Tag: Jeffrey Shallit
Intelligent Design Proponents Toil More than the Critics: A Response to Wesley Elsberry and Jeffrey Shallit
A few years back Dr. Wesley Elsberry and Dr. Jeffrey Shallit co-wrote an article, “Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski’s ‘Complex Specified Information’,” in response to William Dembski’s 2001 book No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence. No Free Lunch was something of a sequel to Dembski’s first major book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge University Press, 1998), but Dembski’s work has come a long way since that time. In this regard–and it’s not Elsberry or Shallit’s fault per se, this is just how things go–their critique is now somewhat out-dated. The computational research of Dembski and Robert Marks at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (as well as the Biologic Institute) has preempted Read More ›
Jonathan Wells Hits an Evolutionary Nerve
When intelligent design (ID) proponents press neo-Darwinian evolutionists on the inability of Darwinian evolution to produce new functional genetic information, a common response from evolutionists is that they get angry and engage in name calling. That’s what happened when Michael Egnor asked How does evolution produce new functional genetic information?, and it again seems to be the case now after Jonathan Wells bravely observed that “duplicating a gene doesn’t increase information content any more than photocopying a paper increases its information content.” Mathematician and ID-critic Jeffrey Shallit responded by calling Wells a “buffoon.” Dr. Shallit then proceeded to offer an irrelevant definition of information which supposedly showed that Wells was wrong. William Dembski has responded to Shallit here, but Shallit’s Read More ›