Debunking Creationism
goodmath | July 17, 2006There's been a bunch of discussion here at ScienceBlogs about whether or not mathematicians are qualified to talk about evolution, triggered by [an article by ID-guy Casey Luskin][luskin]. So far, [Razib at Gene Expression][gnxp], [Jason at][evblog1][EvolutionBlog][evblog2], and [John at Stranger Fruit][sf] have all commented on the subject. So I thought it was about time for me to toss in my two cents as well, given that I'm a math geek who's done rather a lot of writing about evolution here at this blog.
I don't want to spend a lot of time rehashing what's already been said by others. So I'…
goodmath | July 13, 2006Last night, a reader sent me a link to *yet another* wretched attempt to argue for the existence of God using Bayesian probability. I *really* hate that. Over the years, I've learned to dread Bayesian arguments, because *so many* of them are things like this, where someone cobbles together a pile of nonsense, dressing it up with a gloss of mathematics by using Bayesian methods. Of course, it's always based on nonsense data; but even in the face of a lack of data, you can cobble together a Bayesian argument by *pretending* to analyze things in order to come up with estimates.
You know, if you…
goodmath | July 5, 2006In comments to [my recent post about Gilder's article][gilder], a couple of readers asked me to take a look at a [DI promoted][dipromote] paper by
Albert Voie, called [Biological function and the genetic code are interdependent][voie]. This paper was actually peer reviewed and accepted by a journal called "Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals". I'm not familiar with the journal, but it is published by Elsevier, a respectable publisher.
Overall, it's a rather dreadful paper. It's one of those wretched attempts to take Gödel's theorem and try to apply it to something other than formal axiomatic…
goodmath | July 4, 2006As several [other][panda] [folks][pz] have mentioned, George Gilder has written a [new anti-evolution article][gilder-article] which was published in the National Review.
[panda]: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/07/the_technogeek.html
[pz]: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/if_it_werent_for_those_femin…
[gilder-article]: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3631
There's a lot to hate in this article. It's a poorly written screed, which manages to mix together all of Gilder's bogeymen: feminists, liberals, anti-supply-siders, peer reviewers,…
goodmath | June 16, 2006Right after finishing my post about how Dembski has convinced me that he is not a competent mathematician, I find PZ linking to a Panda's Thumb post about Dembski, which shows how he does not understand the meaning of the mathematical term "normalization".
Go look at the PT post: Something rotten in Denmark?
Is this guy really the best mathematician the ID folks have available to represent them?
goodmath | June 16, 2006I was recently sent a link to yet another of Dembski's wretched writings about specified complexity, titled Specification: The Pattern The Signifies Intelligence.
While reading this, I came across a statement that actually changes my opinion of Dembski. Before reading this, I thought that Dembski was just a liar. I thought that he was a reasonably competent mathematician who was willing to misuse his knowledge in order to prop up his religious beliefs with pseudo-intellectual rigor. I no longer think that. I've now become convinced that he's just an idiot who's able to throw around…
goodmath | June 13, 2006 As I mentioned yesterday, I'm going to repost a few of my critiques of the bad math of the IDists, so that they'll be here at ScienceBlogs. Here's the first: Behe and irreducibly complexity. This isn't quite the original blogger post; I've made a few clarifications and formatting fixes; but the content remains essentially the same. You can find the original post in my blogger information theory index. The original publication date was March 13, 2006.
Today, I thought I'd take on another of the intelligent design sacred cows: irreducible complexity. This is the cornerstone of some of the…
goodmath | June 12, 2006While perusing my sitemeter stats for the page, I noticed that I'd been linked to in a discussion at creationtalk.com. Expecting amusement, I wandered on over to see who was linking to me.
Someone linked to my index of articles debunking Dembski and Berlinski. The moderator of the creationtalk forum responded to my series of articles on information theory and Dembski with:
No offense to you or him, but his arguments kind of suck. I looked at his response to Behe on IC, and Dembski on Specified Complexity , to Behe's he didn't refute it, and to Dembski's his only arguement was basically…
goodmath | June 10, 2006 One of my favorite places on the net to find really goofy bad math is Answers in Genesis. When I'm trying to avoid doing real work, I like to wander over there and look at the crazy stuff that people will actually take seriously in order to justify their religion.
In my latest swing by over there, I came across something which is a bizzare argument, but which is actually interesting mathematically. It's an argument that the earth (or at least the milky way) must be at the center of the universe, because when we look at the redshifts of other objects in the universe, they appear to be…