The Advantages of Theft over Toil: The Design Inference and Arguing from Ignorance

Should the Teaching of Biological Evolution Include the Origin of Life?

“…Although he had stated in The Origin of Species that "all the organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth may be descended from some primordial form," Darwin was keenly aware that it was not easy to explain how such an ancestral entity had first evolved. Darwin's self-imposed task was the understanding of the evolutionary processes that underlie biological diversity, an issue that is epistemologically independent from explanations of the appearance of life itself (Wilkins and Elsberry 2001;Sarkar 2007). As Darwin wrote in 1839 in his Fourth Notebook (de Beer 1960:180) "My theory leaves quite untouched the question of spontaneous generation" and, as he wrote many years afterwards to the physician George Charles Wallich, "you expressed quite correctly...that I had intentionally left the question of the Origin of Life uncanvassed as being altogether ultra vires in the present state of our knowledge" (de Beer 1959).…”

Information theory, evolutionary computation, and Dembski’s “complex specified information”

“…This is not so with a "rarefied" design inference, which Dembski urges us to make in ignorance of the properties of any putative designer and also of other causal regularities which may be operative. For more details, see [94].…”

“…The weakness of this approach seems self-evident, because this method will consistently assign design to events whose exact causal history is obscure-precisely the events Dembski is most interested in. As this framework has been adequately criticized elsewhere [23,94], we do not examine it in detail.…”

“…Several writers have already taken issue with some of Dembski's claims (e.g., [23,71,72,92,78,22,94,32]). In this paper we focus on some aspects of Dembski's work that have received little attention thus far.…”

Probability, Optimization Theory, and Evolution

“…His work devotes considerable effort to persuading the reader that his definition of CSI is both mathematically rigorous and practically applicable. Every aspect of this work has been strongly criticized by numerous philosophers and scientists (Fitelson et al 1999;Godfrey-Smith 2001;Wilkins and Elsberry 2001 primary flaws in his arguments as they apply specifically to evolutionary biology.…”