Waiting for a substantive response from Marks and Dembski

Robert J. Marks II and William A. Dembski have been mouthing off publicly about the grand progress they've made in IDC theory. It's not so much that they annoy me as that they make it clear that they're preparing for the next judicial test of public education in creationism. The recent approval of a "scientific strengths and weaknesses" bill by the education committee of my state's house of representatives has got me thinking that the next court case may not be all that far in the future.

A "Darwin or Design?" podcast interview (read on while it loads in a new tab, and then skip to 7:52) with Marks includes this cute little exchange:

Question: Are you getting any kind of response from the other side? Are they saying this is kind of interesting, or are they kind of putting stoppers in their ears? What's going on?

Answer: It's more of the stoppers in the ears thus far. We have a few responses on blogs, which are unpleasant,* and typically personal attacks, so those are to be ignored. We're waiting for, actually, something substantive in response.

The fact is that I contradicted a key claim of Marks and Dembski 16 years ago, in my very first paper regarding the "no free lunch" theorems. I proved that a search algorithm cannot gain exploitable information by processing samples of the fitness function. Yet Marks and Dembski insist on characterizing fitness functions as "oracles" that "guide" searches to satisfactory solutions by providing "warmer-colder" information. The burden is not on me to demonstrate that this is hooey, but instead on them to prove me wrong. You should not wait with bated breath for them to do so, any more than you should gamble on seeing the refutation of the coevolutionary free lunch theorem that they supposedly have in the works.

As for publishing direct criticism of their work, it's harder to do than you might suspect. Engineers and scientists are not paying attention to Marks and Dembski, and thus there's little reason for a journal to accept an article that does nothing but debunk their claims. The trick is to develop valuable new results that naturally give rise to critical analysis of so-called "active information."

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* Yes, I am plenty annoyed with Marks and Dembski. I gave them ample benefit of the doubt, and they demonstrated that they are liars for God. I've learned that people who fob off defense of religious faith as research usually exhibit other unsavory behaviors. In my early days of IDC watching, I emailed Dembski to explain politely that he had misunderstood the "no free lunch" theorem, and he replied, "OK, but don't expect me to admit to that." When I found Marks' name on the signature page of a master's thesis plagiarizing his own publications with Dembski, I was shocked, though I should not have been. Sure, I've posted a lot on the character of these apologists who sow confusion in a field that I worked hard to plow. But I've also posted plenty of technical substance. Don't expect them to acknowledge points other than those they absolutely must.

Oppose the Oklahoma Science Education Act

Oklahoma Senator Josh Brecheen went out of his way to publish his religious purpose for introducing anti-science legislation last year:

[SB 554] is an attempt to bring parity to subject matter taught in our public schools, paid for by the taxpayers and driven by a religious ideology. I’m talking about the religion of evolution. Yes, it is a religion. The religion of evolution requires as much faith as the belief in a loving God, when all the facts are considered (mainly the statistical impossibility of key factors).

This year he's pushing SB 1742, the Oklahoma Science Education Act. The statute in the bill comes from the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), which passed in 2008, and has yet to be tested in court. However, it excludes LSEA's provisions for regulation of teaching in local school districts.

There are two main ways in which SB 1742 differs from similar bills the Oklahoma legislature has considered. First, rather than require local school districts to instruct students in arguments against particular scientific theories, it would allow them to do so, and would require the State Board of Education to provide assistance. Second, it indicates that the secular purpose of the instruction would be to promote "critical thinking, logical analysis, open and objective discussion of scientific theories."

SB 1742 would allow teachers to "use supplemental textbooks and instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories," including "evolution, the origin of life, global warming, and human cloning." However, the ostensible learning objective is utterly unrealistic, and the supplements themselves purport to provide objective review, analysis, and criticism. Thus it is patently dishonest to suggest that the supplements merely "help" the students.

