A note to reviewers of papers by Dembski and Marks

William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II lace their engineering papers with subtle insinuations that will strike reviewers as somewhat strange, but that probably will not raise red flags. The only publication in which they give a crystal-clear explanation of their measure of active information, and state outright what they're trying to do with it, is the somewhat philosophical Life's Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information. Note that they previously referred to "English's Law of Conservation of Information" (a term they made up). English is telling you now that he did not understand their engineering papers until he read the one addressing biological evolution.

ABSTRACT: Laws of nature are universal in scope, hold with unfailing regularity, and receive support from a wide array of facts and observations. The Law of Conservation of Information (LCI) is such a law. LCI characterizes the information costs that searches incur in outperforming blind search. Searches that operate by Darwinian selection, for instance, often significantly outperform blind search. But when they do, it is because they exploit information supplied by a fitness function — information that is unavailable to blind search. Searches that have a greater probability of success than blind search do not just magically materialize. They form by some process. According to LCI, any such search-forming process must build into the search at least as much information as the search displays in raising the probability of success. More formally, LCI states that raising the probability of success of a search by a factor of q/p (> 1) incurs an information cost of at least log(q/p). LCI shows that information is a commodity that, like money, obeys strict accounting principles. This paper proves three conservation of information theorems: a function-theoretic, a measure-theoretic, and a fitness-theoretic version. These are representative of conservation of information theorems in general. Such theorems provide the theoretical underpinnings for the Law of Conservation of Information. Though not denying Darwinian evolution or even limiting its role in the history of life, the Law of Conservation of Information shows that Darwinian evolution is inherently teleological. Moreover, it shows that this teleology can be measured in precise information-theoretic terms. [emphasis added]

You do not have to read far into the paper to find that intelligence creates information to guide biological evolution. The passage I've highlighted contradicts the Conservation Lemma (wish I hadn't called it that) I proved in my first paper (1996) regarding "no free lunch" in so-called search. The fundamental reason that there is no free lunch is that the "search" (which is nothing more than sampling, with performance measured on the sample) cannot gain exploitable information by evaluation of the fitness function. This is really just a formalization of the famous problem of induction, i.e., observations say nothing about what has yet to be observed. Use of observations to decide what to observe is a source of sampling bias, not information. Therefore, when the performance measured on a sample obtained by biased sampling is better or worse than the expected performance for uniform sampling ("blind search"), the difference can be explained only in terms of bias. I'll say much more in a forthcoming post.

You will not read all of the paper, and thus I want to call your attention to the 1-1/3 page "Conclusion: 'A Plan for Experimental Validation.'" Some highlights:

The Law of Conservation of Information, however, is not merely an accounting tool. Under its aegis, intelligent design merges theories of evolution and information, thereby wedding the natural, engineering, and mathematical sciences. On this view (and there are other views of intelligent design), its main focus becomes how evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information. Moreover, a principal theme of its research becomes teasing apart the respective roles of internally produced and externally applied information in the performance of evolving systems.

[...]

In such information-tracking experiments, the opponent of intelligent design hopes to discover a free lunch. The proponent of intelligent design, by contrast, attempts to track down hidden information costs and thereby confirm that the Law of Conservation of Information was preserved. There is no great mystery in any of this. Nor do such experiments to confirm intelligent design merely apply to the origin of life. Insofar as evolution (whether chemical or biological) is an exact experimental science, it will exhibit certain informational properties. Are those properties more akin to alchemy, where more information comes out than was put in? Or are they more akin to accounting, where no more information comes out than was put in? A systematic attempt to resolve such questions constitutes a plan for experimentally verifying intelligent design.

All of the published "information-tracking experiments" have all been analyses of evolutionary computations. (My next post shows that the "information" is nothing but logarithmically transformed performance, and that the misinterpretation is rooted in Marks' misunderstanding of the "no free lunch" theorems.) The highlighted passage indicates how Dembski and Marks will argue, perhaps as expert witnesses in the next judicial test of public-school instruction in "intelligent design" creationism (Dembski was to serve as a witness in the last, but withdrew), that their engineering/computing publications support the claim that biological evolution requires intelligent guidance.

This is in no way a suggestion that you respond to anything but the technical (de)merits of their work. Dembski himself referred a New York Times science reporter to me as a fair-minded critic of ID creationism. I have also protested what I considered to be an infringement of Marks' academic freedom at Baylor University. My intent here is to impress on you how important it is to do a thorough review, and to insist that the authors make clear to you everything that they are doing. In particular, require that they provide a rigorous definition of "search," rather than give examples or suggest that everyone knows what the term means. If the definition does not make "search" out to be sampling, with performance measured on the sample (as in Wolpert and Macready [1997], "No Free Lunch Theorems for Optimization"), then you should ask why it does not.

Raising an eyebrow at a Springer series editor

Springer announced last month that it would publish Biological Information: New Perspectives, the proceedings of a more-or-less secret conference of creationists. The publisher retracted the announcement almost immediately, saying that it was automatically generated, and that the volume was undergoing additional review.

Biological Information was listed, oddly enough, in an engineering series, the "Intelligent Systems Reference Library." The creationist argument that life was engineered is not engineering, of course. The creationists themselves regard it as science.* Only one of the editors of the proceedings, Bob Marks, has worked in the field of intelligent systems. It was probably he who proposed the volume to Springer.

