Evo-Info 1: Engineering analysis construed as metaphysics

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Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, by Robert J. Marks II, the “Charles Darwin of Intelligent Design”; William A. Dembski, the “Isaac Newton of Information Theory”; and Winston Ewert, the “Charles Ingram of Active Information.” World Scientific, 350 pages. January 30, 2017.
Classification: Engineering mathematics. Engineering analysis. (TA347)
Subjects: Evolutionary computation. Information technology–Mathematics.

World Scientific is pitching Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, by Robert Marks, William Dembski, and Winston Ewert, to a general readership, but with particular note of enthusiasts of apologetics. The book features the Conservation of Information Theorem, which was the centerpiece of Dembski’s religio-philosophical treatise Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (2014). So there is no denying that the authors regard their mathematical arguments as support for their religious views. And there is no great surprise in learning that the nonprofit Center for Evolutionary Informatics, operated by Marks and Dembski, has the alternate name Arbor Ministries in public records. The forthcoming book includes a section titled “The Genesis,” and this leads me to hope that the authors, mindful of the canonical teachings of Jesus, have made a clear statement of faith.

No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them.

The Library of Congress has, on pre­publication review of the book, classified the authors’ technical contributions as I did in a post last year: “Engineering mathematics. Engineering analysis.” Not scientific analysis. The Conservation of Information Theorem does not apply to scientific modeling of an evolutionary process as it does to engineering of an evolutionary computation to solve a problem. Marks, Dembski, and Ewert cannot use their math to demonstrate that an evolutionary process was formed to serve a purpose, because the math itself prespecifies a purpose. Everyone, no matter how uncomfortable with math, knows that a proof of a theorem is not a proof of what the theorem assumes to be true in the first place. Put less abstractly, you cannot identify an event that occurred in an evolutionary process, analyze the process under the assumption that the event was specified in advance as an objective, and derive support for the claim that the process was engineered to achieve that objective. In my post, I identified a theorem that applies when scientists model a process given by nature, not when engineers design a process to solve a given problem, and used it to show that the “information” addressed by the Conservation of Information Theorem is not conserved.

Now, if you’re a Christian who would like very much to believe that two Christian engineers and a Christian mathematician can use engineering analysis to provide evidence that evolution is engineered, how are you going to respond to what I have to say? What you need to do is to grapple with their mathematics, and interpret it for yourself. But, unless you’ve studied quite a bit of college-level math — material in courses that students in engineering and computer science take after they’ve completed courses in calculus — you’re not going to understand it. I’m quite sure of that, having read everything that Marks, Dembski, and Ewert have published on evolutionary informatics, having published a half-dozen papers of my own that are related to theirs, and having taught much of the requisite math. The advertisement for Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics makes the claim:

Built on the foundation of a series of peer-reviewed papers published by the authors, the book is written at a level easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math.

But you need only take a whiff of the very next sentence to detect the stench of a salesman.

Those seeking a quick first read or those not interested in mathematical detail can skip marked sections in the monograph and still experience the impact of this new and exciting model of nature’s information.

How convenient. I am telling you that the devil is in the detail, and that you should not place your trust in a gloss, no matter how godly.

When I was working with the geneticist Joe Felsenstein on a response to “A General Theory of Information Cost Incurred by Successful Search” (2013), in which the Conservation of Information Theorem is proved, I advised him to ignore what the authors wrote in plain language about the math, because it was positively misleading. (Last year, in an exchange here in The Skeptical Zone, Joe recognized Markov’s inequality in my attempt at explaining the theorem — with a very helpful prompt from Alan Fox, I should add. The upshot is that we have reduced the theorem to something much simpler than what the authors have identified, and that I have found easy derivations of results much stronger than any that they have published.) The “conservation of information” rhetoric remains much the same as it was in Dembski’s No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (2002), even though Dembski and Marks changed the meaning of information from specified complexity to active information in “Life’s Conservation Law: Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information” (2010; preprint 2008). Active information is loosely the opposite of specified complexity. Yet Dembski and Marks have never mentioned that they made the change, let alone explained why it was necessary. Dembski opens his most recent (2014) treatment of conservation of information with a gobsmacking denial of reality:

Being as Communion is the final book in a trilogy. The two earlier books were The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.