When a bill like this reaches the floor for a vote, demagoguery walks in the door, and rationality flies out the window. Thus it is essential to stop it at an earlier stage of the legislative process. Members of the Senate Education Committee and the Subcommittee on Education of the Senate Appropriations Committee (see below) will consider SB 1742, and I ask those of you who live in Oklahoma to contact them as soon as possible.

Why exclude LSEA's provisions for regulation?

Here is the proposed law, along with substantive text deleted from the Louisiana law:

     A. The State Board of Education, upon the request of a school district board of education, shall allow and assist teachers, principals, and school administrators in creating an environment within the public school system that promotes critical thinking, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origin of life, global warming, and human cloning. Assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated in this subsection.
     B. A teacher shall teach the material presented in the standard science textbook and thereafter may use supplemental textbooks and instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner, as permitted by the… local public school board unless otherwise prohibited by the State Board of… Education.
     C. This act shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular or set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.
     D. The State Board of Education and each… local public school board shall adopt and promulgate the rules and regulations necessary to implement the provisions of this act.

Barbara Forrest¹ reports that after LSEA passed, the Louisiana Department of Education drafted regulations forbidding what the act putatively does not promote:

1. Religious beliefs shall not be advanced under the guise of encouraging critical thinking.
2. Materials that teach creationism or intelligent design or that advance the religious belief that a supernatural being created humankind shall be prohibited for use in science classes.

It took some behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the regulations removed. Senator Brecheen apparently seeks to ensure that no state-level entity will prohibit violations of federal law. In any case, he wants for all Oklahomans to foot the bill for "no strings attached" assistance.

Senate Education Committee

This committee will consider SB 1742 first. Provide your street address in email notes.

Senator John Ford (R) (Chair) fordj@oksenate.gov 405-521-5634
Senator Gary Stanislawski (Vice Chair) stanislawski@oksenate.gov 405-521-5624
Senator Cliff Branan (R) branan@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5543
Senator Josh Brecheen (R) (sponsor of the bill)
Senator Greg Childers (R) childers@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5522
Senator Kim David (R) david@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5590
Senator Judy Eason McIntyre (D) easonmcintyre@oksenate.gov 405-521-5598
Senator Earl Garrison (D) whitep@oksenate.gov 405-521-5533
Senator Jim Halligan (R) halligan@oksenate.gov 405-521-5572
Senator David Holt (R) holt@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5636
Senator Clark Jolley (R) jolley@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5622
Senator Charlie Laster (D) laster@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5539
Senator Richard Lerblance (D) lerblance@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5604
Senator Mike Mazzei (R) mazzei@oksenate.gov 405-521-5675
Senator Jonathan Nichols (R) nichols@oksenate.gov (405) 521-5535
Senator Susan Paddack (D) paddock@oksenate.gov 405-521-5541
Senator John Sparks (D) sparks@oksenate.gov 405-531-5553

Subcommittee on Education of the Senate Appropriations Committee

I've omitted contact information for senators listed above.

Sen. Jim Halligan (Chair)
Sen. John Ford
Sen. Cliff Aldridge (R) aldridge@oksenate.gov 405-521-5584
Senator Josh Brecheen
Sen. Rick Brinkley (R) brinkley@oksenate.gov 405-521-5586
Sen. Judy Eason McIntyre
Sen. Earl Garrison
Sen. Mike Mazzei
Sen. Susan Paddack
Sen. Frank Simpson (R) simpson@oksenate.gov 405-531-5607
Sen. John Sparks
Sen. Gary Stanislawski

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¹ Professor Forrest, who provided expert testimony on the intelligent design movement in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, has provided gobs of information relevant to SB 1742 on the Louisiana Coalition for Science blog.

Chaos and machine intelligence

"Intelligent design" creationists such as Robert J. Marks II often claim that only intelligence, whatever that is, creates information. Some people, including me, respond that chaotic systems create information. My perspective is somewhat unusual, however, in that I've focused on chaos in artificial neural networks.

