Intelligent design advocate William Dembski has introduced a measure of information called "complex specified information", or CSI. He claims that CSI is a reliable marker of design by intelligent agents. He puts forth a "Law of Conservation of Information" which states that chance and natural laws are incapable of generating CSI. In particular, CSI cannot be generated by evolutionary computation. Dembski asserts that CSI is present in intelligent causes and in the flagellum of Escherichia coli, and concludes that neither have natural explanations. In this paper we examine Dembski's claims, point out significant errors in his reasoning, and conclude that there is no reason to accept his assertions.

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We present our first results concerning the de novo evolution of motility and tactic response in systems of digital organisms. Our model organism was E. coli and the behavior of interest was gradient following, since this represents simple decision-making. Our first experiments demonstrated the evolution of a tactic response, both when provided with a hand-coded system to remember previous gradient concentrations and without this crutch where the organisms must determine how to store previous values on their own. In our second set of experiments we investigated two different rotation strategies, random and systematic, and found no significant performance difference between the two strategies. These experiments served as a stepping-stone and proof-ofconcept of the infrastructure needed for our future work on the evolution of simple intelligence.

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