head of Tyrannosaurus Rex Rebuttal to William A. Dembski's Posting and to His Book "No Free Lunch"

Thomas D. Schneider

Rebuttal to William A. Dembski's Posting

2001 June 6.

William A. Dembski claims (metanexus june 5, 2001) (another link: http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_americasobsession.htm) that the ev program does not demonstrate an information increase. On this page I will correct several errors in his posting. (Note: a critical test of one of his claims is given on another page.)


2001 June 7. Wesley R. Elsberry has a very extensive page on William A. Dembski. (2002 Jun 20. The old page moved.)


Rebuttal to "No Free Lunch"

2002 January 23. Dembski has published a book:

No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence, By William A. Dembski Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., $35.00, Cloth 0-7425-1297-5, November 2001, 432pp, amazon.com

In Section 4.9, "Following the Information Trial", on pages 212-218, Dembski attempts to deal not only with the Ev program, but also with my rebuttal on this page.

Summary of No Free Lunch. I have reviewed a small portion of No Free Lunch here, but it was full of not only errors but also many poor arguments. At amazon.com an unnamed (!) reviewer "A reader from New Mexico" asked that the scientific community respond to this book. This is a response. Not surprisingly, Dembski's arguments fail time and time again.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ilya Lyakhov and Wesley R. Elsberry for many useful comments.

2002 March 10. I completed reading No Free Lunch. Dembski attempts to define complex specified information. His arguments are messy (repeatedly varying from silly examples to overdone math) but the essentials seem clear enough to deal with. I therefore asked whether the Ev program creates CSI and was led to conclude that it does. (This in no way implies that I condone CSI. I think it is a mistake and that Shannon was a master to avoid this mistake.) The logic is given on Dissecting Dembski's "Complex Specified Information".

2002 April 25. Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski's book No Free Lunch by Richard Wein.

"The standard of scholarship is abysmally low, and the book is best regarded as pseudoscientific rhetoric aimed at an unwary public which may mistake Dembski's mathematical mumbo jumbo for academic erudition."

2005 June 16. Critique of "Irreducible Complexity Revisited"

2011 Feb 16. Dissection of "A Vivisection of the ev Computer Organism: Identifying Sources of Active Information"

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origin: 2001 June 6
updated: version = 2.25 of dembskirebuttal.html 2016 Feb 29
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