Once upon a time, I'd have assumed that Marks' perspective was similar to my own. He has published books on artificial neural networks and on information theory. He knows that artificial neural nets with feedback loops can behave chaotically, and he should know that there is considerable support for the notion that chaos is essential to information processing in biological brains. Furthermore, he should know that Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy and positive Lyapunov exponents are measures of the rate at which a system creates information as it pursues a chaotic orbit.

Many investigators of machine intelligence believe that a system doesn't deserve to be called "intelligent" unless it is creative in some sense. When we build a chaotic system, and then set it loose to interact with an environment, we cannot predict what it will do over the long term. Although it is our artifact, it acquires a "mind" of its own. And thus we gain information by observing it.

I don't want to give the impression that chaos requires "intelligent design." There are extremely simple dynamical systems that behave chaotically, e.g., the logistic map,

x_n+1 = rx_n (1 - x_n).

(See the Wikipedia article I've linked to for details.) Stephen Wolfram's program of exploration of cellular automata (see A New Kind of Science) has led to the discovery of many chaotic systems that easily could arise by chance.

The upshot is that it makes sense to say that an "intelligent" system with chaotic components creates information, but not that only intelligence creates information.

Install Ubuntu Linux alongside OS X Tiger

Setting up a Mac to boot either OS X (10.7.2) or Ubuntu Linux (11.10, 64-bit) is easy. (The complicated procedures that turn up in Web searches are outdated.)

1. Download the ISO image of the installation CD.


2. Use Disk Utility to burn the image into a CD.


3. Use Disk Utility to partition the hard drive.


4. [Plug in USB mouse/keyboard.]


5. Boot the “live” version of Ubuntu from CD.


6. [Connect to wireless router.]


7. Click the “install” icon on the desktop.

Warnings. Don’t do this to install more than one operating system alongside OS X. There’s a question as to whether installing Linux voids the Apple warranty, and I haven’t found a credible answer online. Ubuntu crashes when I tell it to hibernate.

If you use a wireless router, make sure, before starting, that you know its name, security method, and password (key). To get the first two, click on the wi-fi icon, select “Open Network Preferences…,” and click “Advanced…”

In step 3, select the hard drive in the pane on the left, click the “Partition” button, and then drag upward the bottom border of the picture of the disk partition. This will create an empty block at the bottom. If I recall correctly, the minimum size for an Ubuntu installation is 20 gigabytes. (Don’t be a disk miser. I had 440GB of disk space available, and didn’t think twice about allocating twice the minimum size.) Be sure to click “Apply” before exiting Disk Utility.

Step 4 is necessary if your keyboard and mouse/trackpad are wireless. Here is information on use of the Magic Trackpad with Ubuntu.

In step 5, hold down the c key while rebooting.

Step 6 is necessary if you use a wireless router for Internet access. Ubuntu will prompt you to provide what it needs to connect to the router.

After installation, hold down the option key while booting to run Ubuntu. The bootstrap procedure will indicate that you have a choice between OS X and Windows. Click on “Windows” to select Ubuntu.

Accidentally American: A better example

Forgive a second ad for my other blog, Accidentally American. The post I previously linked to does not give a good idea of why I consider myself to be a citizen of the world, and an American by accident of birth. In “More American Lawlessness in the ‘War on Terror,’” I object to the Predator assassinations of criminal suspects.

“Intelligent design” creationists never define “intelligence”

Long ago, commenting on a post at Uncommon Descent, I called on William Dembski to explain what intelligence is. He responded with his standard evasion — something like “If SETI is searching for intelligence, then intelligence must have scientific legitimacy.” Unsurprisingly, the “Expelled” expelled me from his site for raising a question he didn’t want to address again.

In ethology and scientific psychology, intelligence is a hypothetical construct, not a physically real entity. You can’t cut open an organism and find intelligence, any more than you can thirst. Studies that address intelligence always define it operationally. Just as the thirst of a rat may be defined as the number of hours it has been deprived of water, the intelligence of a person may be defined as his or her score on a paper-and-pencil test. Although we know that there is a physiological basis for thirst, thirst is itself hypothetical. Similarly, density of neural connections is correlated with performance on “intelligence” tests, but intelligence remains hypothetical.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time perusing SETI documents. The use of “intelligence” is entirely casual. Some in the project have preferred “civilization” to “intelligence.” SETI scientists explicitly assume that ET thinks as they do about how to contact a distant civilization. There’s implicitly an operational definition of intelligence in that.

