Did Sal just claim that CSI is a meaningless concept which is self contradictory?

Dembski may have much rewriting to do to avoid these confusions :-)

Sal

I may re-iterate, what Dembski is demonstrating is that one can not make appeals to ignorance (uncertaininty in stochastic processes) to create specific patterns. This is mathematical fact.

You are making claims about Dembski which do not follow for his mathematics.

Based on flawed claims, Sal asserts that Darwinian evolution is self-contradictory.

To claim that a simple H is adequate may make life simpler for IDers who have come to realize that the hard work to calculate H for non trivial hypotheses can be ‘avoided’ by making unsupported claims about sufficiency of simple H, but it also shows why ID remains scientifically vacuous.

That Bill’s paper may be confusing to some however should not be a reason to oversimplify its claims and arguments.

So Sal, let me ask to either support your claims, or one may have to come to the conclusion that your understanding of Dembski’s arguments is severely flawed.

Claims that could benefit from at least some evidence, logic. reasoning or mathematical support

1.Furthermore, a simple H (like uniform probability) that is not biased toward the appearance of CSI is an adequate H because any H that is extremely biased toward making an appearance of CSI is by definition an invalid H to define CSI

2. Thus if Darwinian evolution is at it’s root a claim that stochastic processes are the explanations for the creation specified patterns, the theory has demonstrated itself to be completely self contradictory.

2. seems to be a total strawman, a proof by assertion contradicted by much of anything we known about evolutionary theory, and its mechanisms. In fact, as Dembski has accepted himself, evolutionary algorithms can create the impression of CSI. And since Dembski has failed to present any way to resolve this matter, the existence of apparent versus actual CSI, ‘complicates’ the ID claims ’slightly’. Or more bluntly, it leaves ID powerless to make the claims made by for instance Sal.

Sal is thus correct “The issue is not so much what we don’t know, as much as the fact we know what a stochastic process should and should not do.” and based on what we do know, we also know that a stochastic process (processes which include regularity and chance) can in fact ‘create’ specified patterns.

Finally, Sal uses the term specific patterns, which to some may give the impression that the term has any relevance to the concept of ’specified’. We should be careful that we do not conflate the two concepts. Especially since evolutionary theory is not about specific patterna but specified patterns, where specification merely means function.

Dembksi himself suggested that function in biology is sufficient for specification.

Hope this clarifies why I encourage our friend Sal to attempt to rectify his mistakes or support them with some evidence.

While you are talking to Bill, could you ask him how he intends to calculate the CSI in the bacterial flagella, using his latest variant on how to calculate CSI? Are there any non trivial examples where CSI has been calculated?
Or are coins the extent to which ID is applicable, much like the age old creationist claim that evolution is too improbable to have happened by chance?
It also does not help, that Dembski refers to chance as processes of pure chance, pure regularities and any combination thereof. Seems that a lot of IDers have misinterpreted chance to mean that it is sufficient to show that a pure chance hypothesis is unlikely.

So Sal, how many of the objections to CSI raised on ISCID have been addressed by Dembski’s latest attempt?

For instance, Rex Kerr argued on ISCID the question Does anything at all exhibit specified complexity?

Rex KerrI am going to argue, in contrast, that there exist no examples of specified complexity, and indeed, that the entire idea presupposes a nonscientific method of looking at the world.

Others have argued much of the same such as Re: Design as a scientific explanation Post of the Month: September 1998 by Ivar Ylvisaker

Micah Sparacio in ‘Cataloguing Criticisms of Specified Complexity” collected various objections and criticisms of CSI, as well as ways to resolve them.

For instance Erik

Erik
C11: The term “specified complexity” is a redundant, obfuscatory middle-man that serves no non-rhetorical purpose (it is apparently the name of the state of affairs that someone has sucessfully eliminated a set of non-ID hypotheses using the Explanatory Filter). It adds nothing to the actual argument, but it invites equivocation with other concepts with the same name (e.g. Paul Davies’s concept) and with intuitive concepts of “complexity” that lack any a priori connection to specified complexity. Dembski also seems to equivocate between specified complexity w.r.t. to a uniform probability assumption and specified complexity w.r.t. all known natural causes.

