Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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All I see in Dembski's "active information" stuff is a re-labeling of his earlier concept of a "probability amplifier". There's a vestige from that earlier incarnation of the argument:
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Dawkins’s WEASEL, Adami’s AVIDA, Ray’s Tierra, and Schneider’s ev are alternative searches. As such, they improve on a null search by increasing the probability of successfully locating targets.
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I don't see anything else going on here other than the use of rhetoric that isn't as obviously bogus as "probability amplifier". The concept remains just as worthless as in the original outing. Dembski keeps looking for information in all the wrong places, as in his 1997 talk at the NTSE conference in Austin. There, Dembski provided a quantification of the amount of information that natural selection could fix per generation as -log_2(1/n) bits, where n was the number of offspring an organism had. Bill Jeffereys asked Dembski if a mutation for, say, a coat color in dogs had a different amount of information simply because of a difference in the number of pups a bitch might have in her litter? "Active information" shares exactly the same defect. One would think Dembski would learn something due to these interactions. During the NTSE talk, Dembski had assured everyone that he would expand and justify his argument about natural selection's limited capacity to fix information in section 6.3 of his upcoming book, "The Design Inference". Neither section 6.3 nor any other there actually paid off Dembski's promissory note. The latest article simply seems to deliver a version of the busted argument Dembski declined to put into print in 1998.
Edited by Wesley R. Elsberry on May 02 2009,17:18
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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