His only reference to specified complexity, the main concern of the two earlier books, is in a list of examples of “materialist-refuting logic,” buried in footnote 30 of Chapter 8.

I submit that the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics have been more concerned with preserving the story of “intelligent design” (avoiding any suggestion that Dembski blundered horribly in his earlier work) than with providing a clear explanation of what the math actually says. Of course, I have not read their forthcoming book. I would love to see them turn over a new leaf. Dealing with intellectual psychopathy is a royal pain in the tuckus. I would love to see them succeed in making their work “easily understandable to readers with knowledge of rudimentary high school math.”

Nothing would suit me better than to engage you in terms of the math, and not in terms of the misleading rhetoric that they attach to the math.

But I know, from considerable experience as a student and an educator, that understanding the math takes a great deal more work than most people are willing to do. The authors have already issued a number of accounts of their “new and exciting model of nature’s information” through the Discovery Institute, e.g., “Conservation of Information Made Simple” (2012). They have not yet found the magic words to imprint mathematical abstractions on the minds of the mathematically uninclined. But all things are possible with God, and hope springs eternal: the faithful will not rule out miracles in the new book.

Stay tuned to this “Evo-Info” series for basic insights into evolutionary informatics that almost certainly will not appear in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics.

129 thoughts on “Evo-Info 1: Engineering analysis construed as metaphysics”

  1. I have found a flaw in your argument. You said “a pain in the tuckus”. The correct spelling is “tuchus”, the “ch” being pronounced as in Johann Sebastian Bach”.

  3. Tom writes:

    Last year, in an exchange here in The Skeptical Zone, Joe recognized Markov’s inequality in my attempt at explaining the theorem — with a very helpful prompt from Alan Fox, I should add.

    Quite inadvertent, I assure you!

  4. Tom English: תּחת

    Google Translate tells me that this is the Hebrew word for “under” (or, more slangily. “butt”). The final “t” is changed to an “s” when the word moves into Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Yiddish, just as “shabat” changed to “shabbes”.

    It ends up in English as “tush” or “tushie”.

  7. It looks like one more attempt to define life as designed.

    Without, of course, noting that the limitations of evolutionary processes that cause life’s patterns and limit what can appear in a lineage simply are not the limitations of design. At most, some of those limitations appear piecemeal in the work of some designers.

    So another effort to ignore all of the evidence for unintelligent evolution while trying to claim sheer complexity of function for design.

    Glen Davidson

  8. I knew the word as one of the Yiddish words that had come into English in Jewish neighborhoods. My father used to kid me when some issue came up by tapping the side of his head and, instead of saying “use your nudel” saying “use your tuchus“.

    In 1975 I was writing a paper on some logical inconsistencies in isolation-by-distance models in population genetics. One model of spatial structure avoids mathematical ugliness at the ends of a region by imagining the line segment wrapped into a circle. In two dimensions, a rectangle is wrapped twice, becoming a torus. This gave me the opportunity to entitle the paper “A pain in the torus: some difficulties with models of isolation by distance”.

  9. GlenDavidson,

    So another effort to ignore all of the evidence for unintelligent evolution while trying to claim sheer complexity of function for design.

    What are the best arguments for unintelligent evolution?

  10. To get away from the tuchus and go to matters more cerebral, let me remind readers that basically Tom and I have already shown that the Dembski/Marks theorems are irrelevant to “evolutionary search”. I look forward to Tom’s exposition of how they can be made much easier to understand. But even if the results can be greatly simplified, they don’t show that evolutionary process will on average achieve nothing better than random mutation would in the absence of natural selection.

    That is what their descriptions of these results conveyed, but it is a wrong impression. Because they are comparing an “evolutionary search” to a collection of processes, most of which wander crazily and have no tendency to go towards more fit genotypes. Once one has there be genotypes that reproduce, and thus have fitnesses, one is already in a very special subset of the “searches” that they consider. One therefore has a substantial amount of their “active information”, and all you needed to get it was to have an organism that reproduces.

