Separating this from the Boston Marathon bombing thread
Is invoking Darwin's name, or some supposed similarity between Darwin and Dembski, supposed to be meaningful?
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)
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.
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.
No, there are better arguments to make in this particular case.
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.
Why do you think the lack of a final step, or truly distinct steps, makes the theory untestable?
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.
I think you mean "dependent", not "independent". I agree, they are dependent. Yet, the two copies laid end-to-end still has more information.
You don't think it looked like a man? Or do yo think that it was sculpted by human?
The most common languages and alphabets were not designed. They evolved. Today we design languages that imitate the products of evolution.
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.
Saying humans are "ape-like" is like saying house cats are "feline-like" and dogs are "canine-like". House cats are felines, dogs are canines, humans are apes. There is no evolutionary "ape-like ancestor", there is a common ancestry between humans and other apes, closer than the ancestry between any human and any non-ape, an ape ancestry.
Is invoking Darwin's name, or some supposed similarity between Darwin and Dembski, supposed to be meaningful?
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)
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.
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.
No, there are better arguments to make in this particular case.
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.
Why do you think the lack of a final step, or truly distinct steps, makes the theory untestable?
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.
I think you mean "dependent", not "independent". I agree, they are dependent. Yet, the two copies laid end-to-end still has more information.
You don't think it looked like a man? Or do yo think that it was sculpted by human?
The most common languages and alphabets were not designed. They evolved. Today we design languages that imitate the products of evolution.
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.
Saying humans are "ape-like" is like saying house cats are "feline-like" and dogs are "canine-like". House cats are felines, dogs are canines, humans are apes. There is no evolutionary "ape-like ancestor", there is a common ancestry between humans and other apes, closer than the ancestry between any human and any non-ape, an ape ancestry.
