Bob O'H
Posts: 2564
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (Arden Chatfield @ Aug. 21 2009,23:17) | | Quote (Maya @ Aug. 21 2009,16:40) | Davey Lives!
(I must not finish with "Too bad." I must not finish with "Too bad." I must not . . .) |
Dave's the quintessential groupie: months after being fired, he's STILL tossing Dembski's salad on his own time. |
In fairness, Dave pretty much gets it
| Quote | Posted by: Dave Springer | August 21, 2009 8:48 PM
The Dembski and Marks paper is essentially correct although I don't agree that information can ever be lost. For many years theoretical physicists were arguing over whether dropping an encyclopedia into a black hole could destroy the information in it. The argument continues although Hawkings, who made the famous bet, conceded that the information would not be lost and would eventually reemerge in subtle patterns of Hawking radiation. So Dembski is in good company as far as conservation of information goes.
I remarked to him that the response from the chance & necessity crowd (the informed responses anyhow) would be that the information leading to diversification and adaptation of life comes from the environment. Said information has been in the environment since the creation of the universe. Mutation provides a constant source of queries to the environment and acquires active information from that source. The active information then becomes endogenous information through heredity. Therefore I didn't see how this casts any additional doubt on the sufficiency of the genetic search, given the resources (time and number of organisms) available to the mechanism, to transform all that exogenous information to endogenous.
The big question is where did the information come from in the first place rather than how it changed form. Inevitably the question leads to cosmology and the fine tuning problem. I don't really have a bone to pick with modification with descent over billions of years turning mud to man. What I have a problem with is the probability of it happening without the deck being stacked to make it happen. This is more or less in alignment with the thinking of deists like Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and Albert Einstein so I don't feel like I'm in totally bad company.
(emphasis added)
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OK, I don't see the necessity for the deism angle, but at least he sees that the argument isn't a problem for evolution.
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It is fun to dip into the various threads to watch cluelessness at work in the hands of the confident exponent. - Soapy Sam (so say we all)
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