    In addition, the particular smoothness of the fitness landscape is a prediction of physics, resulting from the weakness of long-range interactions. So you get more “active information” for free there.

    Thus their theorems may be unnecessarily complicated, but even if the theorems can be greatly simplified, they don’t help make Dembski, Ewert, and Marks’s point about biological evolution needing a Designer to succeed.

    This argument by Tom and I is, of course, in our post at Panda’s Thumb in 2015. (The comments in that thread are missing, but well be restored in a couple of months once the move of PT to its new server is completed).

  11. Joe Felsenstein,

    To get away from the tuchus and go to matters more cerebral, let me remind readers that basically Tom and I have already shown that the Dembski/Marks theorems are irrelevant to “evolutionary search”. I look forward to Tom’s exposition of how they can be made much easier to understand. But even if the results can be greatly simplified, they don’t show that evolutionary process will on average achieve nothing better than random mutation would in the absence of natural selection.

    I stipulate that you have made a good point here that cuts through the BS. That natural selection creates direction to the process so that an argument that rules out random cause is irrelevant.

    Do you believe that a reasonable argument can be made that natural selection as a mechanism can explain all of life’s diversity?

  12. Joe Felsenstein: But even if the results can be greatly simplified, they don’t show that evolutionary process will on average achieve nothing better than random mutation would in the absence of natural selection.

    You’re right to emphasize that. It’s not that I lose sight of it. I get wrapped up in the engineering analysis because, well, um, that’s what I do. And I forget to make it clear to the reader that I’m not strengthening the ID argument one jot.

    The fact that I’m well qualified to respond to Marks, Dembski, and Ewert is essentially an indictment of their approach.

  13. colewd: Do you believe that a reasonable argument can be made that natural selection as a mechanism can explain all of life’s diversity?

    Do you know anything about Joe Felsenstein?

  14. Joe Felsenstein: Google Translate tells me that this is the Hebrew word for “under” (or, more slangily. “butt”). The final “t” is changed to an “s” when the word moves into Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Yiddish, just as “shabat” changed to “shabbes”.

    It ends up in English as “tush” or “tushie”.

    In Arabic, it’s Teezak.

  15. Joe Felsenstein: One therefore has a substantial amount of their “active information”, and all you needed to get it was to have an organism that reproduces.

    I like to refer to that “active information” as constraint.

    GlenDavidson: Without, of course, noting that the limitations of evolutionary processes that cause life’s patterns and limit what can appear in a lineage simply are not the limitations of design.

    “Limitations” seem about the same to me.

  16. colewd:
    GlenDavidson,

    What are the best arguments for unintelligent evolution?

    Having things to do, and, knowing how you ignore what you don’t like while repeating ID/creationist slogans, I would just answer with something that covers it that you should have already considered meaningfully. The (very long) paragraph about what evolution is that I wrote:

