Dembski Concedes the Obvious

I've been a bit derelict in my blog reading lately, so I overlooked this post by Wesley Elsberry. His subject is a comment left by William Dembski at his (Dembski's) blog, in response to this post.

Dembski, it seems, now admits that he has been wasting everyone's time for quite a while.

Dembski's comment comes in a series of numbered points. Here's the first:

(1) I've pretty much dispensed with the EF. It suggests that chance, necessity, and design are mutually exclusive. They are not. Straight CSI is clearer as a criterion for design detection.

For those not fluent in crankspeak, EF refers to Dembski's Explanatory Filter. He was attempting to describe a procedure for determining whether some event or artifact can only be explained as the result of intelligent agency. The premise of the filter was that there are only three types of explanations, chance, necessity or design. Design could then be established by eliminating chance and necessity.

Even before getting to the problem of how one is meant to eliminate chance and design, critics immediately pointed out that Dembski's naive trichotomy was unworkable. Indeed, it was one of the first criticisms raised. Dembski dug in his heels initially, so it is nice to see that he has now conceded the point.

Of course, defending the EF was one of the major goals of his book The Design Inference. Guess you can scratch that off your ID reading list.

CSI refers to Complex Specified Information. In Dembskiland, Complex just means improbable, and Specified means that the event or artifact in question matches some recognizable pattern. Since Dembski presented the EF as a tool for discerning CSI, I don't follow the clean separation ebtween them he is trying to establish here. For the record, though, Dembski's CSI is a nonsensical notion for a variety of reasons. For one, he was inconsistent in his writing about whether the determination of specificity came before or after the determination of complexity. For another, the sorts of probability calculations that were essential to his theory we impossible to carry out. Which brings us to his second bullet point:

(2) The challenge for determining whether a biological structure exhibits CSI is to find one that's simple enough on which the probability calculation can be convincingly performed but complex enough so that it does indeed exhibit CSI. The example in NFL ch. 5 doesn't fit the bill. The example from Doug Axe in ch. 7 of THE DESIGN OF LIFE (www.thedesignoflife.net) is much stronger.

That Dembski's little flagellum calculation in his NFL book (that's No Free Lunch, for those not down with the jargon) was not very convincing was pointed out by his critics as soon as the book was published. I seem to recall the academic journal Evolution publishing an especially witty and trenchant form of this criticism:

The text soon becomes a dazzling congeries of binomial coefficients, perturbation probabilities, and sundry mathematical notation, all in the service of a computation that may as well have been written in Klingon for all the connection it has to reality. Modeling the formation of complex structures via a three-part process of atomization, convergence, and assembly is terribly unrealistic.

So it is nice that, once again, Dembski admits he was wasting everyone's time with this calculation. Why do I suspect, though, that if I look into the details of Mr. Axe's example, mentioned by Dembski, that I am going the usual morass of numerology, unsupported assumptions, and bad probability?

Skipping ahead to Dembski's final point:

(5) There's a paper Bob Marks and I just got accepted which shows that evolutionary search can never escape the CSI problem (even if, say, the flagellum was built by a selection-variation mechanism, CSI still had to be fed in).

Once more, Dembski's critics have been telling him for years that natural selection is a marvellous device for transmitting information from the environment into the genomes of organisms. What was allegedly novel about Dembski's work was his claim to have shown with rigorous mathematics that the flagellum could not have been built via random variation and natural selection. It seems he his now withdrawing that claim.

Once this is understood, it seems that the CSI problem, as Dembski calls it, amounts to little more than the question of why there is something instead of nothing. Puzzling indeed, but hardly something for biologists to be worrying about.

More like this

This is interesting, but how does environmental information and natural selection change a prokaryote into a eukaryote? monocellular life into multicellular life?

Natural selection doesn't, by itself, change anything into anything; it merely selects from the changes made possible by mechanisms such as mutation and endosymbiosis.

Endosymbiosis is the culprit in the case of the prokaryote-eukaryote transition. This mechanism is not merely hypothetical; we can see it happening right now in the case of the organism Hatena. See this post and this one for more infrormation.

As for unicellular into multicellular life, that's easier than you might think. Every cell becomes multiple cells by dividing, so all you need is some trait that keeps those daughter cells stuck together and voila, the first step toward multicellularity. Again, we've actually observed this in the lab in the case of Chlorella, which evolved from single cells to stably spherical 8-celled colonies under the pressure of predation. See here for more.

