Now that I’ve made this argument, some probably have the nagging suspicion that the argument is just more intellectual obscurantism and I’m trying to muddy a clear choice between Creationism and Darwinism. To counteract your nagging suspicion here is a series of links to show you that while many experts claim Dembski is wrong, when you only accept their claims in their areas of expertise and aggregate them, they actually agree with Dembski:
Demski is a good mathematician, but doesn’t use the No Free Lunch Theory (NFLT) correctly
“In my taxonomy of statistical errors, this is basically modifying the search space: he’s essentially arguing for properties of the search space that eliminate any advantage that can be gained by the nature of the evolutionary search algorithm. But his only argument for making those modifications have nothing to do with evolution: he’s carefully picking search spaces that have the properties he want, even though they have fundamentally different properties from evolution.”
Dembski uses the NFLT correctly, but doesn’t fill in all the details to show that it applies to biological coevolution
“Indeed, throughout there is a marked elision of the formal details of the biological processes under consideration. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that neo-Darwinian evolution of ecosystems does not involve a set of genomes all searching the same, fixed fitness function, the situation considered by the NFL theorems. Rather it is a co-evolutionary process. Roughly speaking, as each genome changes from one generation to the next, it modifies the surfaces that the other genomes are searching. And recent results indicate that NFL results do not hold in co-evolution.”
The NFLT applies to biological coevolution (see example 4 and conclusion)
“On the other hand, we have also shown that for the more
general biological coevolutionary settings, where there is no
sense of a “champion” like there is in self-play, the NFL
theorems still hold.”
If you want to respond to this comment, please email me that you’ve responded, or email me your response.
Now that I’ve made this argument, some probably have the nagging suspicion that the argument is just more intellectual obscurantism and I’m trying to muddy a clear choice between Creationism and Darwinism. To counteract your nagging suspicion here is a series of links to show you that while many experts claim Dembski is wrong, when you only accept their claims in their areas of expertise and aggregate them, they actually agree with Dembski:
Demski is a good mathematician, but doesn’t use the No Free Lunch Theory (NFLT) correctly
Good math bad math http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/03/king-of-bad-math-dembskis-bad.html
“In my taxonomy of statistical errors, this is basically modifying the search space: he’s essentially arguing for properties of the search space that eliminate any advantage that can be gained by the nature of the evolutionary search algorithm. But his only argument for making those modifications have nothing to do with evolution: he’s carefully picking search spaces that have the properties he want, even though they have fundamentally different properties from evolution.”
Dembski uses the NFLT correctly, but doesn’t fill in all the details to show that it applies to biological coevolution
Wolpert, one of the originators of the NFLT http://www.talkreason.org/articles/jello.cfm
“Indeed, throughout there is a marked elision of the formal details of the biological processes under consideration. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is that neo-Darwinian evolution of ecosystems does not involve a set of genomes all searching the same, fixed fitness function, the situation considered by the NFL theorems. Rather it is a co-evolutionary process. Roughly speaking, as each genome changes from one generation to the next, it modifies the surfaces that the other genomes are searching. And recent results indicate that NFL results do not hold in co-evolution.”
The NFLT applies to biological coevolution (see example 4 and conclusion)
Wolpert and Macready on coevolutionary free lunches http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub/869h/0869%20(Wolpert).pdf (example on page 2, but doesn’t state the evolution finding in the conclusion)
http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/images/1/15/Wolpert-Coevolution.pdf (example on page 5, contains statement in conclusion)
“On the other hand, we have also shown that for the more general biological coevolutionary settings, where there is no sense of a “champion” like there is in self-play, the NFL theorems still hold.”
If you want to respond to this comment, please email me that you’ve responded, or email me your response.