Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Egnor embodies the high end of a continuum of faith-fueled antievolutionists whose lower terminus consists of Nathan Bradfield and Ikester types who basically shout "I call bullshit!" over and over when confronted with pro-evolution arguments. Egnor is, by any metric, probably smarter than those two put together, but this doesn't rescue him from the vacuity of his meaningless demand for, literally, more info.

The idea of refuting evolution on the basis of materialistic processes being insufficient to generate sufficient "information" has become a huge favorite of more sophisticated -- or at least more educated -- evolution deniers. Rather than yammer that the continued presence of monkeys disproves the entire notion of common human-chimp ancestry and give each other high-fives, they invoke "information theory" as a means of erecting a giant, shambling man of straw which they then incinerate.

Most high-schoolers could determine that these people proudly torch both themselves and respect for basic worldly observation in the process. All the "info please!" crowd is doing is observing something that's impossible to just deny wholesale or outright (e.g., an oblate-spheroidal Earth) and producing a quantity of pseudoscientific babble sufficient to convince the already convinced that the observed item is actually not what it is. They don't invoke information as a means of offering plausible biological theories; they do it to make noise about existing, solid-but-godless ones, and the more noise they need, the further they broaden their already porous definition of "information."

It's really pretty cool, in a Human Circus Factor^tm kind of way, watching the minds of smart people behave like virus-infected operating systems.

Egnor says: "Show me the evidence (journal, date, page) that new information, measured in bits or any appropriate units, can emerge from random variation and natural selection, without intelligent agency." Never mind that PZ and others answered Egnor's question insofar as it exists in a meaningful guise. Although a brain surgeon intoning "Shannon information theory" appears more scholarly than an Ikester type's shrill demand for transitional fossils between blowfish and koala bears, each has the same basic degree of relevance to evolutionary biology: zero.

The mathematically savvy creationists of today coat their evolution denial in the same translucent sheen of nonsense used by post-Descartes, pre-computer-age behavioral psychologists who believed that terms like "belief," "decide" and even "think" were misapplications of language, only in reverse. In their understandable haste to trash to its core the concept of anatomical-brain, mystical-thought "dualism" -- which in Cartesian terms had a proposed physical intersection of "mind" and "body" in the pineal gland -- they wanted no part of the idea that things like learning, decision-making and the whole of "intelligence" could indeed be defined on the basis of mechanical processes unfolding in brain matter in complex but eminently modelable ways. Alan Turing put the lie to that one, and today we speak of computers doing all sorts of dry but human-sounding things, like requesting and directing and executing and storing and so on.

I am not a mathemagician, but I don't think it takes grounding in number theory or anything else to posit, based on basic observations of how the world operates, that the addition of energy into a system consisting of a suitable substrate is sufficient to produce an accumulation of what we can loosely or even stringently classify as "new information." A flood or other high-impact meteorological event can isolate two or more populations of similar animals and serve as the catalyst for allopatric speciation; myriad other (and better) examples about in the natural world.

We know that DNA mutations of a decidedly unintelligent origin (e.g., solar radiation, mutagenic substances) can alter organisms' genomes in such a way that novel, potentially beneficial proteins are produced as a result, leading to a slow, fluid, but inexorable cascade toward creatures reasonably well suited -- often spectacularly so -- for whatever ambient challenges happen to exist. Sure, there's an enormous cost to "life" as a whole to this hugely imperfect, unguided process; just ask the 99 percent or whatever of species ever to inhabit Earth that have gone extinct as one of its results. For the most part, only those who make the mistake of assuming it was all somehow going to turn out "this way" no matter what, and therefore must have been steered in the direction of "this," find reason to invoke special (guided) creation; even really smart people, if caught early enough in faith's oafish but powerful claws, are not immune to invoking the anthropic fallacy in this way.

In the distance-running community, you'll find plenty of people quick to deny the idea that some groups of people might have innate advantages over others in the sports; willing as they are to acknowledge that the reason they don't perform as well as other white, middle-class road racers in their neighborhood is a dearth of inborn talent, they're convinced that it's "racist" to suggest that, say, the average Nandi tribesman might have characteristics favoring a stronger ability to quickly cover ten kilometers on foot than people of Samoan descent. Often, they demand that their interlocutors show them "the running gene," and when this doesn't happen, smugly say "See? Told you the racists wouldn't be able to do it." The fact that their demand has zero basis in the argument, any argument, doesn't matter; through the gloriously translucent misuse of scientific terminology in the context of raucous ignorance, they've solved their cognitive dissonance problem for the moment.

This is no different than what Egnor, Michael Behe, and (sometimes) Bill Dembski do -- take a scientific buzzphrase or superficially applicable string of techno-jargon, sling it around in a spurious way, and declare the other guy's theory implausible on the basis of their baroquely inane reasoning.