By Anton Mates (not verified) on 30 Jan 2009 #permalink

Origins In Cells Clusters
Life Is Simpler Than They Tell Us

Evolution:
Genes to Genomes to Monocellular to Multicellular Organisms;
Direct Sunlight to Metabolic Energy, Too;
Triptophan to Serotinin to Melatonin to Neural System.

A. Triptophan to Serotinin to Melatonin

Melatonin is a hormone secreted by the human pineal gland during night-time darkness. It is now marketed in the US as a nutritional supplement. The hormone is an indoleamine compound derived from the essential amino acid L-tryptophan, with serotonin as an intermediate precursor.

Tryptophan is one of eight essential amino acids, not produced by the body but coming from the diet. The additional fourteen amino acids are produced metabolically.

In the brain, tryptophan converts to serotonin, the neuro-transmitter. Tryptophan is the only source for serotonin in the brain. Insufficient L-tryptophan in the diet is a cause of many severe biological malfunctions.

Some serotonin is converted in the pineal gland to melatonin, the hormone involved in intercell processes during sleep time.

B. Sunlight to Metabolic Energy

Bio-clocks are products of the innate sun-dictated active-inactive pattern of genes and genomes, parents of Earth's life. During life genesis and its early evolution direct sunlight was the only source of their usable energy. This situation persistrd well into the evolution of the early monocellular organisms, and both genes and genomes display, therefore, innate "inactive-sleep" phenomena.

The incorporation of mitochondria with some cells innitiated the metabolic bio production of bio usable energy and furnished the evolving monocellular organisms with new, additional, flexibly available local energy. This development opened up a variety of courses of evolutions of cultures of monocells communities.

C. Individual Monocells to Cooperative Monocells-Communities

As individual independent genes aggregated to cooperative genes communes, genomes, so individual
monocells aggregated cooperatively into monocellular communities.

From "Life Is A Cooperative Affair" (Sept 2005)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1&p=168

"Life has always been and still is a fractal affair, repetition of phenomena on ever more complex scale. It cannot be otherwise; it evolves. And surviving-proliferating life has always been a cooperative affair since cooperation is most successful for overall survival/proliferation."

Cooperation requires all sorts of interactions, including maintenance, protection and foraging for food-energy. Organisms' interactions are "cultures". Cultures require "cultural energy". Melatonin and some proteins are dark-and-light que signals evolved by the monocells communities for timing intercells processes when the intracells processes are at "sleep-inactive" state. Melatonin is a derivative of serotonin a derivative of triptophan, and proteins are genes' toolings, energy-dependent metabolism products.

D. Monocellular to Multicellular Organisms, Monocells Culture to Neural System

Now we can appreciate the fractal nature of life's evolution. It is ever-continuous ever-enhanced ever-complexed cooperation. Now we can understand why, and grosso modo how, all the organs and processes and signals found in multicelled organisms have their origins in the monocells communities. And this includes the functions of serotonin and melatonin and, yes, the evolution of neural cells and the neural systems with their intricate outer-membrane shapes and functionings and with their high energy consumption requirements.

Now, circa four billion years after initial genesis-evolution with direct sun's energy followed with evolution with also indirect, bio, sun's energy, some of Earth life, we humans, find ouselves short of energy and in need of exploiting again more, and more direcly, our sun's energy...

Dov Henis
(Comments From The 22nd Century)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-P81pQcU1dLBbHgtjQjxG_Q--?cq=1
Life's Manifest
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/112.page#578
EVOLUTION Beyond Darwin 200
http://www.physforum.com/index.php?showtopic=14988&st=405&#entry396201
http://www.the-scientist.com/community/posts/list/100/122.page#1407

By Dov Henis (not verified) on 17 Mar 2009 #permalink

You know what's really awful? These days, it's kind of hard to read "CSI" without thinking of ... well, you know. :P

By J. J. Ramsey (not verified) on 09 Dec 2008 #permalink

Poor Dr. Dr. D...The Designer giveth, the Designer taketh away. Blessed be the Name Of The Designer, eh Bill?

If he's not careful, the rubes will stop supporting him in the style he's become accustomed to. Couldn't happen to a sleezier "sciencey" kind of guy.

Has anybody managed to quantify the amount of CSI in... well... anything yet? I haven't been following this stuff for a while, but last I checked, it seemed to be a whole lot of calculating and waxing poetic about a quantity that appears not to exist in any measurable form.

By Troublesome Frog (not verified) on 09 Dec 2008 #permalink

Where do you suppose that Dembski-Marks paper got accepted, the Journal of Mathematics Which Is Actually Irrelevant to Biology or the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Drunk Arseholes in Pubs?

