{"id":800,"date":"2009-08-21T09:20:06","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T09:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2009\/08\/21\/bill-dembski-weasels-under-even-my-low-expectations\/"},"modified":"2009-08-21T09:20:06","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T09:20:06","slug":"bill-dembski-weasels-under-even-my-low-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2009\/08\/21\/bill-dembski-weasels-under-even-my-low-expectations\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Dembski Weasels Under Even My Low Expectations"},"content":{"rendered":"

A brief disclaimer before I start. I do not read Uncommon Descent. I didn’t check
\nit before writing my post yesterday. So I didn’t know about the content of Dembski’s
\npost there that I’m about to write about, until I saw Bob O’H<\/a>‘s comment on my post this morning.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I explained how he used Dawkins’ “weasel” experiment as an example
\nof his and Marks’ approach to quantifying the information in search. I said that
\nit was a lousy example for what it was purportedly being used to demonstrate. And I
\ntheorized that he wanted to claim peer-review approval for his “critique” of Dawkins.<\/p>\n

Unbeknownst to me, before I even wrote those words, Dembski had already<\/em>
\ndone that, over on UD (as usual, I refuse to link to UD; you know where to find them
\nif you really must):<\/p>\n

\nP.S. Our critics will immediately say that this really isn’t a pro-ID article but that it’s about something else (I’ve seen this line now for over a decade once work on ID started encroaching into peer-review territory). Before you believe this, have a look at the article. In it we critique, for instance, Richard Dawkins METHINKS*IT*IS*LIKE*A*WEASEL (p. 1055). Question: When Dawkins introduced this example, was he arguing pro-Darwinism? Yes he was. In critiquing his example and arguing that information is not created by unguided evolutionary processes, we are indeed making an argument that supports ID.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Umm… Bill, the reason that your critics say it isn’t a pro-ID article is because
\nit doesn’t talk about intelligent design<\/em>. It’s a rather dull math paper
\nabout how to quantify the information content of a search algorithm that that
\nallows it to perform well in a particular kind of search domain.<\/p>\n

And the paper doesn’t critique Dawkins’ experiment at all<\/em>! It
\ndescribes<\/em> a variant of the “Weasel” experiment as an example of how
\nto quantify the landscape information in a partitioned search. It doesn’t
\ncritique<\/em> that at all; it just presents a straightforward analysis of it.
\nSo it doesn’t actually critique anything.<\/p>\n

But more importantly: as people have explained to you hundreds of times by now, Dawkins’ didn’t use locking<\/em>. Dawkins’ search algorithm was not
\npartitioned search<\/em>. In fact, the algorithm that Dawkins’ used can’t be
\nmodeled as a partitioning search at all.<\/em><\/p>\n

So, as usual… Dembski is a liar. At this point, there’s just no way to
\nexcuse him. I don’t consider him to be a particularly competent mathematician – but
\nignorance and incompetence are no longer an adequate explanation of his rubbish. He’s
\nhad the locking error pointed out to him numerous times; he’s had the difference explained
\nto him, demonstrated to him, proven to him numerous times – but he still keeps
\nharping on the incorrect version of the experiment, because it’s an easier target.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A brief disclaimer before I start. I do not read Uncommon Descent. I didn’t check it before writing my post yesterday. So I didn’t know about the content of Dembski’s post there that I’m about to write about, until I saw Bob O’H‘s comment on my post this morning. Yesterday, I explained how he used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligent-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-cU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}