I happened upon a volume in the series, and had a look at its two editors and 43 titles, 35 of which are dated 2011 or 2012. Seeing that one of the series editors is Janusz Kacprzyk, I thought immediately of the Polish journal that announced a forthcoming article by Marks and Dembski (another of the proceedings editors), but suspended operations prior to publishing it. And Prof. Kacprzyk was indeed on the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Technology and Intelligent Computing.

Membership on an editorial board is more an honor than anything else, and it's doubtful that Prof. Kacprzyk was involved in the process of review and acceptance of the article. However, it's not unreasonable to ask what he knew about it. And I did, with no mention whatsoever of Springer:

I'm curious as to how much you knew about the article. Were you aware that many scientists and engineers objected to it as "intelligent design" creationism? Did you read the article?

Prof. Kacprzyk did not dignify my email with a response. So I'll dignify his non-response with a raised eyebrow. If he knew nothing about the article, then why not say so?

How, precisely, do the editors of a series on engineered intelligent systems receive a proposal for a volume on biological information, and conclude other than that it's outside the scope of the series? The parsimonious guess is that they're compensated on a per-volume basis, and care more about cranking out volumes than anything else. But inquiring minds want to know.

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* I say that ID creationism falls into the category of speculative philosophy, "which makes claims that cannot be verified by everyday experience of the physical world or by a scientific method." And rather than advocate censorship of Biological Information, I call for Springer to classify it correctly.

The central theme of the volume is, I suspect, that biological information is the consequence of non-material intelligence operating on matter. This is a teleological view of physical reality. What's new about it is the tacit claim that something unobservable (intelligence) creates measurable stuff (information) out of nothing with evident purpose. It is hardly unfair to characterize this as speculative philosophy seeking to become science.

In the Library of Congress classification system, BD493-701 is associated with "teleology, space and time, structure of matter, plurality of worlds." Books in this range have a great deal to say about science, but are not themselves works of science. I believe that Biological Information belongs with them. Irrespective of how libraries classify it, I hope that Springer will go on record with a statement that the volume is meta-scientific.

Oppose the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act

HB 1551, the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act," passed the Oklahoma House, and goes next to the Senate Education Committee. The committee meets at 9:00 on Monday morning, and I ask those of you who live in Oklahoma to contact members as soon as possible (see below). Remember to include your home address in email correspondence.

Note that this bill, if passed into law, would give science teachers the freedom to judge where "scientific controversy" exists. It lists "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning" as examples of controversy. It does not mention, of course, the "scientific controversies" as to whether HIV causes AIDS, and as to whether HIV even exists. The thought of biology teachers effectively encouraging teenagers to doubt that unprotected sex puts them at elevated risk of AIDS is chilling. Most would not do this, but I guarantee you that there are some who would.

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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 similar bills)
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

I laughed at him, but I also applauded him

I'm just back from a public debate of whether intelligent design should be taught in public-school science classes. Baptist pastor Steve Kern argued for, and doctoral student Abbie Smith argued against. Kern is the husband of Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern, a sponsor of "academic freedom" bills.

I half-expected to see a skillful orator tie a scientist-in-training into rhetorical knots. I've known many Baptist preachers and preachers-to-be, and I assure you that plenty of them are capable of it. Abbie would nail them on the relevant science, but that's not really what wins debates on matters like this.

However, Kern was ill-prepared and slow-witted. He was so bad that I wonder whether the host of the event, the Oklahoma City chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, invited him not just for his views, but also for his ineptitude. (In last year's debate, Kern argued that the U.S. was established as a Christian nation.)

Kern did get his tongue loose at one point in the debate. He emphasized that he reads creationist science books, and then proceeded to regurgitate various ill-digested morsels. When he made his way to genetic entropy, and stated that mutations always destroy information, I merely grinned. But when he ended by proclaiming that evolutionary improvement would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I let myself chortle. I wasn't alone, but I may have been the first or the loudest. The moderator gave me a disapproving look, and I deserved it.

The debate was a bore, though Abbie presented well. The highlight, for me, came during the Q&A. Kern said outright that it is theology that drives his science, and not science that drives his theology. I waited for the audience to respond, and when it did not, I initiated a round of applause. And I was sincere in doing so. What I detest about ID creationists is their fabulous dishonesty, not their belief in God. There's nothing more I could ask of Kern, than that he explain with complete honesty his subjugation of science to religious dogma.

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, $$x_{n+1} = r x_n (1 - x_n).$$ (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.

“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:

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The idea that specified events of small probability do not happen seems to be fundamental 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 particular trial $T$ with well defined set $\Omega_T$ of possible outcomes, a fixed family $\mathcal{F}$ of probability distributions — the innate probability distributions — on $\Omega_T$, 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 $\Omega_T$, 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].

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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.

I was wrong about the Ninth Circuit opinion

In my last post, I exhibited a knee-jerk response to language in an opinion of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I’ve edited it to indicate my errors. I’m not terribly embarrassed to have forgotten Edwards v. Aguillard, and failed to recognize it as the source of various creationist watchwords. However, I have no excuse for failing to see that the court addressed the behavior of a history, not science, teacher.

I apologize for the errors, and thank Glenn Branch and Robert Luhn of the NCSE for gently setting me straight.