Bad Math
goodmath | August 3, 2006Over at his blog, William Dembski, my least-favorite pathetic excuse for a mathematician, [has cited an article][dembski] written by one John Davison about the theory of evolution. According to Dembski, this article explains "why the naked emperor still lingers"; that is, why the theory of evolution is still around even though it's so obviously wrong. (Update: I originally typed "Paul Davison" instead of "John Davison", I don't know why. Any "Paul Davison"s out there, sorry for associating your name with this dreck. Additionally, the article is posted on Dembski's blog, but it wasn't posted…
goodmath | July 31, 2006While taking a break from some puzzling debugging, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. Today, I came across a gem called ["Information, science and biology"][gitt], by the all too appropriately named "Werner Gitt". It's yet another attempt by a creationist twit to find some way to use information theory to prove that life must have been created by god.
It looks like the Gitt hasn't actually *read* any real information theory, but has rather just read Dembski's wretched…
goodmath | July 27, 2006I've been taking a look at William Dembski's paper, "[Information as a Measure of Variation][imv]". It was recommended to me as a paper demonstrating Demsbki's skill as a mathematician that isn't aimed at evolution-bashing. I'm not going to go into too much detail about it; it's just not that good. If this is the best work he's done as a mathematician, well, that's pretty sad.
The main problems with the paper are:
1. He either doesn't understand or misrepresents some of the fundamentals of the field he's allegedly discussing;
2. He presents many of the central ideas of the paper (that is,…
goodmath | July 25, 2006A reader sent me a link to *yet another* purported [Bayesian argument for the existence of god][unwin], this time by a physicist named Stephen Unwin. It's actually very similar to Swinburne's argument, which I discussed back at the old home of this blog. The difference is the degree of *dishonesty* demonstrated by the author.
As usual, you can only see the entire argument if you [buy his book][buymybook]. But from a number of reviews of the book, and a self-interview posted on his personal website, we can get the gist. Scientific American's [review][sciam] has the best concise description of…
goodmath | July 24, 2006This weekend, I came across Granville Sewell's article "[A Mathematicians View of Evolution][sewell]". My goodness, but what a wretched piece of dreck! I thought I'd take a moment to point out just how bad it is. This article, as described by the [Discovery Institute][diref], purportedly shows:
>... that Michael Behe's arguments against neo-Darwinism from irreducible
>complexity are supported by mathematics and the quantitative sciences,
>especially when applied to the problem of the origin of new genetic
>information.
I have, in the past, commented that the *worst* math is no…
goodmath | July 20, 2006A reader sent me a link to [this amusing blog][blog]. It's by a guy named George Shollenberger, who claims to have devised The First scientific Proof of God (and yes, he always capitalizes it like that).
George suffers from some rather serious delusions of grandeur. Here's a quote from his "About Me" bio on his blog:
>I retired in 1994 and applyied my hard and soft research experience to today's
>world social problems. After retirement, my dual research career led to my
>discovery of the first scientific proof of God. This proof unifies the fields
>of science and theology. As a…
goodmath | July 18, 2006You might remember my post last week about [conservatives who can't subtract][subtract]: in particular, about how a conservative blogger who goes by "Captain Ed" attacked John Edwards for saying there are 37 million people in poverty in the US. It turned out that good ol' Ed wasn't capable of doing simple subtraction.
You might also remember a post about [lying with statistics][liar], discussing an article by Tim Worstall, who quoted a newspaper piece about abortion rates, and tried to misuse the statistics to argue something about sexual education in the UK.
Well, Tim (the target of the…
goodmath | July 17, 2006There's been a bunch of discussion here at ScienceBlogs about whether or not mathematicians are qualified to talk about evolution, triggered by [an article by ID-guy Casey Luskin][luskin]. So far, [Razib at Gene Expression][gnxp], [Jason at][evblog1][EvolutionBlog][evblog2], and [John at Stranger Fruit][sf] have all commented on the subject. So I thought it was about time for me to toss in my two cents as well, given that I'm a math geek who's done rather a lot of writing about evolution here at this blog.
I don't want to spend a lot of time rehashing what's already been said by others. So I'…
goodmath | July 13, 2006Last night, a reader sent me a link to *yet another* wretched attempt to argue for the existence of God using Bayesian probability. I *really* hate that. Over the years, I've learned to dread Bayesian arguments, because *so many* of them are things like this, where someone cobbles together a pile of nonsense, dressing it up with a gloss of mathematics by using Bayesian methods. Of course, it's always based on nonsense data; but even in the face of a lack of data, you can cobble together a Bayesian argument by *pretending* to analyze things in order to come up with estimates.
You know, if you…
goodmath | July 12, 2006This is a repost from GM/BMs old home; the original article appeared
[here][old]. I'm reposting because someone is attempting to respond to this
article, and I'd rather keep all of the ongoing discussions in one place. I also
think it's a pretty good article, which some of the newer readers here may not
have seen. As usual for my reposts, I've fixed the formatting and made a few
minor changes. This article was originally posted on May 29.
