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goodmath | December 14, 2009 An alert reader pointed me at
href="http://www.uncommondescent.com/philosophy/what-is-intelligence/"
rel="nofollow">a recent post over at Uncommon Descent by a guy who calls
himself "niwrad", which argues (among other things) that life is
non-computable. In fact, it basically tries to use computability
as the basis of Yet Another Sloppy ID Argument (TM).
As you might expect, it's garbage. But it's garbage that's right
up my alley!
It's not an easy post to summarize, because frankly, it's
pretty incoherent. As you'll see when we starting looking
at the sections, niwrad contradicts…
goodmath | November 16, 2009 For those who have slightly better memory of recent events than an average
gerbil, you'll surely remember that not too long ago, the Intelligent Design
folks, with the help of Ben Stein, put together a whole movie about how
evilutionists are all a bunch of evil fascists, out to silence the poor,
hard-working IDers.
You'll also remember that Bill Dembski has been talking up the fact that
he's got two peer reviewed papers allegedly about intelligent design. So,
you'd think that after complaining about being locked out of the debate,
now that he has some actual papers to talk about, he'd be…
goodmath | May 11, 2009 Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski has responded to my critique of
his paper with Marks. In classic Dembski style, he ignores the
substance of my critique, and resorts to quote-mining.
In my previous post, I included a summary of my past critiques of
why search is a lousy model for evolution. It was a brief summary of
past comments, which did nothing but set the stage for my
critique. But, typically, Dembski pretended that that was the entire
substance of my post, and ignored the rest of it. Very typical of
Dembski - just misrepresent your opponents, create a strawman, and
then pretend that…
goodmath | May 7, 2009 So. William Dembski, the supposed "Isaac Newton of Information Theory" has a new paper out with co-author Robert Marks. Since I've written about Dembski's bad IT numerous times in
the past, I've been getting email from readers wanting me to comment on this latest piece of intellectual excreta.
I can sum up my initial reaction to the paper in three words: "same old rubbish". There's
really nothing new here - this is just another rehash of the same bankrupt arguments that Dembski has been peddling for years. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that Dembski
has actually…
goodmath | April 3, 2008Bad from the Bad Ideas Blog sent me a link to some clips from Ben Stein's new Magnum Opus, "Expelled". I went and took a look. Randomly, I picked one that looked like a clip from the movie rather than a trailer - it's the one titled "Genetic Mutation".
Care to guess how long it took me to find an insane, idiotic error?
4 seconds.
It's the old "evolution can't create information" scam.
The clip is Ben Stein interviewing a guy named "Maceij Giertych",
who is allegedly a population geneticist. (I say allegedly because looking
the guy up, he appears to be an agricultural biologist studying…
goodmath | June 27, 2007In light of [my recent demolition of a purported improvement on the second law of thermodynamics][2l], an alert reader sent me [a link to this really boneheaded piece of work at Uncommon Descent by Granville Sewell][sewell].
[sewell]: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/introducing-sewells-l…
[2l]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/06/dembskis_buddy_part_2_murphys…
Sewell is, yet again, trying to find some way of formulating IDist anti-evolution garbage in terms of the second law of evolution. Sewell's been doing this for ages, and it's been a
wretched failure. Naturally,…
goodmath | June 22, 2007PZ wrote about the latest nonsense from IDiot George Gilder. In this interview, Gilder tries to make some really horrible arguments about how everything is really hierarchical, and he uses "information theory, computer science, and network theory" as examples.
I believe that the universe is hierarchical, with creation at the top - the idea that there's a creator and that we, at our best, act in his image. This top-down model is what all of my work has in common. I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose. In…
goodmath | March 29, 2007 So over at the DI whiners blog, Egnor is, once again, trying to pretend that he's actually making a case for why evolution is irrelevant to antibiotic resistance. It's really getting silly; he repeats the same nonsense over and over again, desparately doing the rhetorical version of sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "La La La! I can't hear you!":
The Darwinist assertion that random variation and natural selection (chance and necessity) account for all biological complexity has nothing to do with the mundane observation that it's unwise to unnecessarily expose populations of…
goodmath | March 22, 2007 As usual, Casey Luskin over at DI's media complaints division is playing games, misrepresenting people's words in order to claim that that they're misrepresenting IDists words. Nothing like the pot calling the kettle black, eh? This time, he's accusing Ken Miller of misrepresenting Dembski
in a BBC documentary.