Once more, Dembski's critics have been telling him for years that natural selection is a marvellous device for transmitting information from the environment into the genomes of organisms.

I brought up the same point when Dembski gave his talk at Baylor. I gave the example that the color of snow in, say, the tundra dictates organisms to "be more white". He responded that the scenario I described was plausible, but that it was not an information-rich source.

Moreover, he claimed, accepting that evolution could transmit information from the environment to an organism just pushes back the problem one more step, for you would still have to explain where the organism capable of receiving such information came from in the first place.

Never mind that he has no way of quantifying the amount of information present in the environment -- surely no way for him to definitively declare "that's not a rich information source!" -- nor that he has no real idea just how many different potential sources of information there are. No, his little program is doomed from the start because he doesn't seem to appreciate the difference between information stored in a computer and information inherent in the physical structure of these strange molecules that make up life. And "What makes the physical structure of these molecules behave the way they do?" is just a hop, skip and a jump away from "Why is there something rather than nothing?" You're absolutely right, Jason. Dembski's beef is no longer with evolution, but with the underlying physical nature of life's chemistry.

In a perfect world the light bulb would come on and Dembski would say, "All this time I've been f****d up! Therefore, I disavow ID and fully embrace the theory of evolution. Darwin is God. Now, let's get on with real science."

Sadly, in the real world he will likely cling tenaciously to his delusions to the bitter end.

By Nebularry (not verified) on 10 Dec 2008 #permalink

CSI is sufficiently ill-defined that it can be attributed to just about anything, or at least anything which Dembski feels like applying it to. So, yeah, asking "where did the CSI come from" is pretty close to asking "but where did the matter come from?".

Cody:

Moreover, he claimed, accepting that evolution could transmit information from the environment to an organism just pushes back the problem one more step, for you would still have to explain where the organism capable of receiving such information came from in the first place.

Oh, sweet Isis, has nobody sat Dembski down for this little talk?

"You see, Billy, when two people really love each other very very much. . . ."

"These days, it's kind of hard to read 'CSI' without thinking of ... well, you know."

Completely
Stupid
Invention

maybe?!

After reading the links from Jason, I am mostly fascinated with the AES: Actualization-Exclusion-Specification because it seems to be fine work, a division of the stages of emerging genetics.

I would hope that just because the new theory of evolution which I am "toting" as food here is not readily understood, this will not preclude me from participation - in an off subject sort of way. Where would a new theory of evolution find proper unveiling?

I am hoping that friends here might follow this link to a very fine job done by Carter Phipps. If you might enjoy this view of 12 schools of evolutionary thinking, with #9 representative of the common theosophical viewpoint, then you might understand that I am bent on advancing #9 to the point where it is understood by me (rather than as given in the article.)

I would enjoy speaking with people who are both knowledgeable and sincere about the furtherance of goals to bring adequate practice to science and religion and hope that you will allow me to present my new and unpublished findings somewhere with interested parties.

"Where would a new theory of evolution find proper unveiling?"

The usual & accepted way that science is advanced & legitimate ideas are propagated through the community is by the peer reviewed process. If it's junk it will probably get filtered out right away & researchers won't waste valuable time reconciling it. If it's not junk ... good luck, but it is a grueling & rigorous process (not for the faint of heart).

J-Dog...

If he's not careful, the rubes will stop supporting him in the style he's become accustomed to.

I think for that to happen the rubes would have to become un-rubes (ex-rubes? not-rubes? ~rubes?), and that would be a speciation event.

And we all know that's not possible.

By BobbyEarle (not verified) on 10 Dec 2008 #permalink

So he concedes (more or less) that it was BS, so he clings ever more tightly to the "foundational" BS he was spouting.

It's different, other than the fact that he's still claiming that ID is exempt from having to come up with supporting evidence, like a real scientific theory.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592

Second JimCH's comments.

While handwaving arguments occasionally get published, "woo" rarely surfaces in real journals unless the editor is not paying attention (i.e. the proteonomics-cum-creationsist paper) or the real purpose is never explicitly mentioned or addressed (Durston, Marks, Dembski, Axe- who never really test their ID stuff but tilt at some obscure tangents in mathematical journals). The whole theosophy thread is unlikely even to make Biol diRevista.

Blake wrote:

....Proceedings of the Royal Society of Drunk Arseholes in Pubs?

Um...I'll concede the likelihood that Dembski comes across as a horse's patoot, but really Blake, if you have an anecdote regarding Bill that speaks to an excess in the libations department, I'd love to hear it.

