There is one other issue here which you did not mention in your very short
note. :-)
It is the issue that you and I finally made peace over. They talk about
specified complexity. If something is specified, there must be a specifyer.. I
suspect when they use complexity they mean organized in Yockey's terminology
(see p. 129 Mystery of Life's origin). But they make a mistake when they say,
"A random arrangement of letters in a book is aperiodic but contains little if
any useful information since it is devoid of meaning." (p. 129)
The footnote attached has Yockey telling them that meaning is extraneous to
the sequence. I suspect he was telling them that meaning does not equal
information but they didn't understand that.
But since a highly organized sequence and a highly random sequence look alike,
one can not tell what process produced the sequence.
"Thus both random sequences and highly organized sequences are complex because
a long algorithm is needed to describe each one. Information theory shows
that it is fundamentally undecidable whether a given sequence has been
generated by a stochastic process or by a highly organized process. This is
in contrast with the classical law of the excluded middle (tertium non datur),
that is, the doctrine that a statement or theorem must be either true or
false. Algorithmic information theory shows that truth or validity may also
be indeterminate or fundamentally undecidable."~Hubert Yockey, Information
Theory and Molecular Systems, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
p. 82.
This undecidability renders Thaxton, Bradley,and Olson's statement above
unusable if they meant to imply a specifyer of the information.
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm