I guess you don’t know what supporting a claim means as you can produce no evidence to support your claim that I said ID was testable. Were you intentionally mis representing me or was this just a mistake on your part?
Dembski, Marks & al have demonstrated through several peer review publications that these evolutionary algorithms that you are talking about were successful only because «active information” has been smuggled into the evolutionary simulations by the programmers to allow them to achieve theirs goals. Remove « active information » and these algorithms no longer work.
LOL! Your knee-jerk defenses of ID’s indefensible nonsense are a real hoot!
If someone said “there are no polar bear species native to the Hawaiian islands” you’d jump up and scream “THAT’S NOT SUPPORTED!! YOU HAVEN’T LOOKED IN EVERY BASEMENT AND EVERY CAVE!!”. 
Too funny!
No. So what? “The probability of producing the amino acid sequence of a specific human protein starting from nothing” is not a measure of information, and becoming more like a human protein is not a measure of information gain.
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Ah, the old Creo favorite “computer simulations can’t support evolution because the computer software is DESIGNED!!”. 
We just had a discussion about how the DI’s clown crew publishes sciency-sounding nonsense to gull ignorant laymen. That was great timing.
Any answers to these questions Gil?
No, they have not. In particular, they have not and cannot show that “active information” can be smuggled into evolutionary algorithms such as Dave Thomas’s Steinway tree finder where the goal is unknown to the programmer.
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Another unsupported claim by unsupported Tim Horton 
The problem is at the cellular level where genetic information is identified as both nucleic and amino acid sequences.
I’ve written evolutionary algorithms. I smuggled no “active information” (a comical term in the context of many ID-defending diabtribes, IMHO) into my EA software. Their counter-argument is a silly one that may impress those unfamiliar with such algorithms but not those of us who have created them.
Dave Thomas also used EA to develop the Doug McKenzie character in the “Great White North” skit of the old SCTV program back in the late 1970’s.
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Were you searching for active information? Can you give an example?
The term “active information” arises in varied contexts (including alternative medicine, conspiracy theory conventions, and theosophical society meetings.) So what definition of “active information” are you assuming here and how does it differ from “inactive information” or “passive information”?
Well, I guess the first thing to do is to show that the living thing - self-replicating watch analogy actually holds up. Another would be to perform an analogous analysis with self-replicating objects that we know are not designed. Where do the analogies fall apart, and how does that affect the conclusions?
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I’m sorry, but do you not see that these two are almost identical, that they vary in ways that are inconsequential, and that one is supposed to be the problem and the other the solution??
Consider this:
God-of-the-Gaps Argument: Evolutionary theory can’t explain this, (implied “DESIGN can”), therefore DESIGN (implied “is the best explanation”).
Not a God-of-the-Gaps Argument: Naturalistic theories can’t explain this; DESIGN can; therefore DESIGN is the best explanation.
Am I missing something in your comparison?
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I think about active information as information in the form of a sequence like the english language proteins sequences and DNA sequences. The challenge here is the enormous amounts of ways to arrange these sequences when they have a length much above 10 units or characters.
In his weasel simulation Dawkins was creating a search that amounted to around 30 english characters or around 100 bits of “active information”. He required 100% or that active information in his program for a successful search.
Truly, his best work, eh?
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Yes, @Michael_Callen, Dave Thomas earned many loonies and toonies from that work!
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The positive case is that a mind is capable of producing the effects observed. This is the positive case.
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Think about that. Because we usually write algorithms using a programming language which uses “sequences” in some form (e.g., with English-like mneumonics) to produce output which involves “sequences” in some form, the argument is meaningless. It is as if the critics are complaining that because the results did not arise “truly ex nihilo!” as in out of thin air, the evolutionary algorithms don’t illustrate “unintelligent processes” achieving their goals. Absolute rubbish.
That’s not the first time a William Dembski argument made me wince. For me, EAs hit me too close to home.
POSTSCRIPT:
I think @Roy made a very good point which also applies to Dembski’s argument
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Sorry Bill, I may be dense, but I don’t see how one is substantially the positive case and the other is not. Can you include more text for me as I have done?
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