In contrast, intelligence does some mighty heavy lifting in ID creationism. IDCists believe that non-material intelligence, and nothing else, creates special kinds of physical information. But what is intelligence? Ruling out matter and energy, we’re left apparently with information. So information creates information ex nihilo? That’s a nonstarter. Intelligence must have a special ontological status.

Gee, what could this entity that creates physical stuff out of nothing be? Do you suppose that IDCists believe that creative intelligence is spiritual in essence? There is, of course, no way for it to be anything but in the belief systems of almost all of them. Far be it from me to criticize personal belief in creative intelligence. But I have huge problems with people who pretend to have raised a challenge to evolutionary theory that is scientific, when they know that it is at core spiritual.

Impugning randomness convincingly?

I haven’t finished reading “Impugning Randomness, Convincingly” [pdf], by Yuri Gurevich and Grant Olney Passmore, but I’ll go ahead and share its remarks about our old pal William A. Dembski.

The idea that specified events of small probability do not happen seems to be fun- damental to our human experience. And it has been much discussed, applied and misapplied. We don’t — and couldn’t — survey here the ocean of related literature. In §2 we gave already quite a number of references in support of Cournot’s principle. On the topic of misapplication of Cournot’s principle, let us now turn to the work of William Dembski. Dembski is an intelligent design theorist who has written at least two books, that are influential in creationist circles, on applications of “The Law of Small Probability” to proving intelligent design [TDI, NFL].

We single out Dembski because it is the only approach that we know which is, at least on the surface, similar to ours. Both approaches generalize Cournot’s principle and speak of independent specifications. And both approaches use the information complexity of an event as a basis to argue that it was implicitly specified. We discovered Dembski’s books rather late, when this paper was in an advanced stage, and our first impression, mostly from the introductory part of book [TDI], was that he ate our lunch so to speak. But then we realized how different the two approaches really were. And then we found good mathematical examinations of the fundamental flaws of Dembski’s work: [Wein] and [Bradley].

Our approach is much more narrow. In each of our scenarios, there is a par- ticular trial T with well defined set Ω_T of possible outcomes, a fixed family F of probability distributions — the innate probability distributions — on Ω_T , and a particular event — the focal event — of sufficiently small probability with respect to every innate probability distribution. The null conjecture is that the trial is governed by one of the innate probability distributions. Here events are subsets of Ω_T, the trial is supposed to be executed only once, and the focal event is supposed to be specified independently from the actual outcome. By impugning randomness we mean impugning the null hypothesis.

Dembski’s introductory examples look similar. In fact we borrowed one of his examples, about “the man with a golden arm” [i.e., Nicholas Caputo]. But Dembski applies his theory to vastly broader scenarios where an event may be e.g. the emergence of life. And he wants to impugn any chance whatsoever. That seems hopeless to us.

Consider the emergence of life case for example. What would the probabilistic trial be in that case? If one takes the creationist point of view then there is no probabilistic trial. Let’s take the mainstream scientific point of view, the one that Dembski intends to impugn. It is not clear at all what the trial is, when it starts and when it is finished, what the possible outcomes are, and what probability distributions need to be rejected.

The most liberal part of our approach is the definition of independent specification. But even in that aspect, our approach is super narrow comparative to Dembski’s. There are other issues with Dembski’s work; see [Wein, Bradley].

I’ve changed the reference numbers to tags that are meaningful to many of you. TDI and NFL are Dembski’s The Design Inference and No Free Lunch, respectively. James Bradley wrote “Why Dembski’s Design Inference Doesn’t Work” [pdf] for BioLogos, and Richard Wein wrote Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates for TalkOrigins.