Ive always thought of ID as an oyxmoron anyway. I live in KY and well, one only needs to visit a small town to see how unintelligently the design really is.

It's was the mutually-exclusive nature of the Explanatory Filter I had the most trouble with, being that it excludes by fiat the Chance-PLUS-Regularity case that evolutionary processes embody, and now he's conceded it?

His other positions are still wrong, but excuse me rubbing my eyes for a second at the mere existence of such an actually proper concession :)

Holy shit,I checked out notedscholar's website and it's hilarious... has Mark Chu-Carroll ever seen this?

Apparently Dembski has backed away from this statement. According to his recent post on UD, the EF was the greater invention since sliced bread and he will continue to support the EF filter nonsense.

Why do these ideas need to be mutually exclusive? Science teaches us that evolution is only a theory and it is the process of revising and debunking theories that separates science from belief.

I had to laugh when I saw Dembski's 'sliced bread' comment.

Many of his acolytes and sycophants took that literally, and have declared that the announcement of the death of the EF was premature.

Such folk are pathetic.

Apparently Dembski has backed away from this statement. According to his recent post on UD, the EF was the greater invention since sliced bread and he will continue to support the EF filter nonsense.

That's okay, he didn't call no take backs. Usually when mathematicians really mean something then they call no take backs. And jinx they owe him a coke if they say it at the same time as other mathematicians.

ID is some real serious stuff, people. So naturally you wouldn't expect them to call no take backs! I want my mommy!

By reindeer386sx (not verified) on 12 Dec 2008 #permalink

Don't you think Jason might have posted an article of this nature to encourage others, not to heckle, but to consider their own necks in "style" for showing a great willingness to reassess in the light of new information or reconsideration when another team of scientists advances in some way that appears to "undo" them?

You are not intellectual inferiors because there is seriously misplaced sentiment that should find exposure in wanting the greatest good. We need scientific investigation and want to cherish all the many evidences that have been gathered by each one, but occasionally there may be reason to look for new approaches to the gathering of data. Is thought as potent as search and seizure?

Don't you think Jason might have posted an article of this nature to encourage others, not to heckle, but to consider their own necks in "style" for showing a great willingness to reassess in the light of new information or reconsideration when another team of scientists advances in some way that appears to "undo" them?

Oh, please. ID presents arguments which are two centuries old. Many are still parroting the arguments found in Paley's Natural Theology as if this were still a relevant source and hasn't been demolished by study after study after study after study. If they were willing to reassess their screeds in light of new information, we'd not have people like Behe pushing nonsense like irreducible complexity.

No...I get the feeling he's merely abandoning the EF to save CSI. He'll still keep the requirements vague enough to avoid being pinned down. Just like jello to a wall :).

While we're on the subject of information theory, there's been a question I'd like to see answered by a physics or math person. Most of the information theorems I see pushed by ID advocates seem to me suspiciously similar to the thermodynamics arguments pushed by Henry Morris in that they both say that simple things cannot become more complex without an outside source of information/energy.

It seems to me they both (purposely?) miss something...ID applications of Information Theory miss the information contained within the environment, whereas Morris Thermodynamics misses the energy which comes into the system through the sun.

Am I misunderstanding this? I have a decent understanding of thermodynamics (bio major...chem classes), but not information theory.

From Brenda's web site:

"Blavatsky reports that the earth is a globe in a series of seven globes comprising a chain. The earth chain contains seven kingdoms of nature. We know them as mineral, plant, animal, human. Three other kingdoms are said to be invisible and they are listed as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd elemental kingdoms. They are more commonly known as thought elementals, feeling elementals or feelings, and etheric elementals or the states of matter which are invisible except to kirlian photography as light. Each kingdom exists as "king" upon a globe. So that while the animal kingdom - which later overlaps with the human - inhabit the earth during their fourth root race, they are here with no interference from other evolving lives. The plants exist on the globe ahead of the animals and humans exist on the globe behind the animals. The entire chain consists of seven rounds of seven globes, which would mean 49 separate descent-ascent globe learning periods before animal progresses to human, plant progresses to animal, and so forth."

...make it stop!!!

By Steverino (not verified) on 15 Dec 2008 #permalink

The whole point of this exercise is to show you a major breakthrough on my part in studying theosophy. Of course, there are many students who are satisfied with repeating the teaching they learn in a rote way. However, I actually had a breakthrough to the presentation of the material in a new way, and this new way is more than coincidentally in favor of the Christian approach we study in the Bible.

