{"id":844,"date":"2010-02-15T11:32:04","date_gmt":"2010-02-15T11:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2010\/02\/15\/disco-strikes-out-again-casey-luskin-kitzmiller-and-new-information\/"},"modified":"2010-02-15T11:32:04","modified_gmt":"2010-02-15T11:32:04","slug":"disco-strikes-out-again-casey-luskin-kitzmiller-and-new-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2010\/02\/15\/disco-strikes-out-again-casey-luskin-kitzmiller-and-new-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Disco Strikes Out Again: Casey Luskin, Kitzmiller, and New Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for
\ninformation theory stuff. I really don’t deserve it: Jeff Shallit at
\nRecursivity<\/a> knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best.<\/p>\n

Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute,
\nresident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part<\/em>
\nseries on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of
\nintelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong. In Kitzmiller, the
\nintelligent design folks didn’t just lose; they utterly humiliated themselves.
\nBut Casey has taken it on himself to demonstrate why, not only did they
\nnot<\/em> make themselves look like a bunch of dumb-asses, but they
\nin fact should have won, had the judge not been horribly biased against them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Casey’s basic argument is really pathetic. The idea behind it is that the
\njudge in the case allowed the ruling to be dictated by the National Center for
\nScience Education (NCSE), which filed an Amicus brief that was quoted
\nextensively in the decision.<\/p>\n

Casey’s key piece of evidence?<\/p>\n

In the NCSE brief and in testimony, the fact that mutations can add
\ninformation to genome was discussed. In both cases, the key citation was a
\nreview article from a group led by Maunyuan Long of the University of Chicago,
\nwhich provides an overview of research that describes how new genes are
\nformed.<\/p>\n

As a disco-creationist, Casey claims that random processes like mutation
\ncannot create<\/em> information. If a random process can’t create
\ninformation, then the information in an organism’s genes must have some
\nnon-random source – like the “intelligent designer”. <\/p>\n

Given that, according to Casey and his fellow disco-dancers,
\nevolution can’t create information, there must<\/em> be something
\nwrong with the work that was cited at the trial. And Casey,
\ntrue genius that he is, discovered the problem: words!<\/p>\n

You see, in Long et al’s paper, they don’t use the word<\/em>
\n“information”, much less the phrase “new genetic information”. Therefore, the
\npaper doesn’t discuss the origin of genetic information. Anyone who says
\nthat it does is clearly lying! <\/p>\n

\nVirtually all of those “publications” mentioned by Judge Jones
\ncame from one single paper Miller discussed at trial, a review article,
\nco-authored by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago. The article does
\nnot even contain the word “information,” much less the phrase “new genetic
\ninformation.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The catch, of course, is that the paper does<\/em> discuss the origin
\nof genetic information. But the authors are primarily biologists, not
\nmathematicians. Instead of talking about “new genetic information”, they talk
\nabout “new genes”. What’s a new gene? It’s a gene that’s different<\/em>
\nfrom any pre-existing gene. So what’s the content of the new gene? All
\ntogether now: “information”! <\/p>\n

But simple reasoning like that isn’t exactly Casey’s strong suit. Being a
\nscientific illiterate, he can’t read the paper to understand what it says. All
\nhe can do is look at the words. But that’s enough for Casey. Clearly<\/em>,
\na paper titled “The Origin of New Genes” doesn’t discuss the origin of new
\ngenetic information – after all, it doesn’t have the words “new genetic
\ninformation” in it!<\/p>\n

It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s so damned stupid that it’s hard to believe
\nthat even a disco dude like Casey could possibly say it without being
\nembarrassed. You’d think that after this long, I’d have reached the point
\nwhere I couldn’t be surprised by these shmoes any more, but they keep lowering
\nthe bar.<\/p>\n

And it gets worse.<\/p>\n

\nBut are Judge Jones’s, Ken Miller’s, and the NCSE’s bold proclamations
\nsupported? Does Long et al. actually reveal the origin of new biological
\ninformation? Is Explore Evolution wrong? A closer look shows that the NCSE is
\nequivocating over the meanings of the words “information” and “new,” and that
\nthe NCSE’s citations are largely bluffs, revealing little about how new
\ngenetic functional information could originate via unguided evolutionary
\nmechanisms. This bluff was accepted at face value by Judge Jones, who
\nincorporated it in his highly misguided legal ruling.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This argument is particularly silly coming from Disco. Many of disco’s
\narguments go back to the stupidity of Dembski’s “complex specified
\ninformation”. In all of the years of arguments about CSI, Dembski has
\nnever<\/em> provided an unequivocal definition of CSI. While claiming that
\nit’s a specific, computable quantity, he has never<\/em> defined it well
\nenough to allow anyone to compute the CSI in any system; and he has never
\ndemonstrated a complete computation of CSI. In fact, he can’t possibly do
\nthat, because to do it, he would need to stop fudging about what CSI actually
\nis, and the moment he did that, the whole CSI argument can be refuted. Dembski
\nconstantly relies on the equivocation in the definition of CSI, so that
\nany time anyone tries to refute it, he can just wave his hands
\nand say “Oh no, you idiot, that<\/em> isn’t CSI.”<\/p>\n

For their arguments, the disco folks continually discuss CSI. They
\nconstantly cite it as the<\/em> primary reason that people should take
\nintelligent design seriously as science. And yet they’ve never managed to
\nactually compute it, or even to actually define<\/em> it without hedging.
\nBut it’s the other<\/em> guys are trying to pull the wool over our eyes by
\nequivocating over the definition of information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for information theory stuff. I really don’t deserve it: Jeff Shallit at Recursivity knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best. Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin […]<\/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-844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intelligent-design"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-dC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844","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=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}