessity is by definition incapable of producing information, much less complex specified information. For there to be information there must be a multiplicity of live possibilities, one of which is actualized, and the rest of which are excluded. This is contingency.
Whenever chance and necessity work together, the respective contributions of chance and necessity can be arranged sequentially. But by arranging the respective contributions of chance and necessity sequentially, it becomes clear that at no point in the sequence is CSI generated.
OB: First, I'm going to replace "CSI" with "useful information". Second, this is a reductionist fallacy. You can produce something by a sequences of steps even when no one step is responsible for producing the result. One example is the division algorithm (aka long division). Subtraction is not division, and multiplication is not division, comparing the size of two numbers is not division, but by using subtractions, multiplications, and comparison in the right order, you perform division. Similarly, by combining chance and necessity, you produce useful information, even though no individual step produces it.
That's a good replacement, making CSI very understandable.
You notice how you had to add an intelligent force into the equation ("you") in order to produce useful information. Same thing holds true for all of our biological parts/systems.
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PW: As I mentioned above the book could be divided into 2 halves as they would be "probablistically independent" in that way.
OB: I think you mean "dependent", not "independent". I agree, they are dependent. Yet, the two copies laid end-to-end still has more information.
I meant independent, and your conclusion hasn't been backed up with logic.
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PW: If that useless pile of rocks that collapsed 10 years ago was capable of disagreeing with me I could see it's significance.
OB: You don't think it looked like a man? Or do yo think that it was sculpted by human?
I don't think it was useful...even the two blobs of fat on the front of females provide endless enjoyment for males and babies alike.
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PW: I haven't read your new responses yet but I just realized that I am either being punked or you just unwittingly provided the perfect example of Complex Specified Information with intelligent causes (language) ...
Dembski uses language as an example himself so I understand it perfectly.
Intelligent causes act by making a choice. How then do we recognize that an intelligent cause has made a choice? A bottle of ink spills accidentally onto a sheet of paper; someone takes a fountain pen and writes a message on a sheet of paper. In both instances ink is applied to paper. In both instances one among an almost infinite set of possibilities is realized. In both instances a contingency is actualized and others are ruled out. Yet in one instance we infer design, in the other chance.
OB: The most common languages and alphabets were not designed. They evolved. Today we design languages that imitate the products of evolution.
That is one of the most bizarre answers I've ever seen...it is like a 50 ft. wookie.
Yes human language changed over time but it originates from an intelligence source...the human mind...are you really going to deny that humans are intelligent beings?
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PW: Human teeth have different wear patterns based on human adaption. The appendix "would have" changed if development occurred over millions of years, but the changes can already be accounted for over the span of hundreds or thousands of years, so there is no need to make huge million year leaps.
OB: There is no million-year leap, just evidence of millions of years. However, By the way, do you know you are invoking super-evolution? No evolutionist would accept the huge changes in the structure of humans had occurred in hundreds or thousands of years; that would be much too fast a time for evolution to operate to that degree on a species that had a generation every fifteen/twenty years. You downplay what evolution can do, and then invoke a much stronger version of it.
I ain't invoking "super-evolution," Sherlock. I don't even recognize the existence of your version of "evolution," so of course "super-evolution" is out of the damn question.
Let me make my point in a more understandable way.
The appendix was more useful hundreds of years ago when we weren't city dwellers.
Its usefulness diminished slightly over a short time period, not a million.
Wisdom teeth were useful as replacement teeth back when we didn't have tootpaste and toothbrushes and our teeth rotted out. They didn't need millions of years to become less and less useless. The Mormon pioneers had a use for them buggers in the 1800s. The Brits have a use for them now.
So in conclusion all your "vestigial" arguments are as useless as your stories about bears falling into the ocean and becoming whales.