From: Glenn Morton (glenn.morton@btinternet.com)
Date: Tue Nov 19 2002 - 17:18:02 EST
Another very silly idea which Dembski propounds in his book Intelligent
Design is the hopelessly flawed, easily falsified concept that information
is conserved. Dembski writes:
ìSince natural causes are precisely those characterized by
chance, law or a
combination of the two, the broad conclusion of the last section may be
restated as follows: Natural causes are incapable of generating CSI. I call
this result the law of conservation of information, or LCI for short. The
phrase ìlaw of conservation of informationí is not new. In The Limits of
Science Peter Medawar used it to describe the weaker claim that
deterministic laws cannot produce novel information.î William A. Dembski,
Intelligent Design, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001), p.170
This is a category mistake. The inability of Natural causes to generate CSI
doesnít mean that information is conserved. Information might be destroyed.
The two categories are very, very different. Dembski then uses this idea to
argue against evolution. Dembski writes:
"Given the law of conservation of information, it follows that inheritance
with modification by itself is incapable of explaining the increased
complexity of CSI that organisms have exhibited in the course of natural
history. Inheritance with modification needs therefore to be supplemented.
ìThe most obvious candidate here is, of course, selection. Selection
presupposes inheritance with modification, but instead of merely shifting
around already existing information, selection also introduces new
information. By seizing on advantageous modifications, selection is able to
introduce new information into a population. The majority view in
biologyóknown as the neo-Darwinian synthesisóis that selection and
inheritance with modification together are adequate to account for all the
CSI inherent in organisms. As a parsimonious account of the origin and
development of life, this view has much to commend it. Nonetheless this view
places undue restrictions on the flow of biological information,
restrictions that biological systems routinely violate.î William A. Dembski,
Intelligent Design, (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001), p. 177
He then goes on to claim that irreducible complexity can't arise by chance
and thus selection doesn't create new information.
Dembski also erroneously writes:
ìThe first corollary can be understood in terms of data storage and
retrieval. Data constitute a form of CSI. Ideally data would stay unaltered
over time. Nonetheless, entropy being the corrupting force that it is, data
tend to degrade and need constantly to be restored. Over time magnetic tapes
deteriorate, pages yellow, print fades and books disintegrate. Information
by be eternal, but the physical media that house information are subject to
natural causes and are thoroughly ephemeral. The first corollary
acknowledges this fact.î William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design, (Downers
Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001), p. 170
Information is simply not eternal. Period. I can think of numerous cases
where information is lost. Consider the Alexandrian library. This ancient
library had lots of information (defined by Shannon or colloquially). I
burned down around 600 A.D. It went up in smoke. If information is
conserved, where the millions of bits of info housed in the Alexandrian
Library go when it burned? We canít find that info in the sky or in the
smoke. The information was not preserved, it is not eternal and it was NOT,
repeat NOT conserved.
Dembski claims that a bacterial flagellum exceeds 500 bits of information.
Great. Lets assume that based on this, I have around 3000 bits of
information to define me and my body. Assume when I die, that the ID
proponents are really sick of me. THey take my body and grind it to powder.
Now, I exist as a structureless powder in the bottom of a mortar. Where
exactly is the 3000 bits of information which made me? Where did it go. How
was it conserved? What you have is a structureless pile of white powder
which will not speak to you nor argue incessantly as I do. What happens to
the information in a cremated body. What receptical preserves this 'eternal'
information? Dembski's idea of information conservation is so silly as to
be hardly worth discussing, except that people actually take this stuff
seriously.
What Dembski misses in the last quoted paragraph is that information is not
separable from the physical media. information is a physical thing.
Mathematics can only be done by manipulating physical objects. Information
isn't out there on the ether waiting to be captured or hiding when the
phsyical object decays.
glenn
see http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
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