I've been looking at PEAR again. I know it may seem sort of like beating a dead
horse, but PEAR is, I think, something special in its way: it's a group of…
goodmath | July 11, 2006This has been written about [elsewhere][lf], but I can't let such a perfect example of the fundamental innumeracy of so many political pundits pass me by without commenting.
Captain Ed of [Captains Quarters][cq] complains about a speech by John Edwards in which Edwards mentions 37 million people below the poverty line:
>Let's talk about poverty. Where did John Edwards get his numbers? The US Census
>Bureau has a ready table on poverty and near-poverty, and the number 37 million
>has no relation to those below the poverty line. If his basis is worry, well,
>that tells us nothing;…
goodmath | July 10, 2006Via [Feministe][feministe], we see a wingnut named Tim Worstall [trying to argue something about sexual education][worstall]. It's not entirely clear just what the heck he thinks his argument is; he wants to argue that sexual education "doesn't work"; his argument about this is based on abortion rates. This
is an absolutely *classic* example of how statistics are misused in political arguments. So let's take a look, and see what's wrong.
[feministe]: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/07/10/lies-damn-lies-and-sta…
[worstall]: http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2006/07/…
goodmath | July 7, 2006About 10 days ago, I wrote a post about a group of bozos who believe they've found a secret code in the bible, and that according to them, there was going to be a nuclear attack on the UN building in NYC by terrorists. This was their fourth attempt to predict a date based on their oh-so-marvelous code.
Well, obviously, they were wrong again. But, do they let that stop them? Of course not! That's the beauty of using really bad math for your code: you can always change the result when it doesn't work. If you get the result you want, then you can say your code was right; if you don't get things…
goodmath | July 5, 2006In comments to [my recent post about Gilder's article][gilder], a couple of readers asked me to take a look at a [DI promoted][dipromote] paper by
Albert Voie, called [Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent][voie]. This paper was actually peer reviewed and accepted by a journal called "Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals". I'm not familiar with the journal, but it is published by Elsevier, a respectable publisher.
Overall, it's a rather dreadful paper. It's one of those wretched attempts to take Gödel's theorem and try to apply it to something other than formal axiomatic…
goodmath | July 4, 2006As several [other][panda] [folks][pz] have mentioned, George Gilder has written a [new anti-evolution article][gilder-article] which was published in the National Review.
[panda]: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/07/the_technogeek.html
[pz]: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/if_it_werent_for_those_femin…
[gilder-article]: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3631
There's a lot to hate in this article. It's a poorly written screed, which manages to mix together all of Gilder's bogeymen: feminists, liberals, anti-supply-siders, peer reviewers,…
goodmath | July 1, 2006Earlier this week, I posted [a brief article][nyc-boom] about the ["True Bible Code"][tbc] folks who claimed that NYC was going to be hit by a terrorist nuclear weapon this weekend.
I was looking at the rest of their site to see what their "true bible code" was. I was expecting something along the lines of the gap codes or yet another low-budget gematria. It turns out to be much more humorous than either of those.
Most of the bible-code type nonsense you find is based on simple rules. There's a good reason for that: the more complex the rules get, the more likely they are to be artifacts.…
goodmath | June 28, 2006Dishonest Dembski:the Universal Probability Bound
One of the dishonest things that Dembski frequently does that really bugs me is take bogus arguments, and dress them up using mathematical terminology and verbosity to make them look more credible.
An example of this is Dembski's *universal probability bound*. Dembski's definition of the UPB from the [ICSID online encyclopedia][upb-icsid] is:
>A degree of improbability below which a specified event of that probability
>cannot reasonably be attributed to chance regardless of whatever
>probabilitistic resources from the known universe…
goodmath | June 28, 2006As I've frequently said, statistics is an area which is poorly understood by most people, and as a result, it's an area which is commonly used to mislead people. The thing is, when you're working with statistics, it's easy to find a way of presenting some value computed from the data that will appear to support a predetermined conclusion - regardless of whether the data as a whole supports that conclusion. Politicians and political writers are some of the worst offenders at this.
Case in point: over at [powerline][powerline], they're reporting:
>UPI reports that Al Gore's movie, An…
goodmath | June 27, 2006I just received some email that would seriously worry me if it weren't for the fact that I'm not an idiot.
WARNING!
TERRORISTS are going to ATTACK NEW YORK!
There is NO TIME to waste! Go read http://www.truebiblecode.com/nyc.html!!!!!!
Going there, I find:
We are now 98% confident that the UN Plaza will be hit by a terrorist nuclear bomb between Thursday evening June 29th and Tuesday evening July 4th, 2006
It is certainly true that: No nukes is good nukes! But just because we got the date wrong (3 times) does not mean that the scriptural threat has evaporated. It is still there in black…
goodmath | June 24, 2006I recently got a real prize of a link from one of my readers. He'd enjoyed the [Swinburne][swinburne] article, and had encoutered this monstrosity; an alleged [probability of christianity][prob] argument *significantly worse* than Swinburne.
[swinburne]: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/mind-numbingly-stupid-math.html "My shredding of Swinburne"
[prob]: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/radio034.htm "Mathematical Probability that Jesus is the Christ"
The difference between Swinburne and this bozo (who's name I can't locate on the site) is that at least Swinburne made *some* attempt to use…