Gpuccio’s Theory of Intelligent Design

Gpuccio has made a series of comments at Uncommon Descent and I thought they could form the basis of an opening post. The comments following were copied and pasted from Gpuccio’s comments starting here

 

To onlooker and to all those who have followed thi discussion:

I will try to express again the procedure to evaluate dFSCI and infer design, referring specifically to Lizzies “experiment”. I will try also to clarify, while I do that, some side aspects that are probably not obvious to all.

Moreover, I will do that a step at a time, in as many posts as nevessary.

So, let’s start with Lizzie’s “experiment”:

Creating CSI with NS
Posted on March 14, 2012 by Elizabeth
Imagine a coin-tossing game. On each turn, players toss a fair coin 500 times. As they do so, they record all runs of heads, so that if they toss H T T H H H T H T T H H H H T T T, they will record: 1, 3, 1, 4, representing the number of heads in each run.

At the end of each round, each player computes the product of their runs-of-heads. The person with the highest product wins.

In addition, there is a House jackpot. Any person whose product exceeds 1060 wins the House jackpot.

There are 2500 possible runs of coin-tosses. However, I’m not sure exactly how many of that vast number of possible series would give a product exceeding 1060. However, if some bright mathematician can work it out for me, we can work out whether a series whose product exceeds 1060 has CSI. My ballpark estimate says it has.

That means, clearly, that if we randomly generate many series of 500 coin-tosses, it is exceedingly unlikely, in the history of the universe, that we will get a product that exceeds 1060.

However, starting with a randomly generated population of, say 100 series, I propose to subject them to random point mutations and natural selection, whereby I will cull the 50 series with the lowest products, and produce “offspring”, with random point mutations from each of the survivors, and repeat this over many generations.

I’ve already reliably got to products exceeding 1058, but it’s

possible that I may have got stuck in a local maximum.

However, before I go further: would an ID proponent like to tell me whether, if I succeed in hitting the jackpot, I have satisfactorily refuted Dembski’s case? And would a mathematician like to check the jackpot?

I’ve done it in MatLab, and will post the script below. Sorry I don’t speak anything more geek-friendly than MatLab (well, a little Java, but MatLab is way easier for this) Continue reading

An Invitation to G Puccio

gpuccio addressed a comment to me at Uncommon Descent. Onlooker, a commenter now unable to post there,

(Added in edit 27/09/2012 – just to clarify, onlooker was banned from threads hosted by “kairosfocus” and can still post at Uncommon Descent in threads not authored by “kairosfocus”)

has expressed an interest in continuing a dialogue with gpuccio and petrushka comments:

By all means let’s have a gpuccio thread.

There are things I’d like to know about his position.

He claims that a non-material designer could insert changes into coding sequences. I’d like to know how that works. How does an entity having no matter or energy interact with matter and energy? Sounds to me like he is saying that A can sometimes equal not A.

He claims that variation is non stochastic and that adaptive adaptations are the result of algorithmic directed mutations. Is that in addition to intervention by non-material designers? How does that work?

What is the evidence that non-stochastic variation exists or that it is even necessary, given the Lenski experiment? Could he cite some evidence from the Lenski experiment that suggests directed mutations? Could he explain why gpuccio sees this and Lenski doesn’t?

It’s been a long time since gpuccio abandoned the discussion at the Mark Frank blog. I’d like to see that continued.

So I copy gpuccio’s comment here and add a few remarks hoping it may stimulate some interesting dialogue. Continue reading

Is ‘Design in Nature’ a Non-Starter?

A row is ready to erupt over two competing notions of ‘design in nature.’ One has been proposed under the auspices of being a natural-physical law. The other continues to clamour for public attention and respectability among natural-physical scientists, engineers and educators, but carries with it obvious religious overtones (Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Wedge Document and Dover trial 2005) and still has not achieved widespread scholarly support after almost 20 years of trying.

One the one hand is the Discovery Institute’s notion of ‘design in nature,’ which is repeated in various forms in the Intelligent Design movement. Here at TSZ many (the majority of?) people are against ID and ID proponents’ views of ‘design in nature.’ The author of this thread is likewise not an ID proponent, not an IDer. On the other hand is Duke University engineering and thermodynamics professor Adrian Bejan’s notion of ‘design in nature’ (Doubleday 2012, co-authored with journalism professor J. Peder Zane), which rejects Intelligent Design theory, but contends that ‘design’ is nevertheless a legitimate natural scientific concept. Apropos another recent thread here at TSZ, Bejan declares that his approach “solves one of the great riddles of science – design without a designer.”

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A (repeated) challenge to Upright Biped

Upright Biped,

Before fleeing the discussion in July, you spent months here at TSZ discussing your “Semiotic Theory of ID”. During that time we all struggled with your vague prose, and you were repeatedly asked to clarify your argument and explain its connection to ID. I even summarized your argument no less than three times (!) and asked you to either confirm that my summary was accurate or to amend it accordingly. You failed to do so, and you also repeatedly refused to answer relevant, straightforward questions from other commenters here.

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