At his website Why Evolution Is True, Jewish atheist and U. of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne has responded in two posts to my own entry on Chanukah, knee pain, and suboptimal design in creatures as a bogus argument for atheism. (As an aside, note the gentleman’s last name. I’m guessing it started out as Cohen, meaning that he is presumably a cohen, a descendant of Aaron. In Ashkenazic pronunciation the Hebrew name often comes out as coyne. Pending information to the contrary, take a moment to appreciate the irony of his illustrious priestly lineage.) Professor Coyne is full of “Aha’s!” and “Gotcha’s!”  He writes:  [T]he “bad designs” [in creatures] are more than just random flaws in the “design” of organisms: Read More ›

Which of the items below is an exercise in science from a peer-reviewed journal, and which is an example of religion in a popular magazine? According to conservation of information theorems, performance of an arbitrarily chosen search, on average, does no better than blind search. Domain expertise and prior knowledge about search space structure or target location is therefore essential in crafting the search algorithm. The effectiveness of a given algorithm can be measured by the active information introduced to the search. We illustrate this by identifying sources of active information in Avida, a software program designed to search for logic functions using nand gates. Avida uses stair step active information by rewarding logic functions using a smaller number of Read More ›