Hope all is well. I know I don’t spend too much time on here anymore. Things have gotten insanely busy and my own research career is getting started. But I have been wanting to start a little personal project and get organized. What I’m wanting to do is make a little personal library of responses to the most common ID arguments. I consider these to be:
Origin of life and information arguments
IC
edge of evolution type arguments
Devolution
Rarity of function in sequence space (think Axe)
Early mutations in development
Cambrian
Waiting time problem
Axe gauger enzyme paper.
I’m hoping people here can maybe provide links to papers, blogposts, forum posts, etc or even their own comments that I can save for reference for each of these arguments. I already have a good bit but I don’t want to miss anything. So any help would be greatly appreciated!
IC fails as any kind of scientific test, because a designer who can do anything is not falsifiable, not even in theory. Pretty much anything else that can be said about IC and ID is begging the question of testability.
And though we don’t see him here often, you might want to get in touch with @Gary_Hurd, who has encyclopedic knowledge of ID arguments, with citations.
Hi TJ
You are missing Dembski’s argument for CSI or complex specified information.
Also Ewerts argument for the observed gene sets between species following a software dependency chart.
It is questionable whether Dembski’s CSI argument is a separate argument from the others: when something is implausibly improbably good as the outcome of natural processes, he can declare it to have CSI. But first the “implausibly improbably good” calculation has to be done by means that Dembski does not tell us.
Anyway here are some others:
The No Free Lunch Theorem argument (Dembski)
The Marks/Dembski/Ewert argument that on average, “evolutionary search” does no better than random search.
The Marks/Dembski Active Information argument that natural selection can improve adaptation only if a the fitness landscape is amenable to that, and (they claim) that means that someone has provided Active Information to that fitness landscape.
The Marks/Dembski/Ewert idea that Algorithmic Specified Complexity, namely the observation that a phenotype (or maybe it’s a genotype) is computed by a nonrandomly short program, and that is rare in the space of all programs, and that somehow is hard for evolutionary processes to achieve, even though why is never made clear.