A new kingdom that is described by Jesus Christ is still unnamed. Is this because humans can not relinquish their hold upon being the most superior of all kingdom? At least can you see the need for a word? More than having a word put in the dictionary, I would particularly like for people who study theosophy to find a WARNING spelled out much as the Surgeon General began to warn smokers.

You are beginning a spiritual life with the possible outcome of physical, mental, and complete merging of your human life with the life of a being who has a much different purpose in their existence. You may at some point come to rely upon the presence of this kingdom in your life, and also may be abruptly deprived of the continued association due to some act on your part which is discouraging to the girasas. Please be sure that you are ready to take this type of risk in your living adventure.

Brenda, I'd like to see the warning they slap on whatever you're smoking.

Really, what you're saying is gibberish. It's cute and amusing in a way that kills brain cells, but really...I wouldn't try defending it.

But, hey...back on topic. Information theory. Similar to thermodynamics. Yes, no or STFU, Chesh?

Josh,

NotedScholar's website made me laugh a lot!

Well... not sure in what sense you found it funny, but I'll err on the friendly side and say thanks!

NS

Brenda:
Reading your post reminded me of of those vague horoscope readings you get in the local rag. This may be traditional fare for pseudo-science with half the calories and less filling than the fare demanded by science and scientists alike.

Cheshire:

Yes, information theory and thermodynamics are conjoined. Consider a system, like a box of gas, which we know has a certain total energy. The atoms inside the box can be moving in many different ways and can have many possible positions, all of which are consistent with the overall condition that the total energy has a specified value. To use a bit of jargon, many microstates map to the same macrostate. Given that the system is in a certain macrostate, there is a probability distribution over all microstates for which microstate you'd find the system in, if you could measure that closely. The entropy of the system is the Shannon information of this probability distribution.

regarding how creationist refer to information theory (as if all creations think alike): informatoin theory is used to measure a very abstract concept, which can be labeled as either "information content" or "information entropy". It is used extensively in the field of telecommunications to measure the information content of electrical signals transmitted over wires through space, such as in satellite commuinications or any internet media. Its an important concept because if you use 1000 bits to transmit a message that only has 10 bits of actual information, you just wasted a lot of bandwidth. Better to compress it first.

So the genome is a lot like digital information. Information theory talks about information using strings of symbols (like strings of 1's and 0's or strings of this alphabet I am using now). The gemone is very much like a string of any other digital information. Its "information" content can be measured (in terms of the redundancy contained in it).

So we know from information theory that random data has a low information content and we also know that is useless for communicating anything worthwhile. We also know that the genome has lots of real information and is very useful for communicating the mind-blogling complexity of the design of any given cell's internal operations much less all cells known to exist.

We also know from biology that the oldest organisms on the planet have 90% of the same informaton as humans's genomes. So all of this information was present in the earliest days and according to evolutionists, much of the information in the genomes of any creature have not even been expressed yet.

So creations point out that you would have to check your brain at the door to believe that genome of the worm just accidentally had all the information in it a billion years ago to fully realize most life we see today. Its extremely obvious that it could not have evolved, no matter what believe about how it got here.

By David Drell (not verified) on 16 Dec 2008 #permalink

So we know from information theory that random data has a low information content and we also know that is useless for communicating anything worthwhile.

Somethign tells me you're not exactly an expert. I could be wrong though! (Not.)

By reandeer386sx (not verified) on 16 Dec 2008 #permalink

David Drell: "We also know from biology that the oldest organisms on the planet have 90% of the same informaton as humans's genomes."

Evidence? Considering that there are wide differences even in the numbers of chromosomes among species, this looks suspect.

By J. J. Ramsey (not verified) on 16 Dec 2008 #permalink

"Evidence? Considering that there are wide differences even in the numbers of chromosomes among species, this looks suspect."
Sorry, I cannot recall the source, it was some evolutionary biologist on a PBS documentary. But to be more precise, and I am sure no one would argue with the Campbell/Reece biology text (which I believe is consided the standard being studied at universities such as diverse as UT Austin and Max Plank Inst in Germany) that "molecular clocks date the common ancestor of multicellular eukaryotes back to 1.5 B years ago...worms did not appear until 600 million years ago" p514, 6th edition. Eukaryoytic cells are the type we people are made of as well as worms. The basic operation of this type of cell is the same across all animal types and not differentiated by its position on the evolitionary tree. Indeed the definition of the species and its location on the tree is based on characterists of the animal system not its cells (which is why we can even consider transplanting pig organs to humans or growing human ears in mice).

regarding the comment about my comment on information theory and the randomenss - as far as technical precision my statement was false with the strict defintion of informaton theory being the degree to which a new symbol appears random from the previsous symbol; but if reandeer386sx is an expert he/she would know that the problem addressed in informatoin theory is extracting non-random informtion from noisy sources which are modeled as random data - and the geonome has many similar mechenisms for protecting and correcting errors and extracting information from noise - hence the strong collelary. We also would agree that random sources have never been observed to generate coherent messages that appear to convey actual information, such as in the case of a gene.

