Zachriel
Posts: 2723
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Quote-mines, ellipses, incomplete sentences, filled in sentences, and simplified restatements. Dembski's paper doesn't start well.
This is from section F. Random Mutation:
| Quote | | Dembski: If we define success of a single generation as better fitness, the active information of having {many} children as opposed to one ... |
... increases. That is Dembski's active information—which is supposedly the signal of intelligence. Making more babies. Of course, increasing the reproductive rate—all else being equal—does increase the chances that at least one child will be fitter. It works every time! (All else is not always equal. Increasing the reproductive rate requires resources, food and energy in vivo organisms, cpu and memory in silico creatures.)
Dembski seems to mix up the information he claims must be in the search algorithm with the information that is absorbed from the environment. This is not an issue with combination locks, but it is an issue with evolutionary algorithms. There is actually little discussion of evolution in the paper, and it seems to be limited to special cases.
| Quote | | Dembski: Conservation of information theorems indicate that any search algorithm performs, on average, as well as random search without replacement unless it takes advantage of problem-specific information about the search target or the search-space structure. |
With regards to evolution, we're not talking about the average performance of all search algorithms across every possible search space. We're talking about a very specific type of search algorithm and a highly organized search space. Only a study of the particulars can be fruitful. Regardless of the mathematical validity of the paper, or the utility of active information as a concept, the winked support of Intelligent Design is not warranted.
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You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.
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