C12: I have not checked all the relevant publications, but to the best of my knowledge at most one person has been able to apply Dembski’s concepts and methods to a real example, namely Dembski himself. It’s been something like five years the methods were first formulated and only one real application (the flagellum calculation) has been published. That no one except its creator has been able to apply the method and concepts, not even to simpler non-trivial real-world cases than the origin of flagella, is clear testament to its lack of scientific utility in its current state.

C13: The form of the Explanatory Filter gives ID a free-ride by asking us to accept a general “ID hypothesis” without evaluating the merits, or lack thereof, of this hypothesis. It also assumes the existence of a sharp dividing line separating non-intelligence and intelligence. Hypotheses involving intelligence are to lumped into the general ID hypothesis and protected from being subject to critical evaluations of their merits. This assumption is made without a definition of “intelligence”.

Rex Kerr provided a way to solve a problem in the thread ” Refining the Generic Chance Elimination Argument”.

Rex also added some specific criticisms such as

Rex Kerr
C18
There are precisely zero fully-worked-out positive examples of the design hypothesis applied to a scenario where there is known to be design. All examples to date have been sketches used for illustrative purposes. The mathematical results apply only if the determination of SC is made rigorously. A sketch is not typically regarded as a substitute for a positive validation, although after a rigorous positive validation, sketches can allow one to skip over the tedious and uninformative parts of a proof.

Or Gedanken with a major one namely the inherent unreliability of the explanatory filter.

C19
Take a case in which the prior probability is extremely low that a designer can effect the potential “design” being observed. (By this I do not mean that this is a generally usable method for evaluating cases, rather I am specifying that in this case that prior probability can be known. I do not mean that such prior probability can regularly be known.) Also assume that there is a rather high probability that something was missed in the steps of analyzing chance and necessity in the explanatory filter. (In other words that the “argument from ignorance” aspect actually may have an important case that the observer is ignorant of, and this is a high probability in this case.) In this case the Bayesean posterior probability that the “designer did it” is often lower than the posterior probability that the missed case is the explanation. Now considering cases in which the prior probability is unknown (a basic assumption of the normal application of the “explanatory filter”) the reasonableness of the EF is dependent on the actual prior probability, though unknown. If one has certain religious reasons, for example, of having differing views of that prior probability, then the result changes based on those views. The EF is not an objective methodology, and its “reliability” differs depending on precisely that prior probability.

In the ISCID thread ” Responses to Criticisms of Specified Complexity” people explore how these criticisms can be addressed.

Also, given the contributions of these people, should the latest paper on specifications by Dembski give some references and credit to these contributions?
Either Dembski addressed these criticisms, collected by Micah, or he ignored them?

The other side has raised some thoughtful considerations, but occasionally we’re still talking past each other.

I hope discussion of the math issues will continue on your new weblog, and I sense you want to get the story straight on various matters. I’m sorry the class is ending so abruptly as I think I’m close to cleaning up some of the sticky issues.

As far as feedback, if you feel the other side has made a good point that raises your concern about anything I said or Bill said, feel free to air that concern. Skepticism is healthy. :=)

Thank you for setting up a forum for us to clean all this up. Though I feel I have a decent handle on Dembski’s books, his latest paper threw a real curve as I had not read it until the class began. I erred in presuming that there was not at least one new radical conception, namely Phi_S(T). This is an exciting extension of his earlier work, but unlike his 1998 book, it has not had years to receive a working over.

I’ve not had a chance to dialogue with Bill and ask, “is that what you meant?” He needs our feedback, because it’s helpful to him to know how even ID-sympathetic readers might misread his latest paper.

My sincere thanks for setting this up. I look forward to arguing the case before fierce (but fair) criticism.

Salvador