By David Drell (not verified) on 16 Dec 2008 #permalink

Brenda, you said,

Of course, there are many students who are satisfied with repeating the teaching they learn in a rote way.

Then you repeat Blavatsky's unverifiable nonsense in a rote way. Please get your irony meter re-calibrated.

Jason, thanks for posting this; you make it very clear and I love the link to the book review. Unfortunately, Dembski has decided to resurrect the Explanatory Filter BECAUSE science buffs were crowing over his decision, not because it works any better than last week.

An irrelevant quibble: Dembski is using numbered points. A bullet point is part of an unordered with a largish dot (a "bullet") on the left. That's why you create unordered lists with an HTML tag "UL" for unordered instead of "OL" for ordered list.

Back to the topic at hand: Is there any way of estimating, in a back-of-the-envelope Fermi calculation, how much information comes from an environment?

So, David...let's say some scientists were to do an experiment with proteins in test tubes to try to evolve a protein which binded ATP from a stretch of protein which showed no affinity for that substrate.

According to you, we shouldn't see that happen. Yet I can find a number of journal articles where exactly that is accomplished with various substrates...not just ATP.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000…

Besides, there are a large number of evolution simulators which do exactly what you claim you say they can't. PZ Myers just posted an article where someone did something just like that with the Mona Lisa over at Pharyngula not too long ago:

http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona…

And there are also many, many evolution simulators which do exactly what you can describe that can be dug up on the interwebs. Avida and Ev are two that I know of right off hand. There's even a video on youtube where Dawkins generates a Shakespearian phrase from a random string of letters in his Climbing Mount Improbable lecture.

Congratulations, sir...you have just earned yourself a derisive laugh.

Blake...thanks for answering my question.

I'm more familiar with Simpson-Gini information as a way of calculating species diversity than I am with Shannon information as applied to thermodynamics. I never knew what, exactly, was used to calculate the information content of a system. Now I do. Two thumbs up, man.

:)

Monado,

NO. You don't understand. If I could think for myself and find a NEW concept within the material (this is not rote), then others can too. I accomplished a little thing with years of thought, study, and practice. Now, I want to accomplish a big thing and get everyone considering that their thinking can produce SOLUTIONS under the scenario as I describe it.

I don't want MY findings. I want YOURS.

"So creations point out that you would have to check your brain at the door to believe that genome of the worm just accidentally had all the information in it a billion years ago to fully realize most life we see today."

I don't think it is creationists that do that. Evolutionists have made it pretty clear that evolution does NOT in fact postulate what you (or they) seem to think it does.

"Its extremely obvious that it could not have evolved, no matter what believe about how it got here."

It is not obvious at all. This is simple a naive post hoc justification for a lame argument.

This is interesting, but how does environmental information and natural selection change a prokaryote into a eukaryote? monocellular life into multicellular life?

The logic of common ancestry of all life eludes me.

Blake wrote:

...Proceedings of the Royal Society of Drunk Arseholes in Pubs?

To which Scott Hatfield responded: Um...I'll concede the likelihood that Dembski comes across as a horse's patoot, but really Blake, if you have an anecdote regarding Bill that speaks to an excess in the libations department, I'd love to hear it.

Without presuming to speak for Blake, I took his comment as indicating the likely information content of the type of publication that would carry a Dembski article, rather than as indicative of Dembski's personal proclivities. I personally would prefer the construction "...Royal Society of Drunken Arseholes...."

Brenda wrote: I would enjoy speaking with people who are both knowledgeable and sincere about the furtherance of goals to bring adequate practice to science and religion....

Brenda - This ain't the place. Good luck in your search.

information theory and thermodynamics are conjoined. Consider a system, like a box of gas, which we know has a certain total energy.

The great thing is that PJCs and Java beans in Forms break the traditional boundaries of a Forms application - they also have the added benefit of allowing developers to start dipping their toes in the Java waters. No bad thing.