Wesley R. Elsberry wrote:
>
>To: William A. Dembski
>
>Last September, you indicated that you were working on a book
>that would give your in-principle refutation of natural selection
>as a possible source of events with CSI.
Wesley, since you've raised this subject again, I'd like to reiterate my
view that CSI, as Dembski defines it, has not been shown to exist in nature.
Since we last discussed the subject, I've had it confirmed to me that
Dembski, in his book "Intelligent Design", defines the test for CSI as:
-log2 P(E) > 500
where E is a specified event. (I haven't read the book myself, but this
is basically the same as the definition Dembski gives in an on-line
article.)
This means that the test for CSI is the same as the test for design as
defined in his earlier book "The Design Inference", namely:
P(E) < 1/2 X 10^150
But no-one to my knowledge has ever succeeded in showing that the
probability of a specified event in nature is this small.
I've seen some calculations by IDers which claim to calculate the
probability, for example, of a given protein forming from a number of amino
acids. But they assume that the amino acids are selected as i.i.d.
(identical independently distributed) random variables. Of course, this
assumption is totally unrealistic, because evolution by random mutation and
natural selection would not produce such a probability distribution (the
amino acids are *not* independent).
So the demand we should be making of Dembski is not "show that natural
selection can't produce CSI", but "show that CSI actually exists in nature".
Richard Wein (Tich)
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