Preston Garrison wrote:
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> 1. Someone who is being hyped as "the new Isaac Newton" should know what a conservation law is and isn't. Dembski's "conservation" law (of complex specified in
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I hope that my simply quoting the "Isaac Newton" accolade made it clear how
exaggerated that seems to me: As I said earlier, my space was limited. The fact
that CSI can (in Dembski's formulation) increase slightly could be seen as the same
sort of "violation" that statistical fluctuations can produce for the 2d Law of Thermo -
& of course the 2 are not unrelated.
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> 3. Dembski and his cohorts need to face the fact that the relevant information is not just a mathematical abstraction, it is protein and nucleic acid sequence.
Again space limitations kept me from emphasizing that Dembski writes as a
athematician, not a natural scientist. I often find myself in an ambiguous situation
here. As a theorist, I have to insist to experimental colleagues on Einstein's
statement that "In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can
grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed." To the more dreamy types, OTOH, I have to cite
the same Einstein (in fact from the same essay) to the effect that "Propositions arrived
at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality."
Shalom,
George
-- George L. Murphy gmurphy@raex.com http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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