Let's first take a look at what Casey claims happened in the documentary:
A reporter recently sent me an anti-intelligent design BBC documentary with the outlandish title "A War on Science." In it, Darwinian biologist Ken Miller is shown purporting to refute irreducible complexity…
goodmath | March 10, 2007 This isn't really math, but I can't resist commenting on it. I was looking at Evolution News and Views, which is yet another "news" site run by the Discovery Institute, because the illustrious Dr. Egnor had an article there. And I came across this, which I found just hysterically funny:
If You Have Laws, Don't You Have to Have Punish Lawbreakers?
Robert Crowther
The Advocate today gives a big hip-hip-hooray for Darwin's "process." They worry that the public doesn't accept Darwinian evolutionary claims to explain the complex diversity of life and the universe. Must be that they just don't…
goodmath | February 24, 2007 PZ has already commented on this, but I thought that I'd throw in my two cents. A surgeon, Dr. Michael Egnor, posted a bunch of comments on a Time magazine blog that was criticizing ID. Dr. Egnor's response to the criticism was to ask: "How much new information can Darwinians mechanisms generate?"
Of course, the Discovery Institute grabbed this as if it was something profound, and posted an article on it - and that's where they really start to get stupid:
Egnor concludes:
I did a PubMed search just now. I searched for 'measurement', and 'information' and 'random' and 'e coli'. There were…
goodmath | February 5, 2007 I haven't taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense
get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the
moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then... Last week, DaveScott (which is, incidentally, a psueudonym!) decided to retaliate against my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Orac, by "outing" him, and publishing his real name and employer.
Why? Because Orac had dared to criticize the way that a potential, untested
cancer treatment has been hyped recently in numerous locations on the web, including UD.
While reading the message…
goodmath | January 3, 2007Over at [Dispatches][dispatches], Ed Brayton has been shredding my old friend Sal Cordova.
Ed does a great job arguing that intelligent design is a PR campaign, and not
a field of scientific research. Ed does a fine job with the argument; you should definitely click on over to take a look. But Sal showed up in the comments to defend himself, and made
some statements that I just can't resist mocking for their shallow stupidity and utter foolishness.
[dispatches]: http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2007/01/answering_cordova_on_ids_goa…
Let's start with a mangled metaphor from [here][comment-…
goodmath | December 26, 2006Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the
entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the [Panda's Thumb][pt], but sometimes when I don't have time, I just drop a bookmark in my "to read" folder; so on a boring Christmas afternoon, my PT backlog seemed like exactly what I needed.
[One of the articles in my backlog caught my interest.][pt-sc] (I turned out to be short enough that I should have just read it instead of dropping it into the backlog, but hey, that's how things go…
goodmath | December 5, 2006Yesterday at Pharyngula, PZ posted a description of his favorite signaling pathway in developmental biology, the [Notch system.][notch] Notch is
a cellular system for selecting one cell from a collection of essentially indistinguishable cells, so that that one cell can take on some different role.
What I found striking was that the problem that Notch solves is extremely similar to one of the classic problems of distributed systems that we study in computer science, called the leader-election problem; and that
the mechanism used by Notch is remarkably similar to one of the classic
leader-…
goodmath | November 16, 2006In my ongoing search for bad math, I periodically check out Uncommon Descent, which is Bill Dembski's
blog dedicated to babbling about intelligent design. I went to check them today, and *wow* did I hit the jackpot.
Dembski doesn't want to bother with the day-to-day work of running a blog. So he has a bunch of bozos
who do it for him. Among them is Salvador Cordova, who can almost always be counted on to say
something stupid - generally taking some press story about science, and trumpeting how it proves
intelligent design using some pathetic misrepresentation of information theory. [That's…