Re: Dembski's "Explaining Specified Complexity"
William A. Dembski (bill@desiderius.com)
Mon, 20 Sep 1999 20:56:50 -0600I'm going to be brief in replying to Wesley Elsberry. I see no
contradiction in my past writings and my most recent piece to which
Elsberry is responding. Design inferences are among other things
eliminative arguments, and what they must eliminate is a chance hypothesis
(or more generally a family of chance hypotheses). If the event under that
chance hypothesis has small probability, then it is per definitionem
complex. If not, then it isn't. My most recent post is merely a
reformulation of my past ideas, nothing new. It seems that what Elsberry
wants to see is an in principle refutation of the power of evolutionary
algorithms to generate certain types of solutions before he will accept the
applicability of the design inference to biology. Fair enough. I'm
currently writing a book on just that topic: REDESIGNING SCIENCE: WHY
SPECIFIED COMPLEXITY IS A RELIABLE EMPIRICAL MARKER OF ACTUAL DESIGN.
Sincerely,
Bill Dembski
P.S. In Tower of Babel, Rob Pennock attributes the phrase "specified
complexity" to Norm Geisler ("What Mount Rushmore and DNA Have in Common,"
1986). Just to set the record straight, Norm got it from Charlie Thaxton
(Mystery of Life's Origin, 1984, pp. 130-31), and Charlie got it from
Leslie Orgel (The Origins of Life, 1973, p. 189).