    Whether it is a court case or science, the capabilities and limits of causes of specific effects are crucial to deciding whether or not there is good reason to doubt the alleged cause or causes. Evolutionary theory lives or dies on the evidence of the specific effects caused by its capabilities and limits, as should any other claimed cause of life and its diversity. In simple form, evolution is caused by reproduction, which passes inherited information from parent to child, or from single cell to daughter cells, with considerable fidelity, but also with changes in that information called mutations. Detrimental mutations tend to be weeded out by natural selection, while natural selection tends to retain beneficial mutations, and over many generations intersecting and additive beneficial mutations may lead to new features, such as flight. Much more happens in evolution, like neutral or near-neutral mutations, bottlenecks, and genetic isolation (or not), but natural selection tending to eliminate what does not lead to reproductive success and favoring what facilitates reproductive success is usually thought to be the most important process. With these evolutionary processes in place there is considerable scope for impressive change over long periods of time, but there are also important limitations to it that mark evolved life with the evidence for evolution. Notably, while there is some genetic flow between reproductively separated lineages, especially in prokaryotes, polygenic traits are quite unlikely to be transferred to, for instance, vertebrates. Vertical transmission of DNA information predominates in most eukaryotes, and is quite evident in prokaryotes as well. The relative lack of portability of information across separate lineages shows up in the vertically derivative genomes of vertebrates in general, which is seen as nested hierarchies in taxonomy. The limitations of evolutionary processes apparently produce the patterns of life. An interesting example is to be found in the three types of flying vertebrates, bats, pterosaurs, and birds, which all share obvious yet fairly distant homologies, but whose flight adaptations are entirely uninformed by each other at all, apparently due to the fact that all three groups had diverged before each group evolved flight. The same evolutionary limits mean that birds do not have the fine auditory bones that evolved in mammals, while mammals do not have the improvements in eyesight that evolved in birds, such as the pecten (nor do mammals have the more efficient lungs of birds). Vestigial organs are a peculiar case of information retained that is no longer useful for a specific purpose (but may have other current uses), such as the tiny bones of the human coccyx that apparently evolved from tail vertebrae. The general trend of the fossil record is also what would be predicted by evolutionary theory, with amphibians needing dampness evolving first from fishes, then reptiles evolving for drier climates, while mammals and dinosaurs (including birds) evolved insulation for colder areas (among many other changes). “Transitional” forms like Archaeopteryx reveal the incomplete and inefficient adaptations expected from evolutionary processes that are mostly incapable of all but incremental change. The specific patterns and evolutionary developments visible in present life and in the fossil record point with consilience to a specific set of processes that we see happening today, the evolutionary processes of inheriting DNA information with some variations in that DNA, along with natural selection tending to retain reproductively helpful changes, while tending to eliminate reproductively harmful changes.

    Hence the evidence specifically entailed by unintelligent evolution, while you have none that points meaningfully to ID.

    Glen Davidson

  17. Joe Felsenstein: Tom and I have already shown that the Dembski/Marks theorems are irrelevant to “evolutionary search”. I look forward to Tom’s exposition of how they can be made much easier to understand. But even if the results can be greatly simplified, they don’t show that evolutionary process will on average achieve nothing better than random mutation would in the absence of natural selection.

    After so many failed negative arguments one would think that they might be inclined to give a go at a positive one… but then again their books sell well, so it if ain’t broke, don’t fix it

  18. GlenDavidson,

    Hence the evidence specifically entailed by unintelligent evolution, while you have none that points meaningfully to ID.

    If I am to stipulate that unintelligent evolution exists in nature does that in your mind eliminate intelligent evolution as a potential cause? Do you think the argument you cited supports that claim?

  19. colewd: If I am to stipulate that unintelligent evolution exists in nature does that in your mind eliminate intelligent evolution as a potential cause?

    Did I say that?

    Why are you tilting at a strawman of your own making? Learn how science builds on established knowledge, and then you might understand how not ruling things out helps your fantasies not at all.

    Do you think the argument you cited supports that claim?

    No, and you have no business shifting goalposts to fit your deeply-set prejudices.

    Glen Davidson

  20. GlenDavidson,

    No, and you have no business shifting goalposts to fit your deeply-set prejudices.

    If I have shifted goal posts I apologize. I think we have common ground that unintelligent evolution exists.

    I think we also agree that the evidence for unintelligent evolution does not rule out the possibility of intelligent evolution or design.

  22. dazz,

    what is intelligent evolution? spook induced mutations? miraculous selection?

    It could be anything that is can generate information in a directed way. The adaptive immune system is an example.

  23. colewd:
    dazz,

    It could be anything that is can generate information in a directed way.The adaptive immune system is an example.

    the immune system is not intelligent

  24. dazz,

    the immune system is not intelligent

    To make this claim you need a definition of intelligence and then you need to read up on the adaptive immune system and see if its processes do not fit the definition of intelligent.

    In the end may be right (based on an agreed upon definition of intelligence) but it certainly it is not a blind unguided process.

  25. colewd:
    dazz,

    To make this claim you need a definition of intelligence and then you need to read up on the adaptive immune system and see if its processes do not fit the definition of intelligent.

    In the end may be right (based on an agreed upon definition of intelligence) but it certainly it is not a blind unguided process.

    Was expecting something with a tad bit of explanatory power

    … nah! just kidding, we already know what to expect from you. nothing

  26. dazz,

    … nah! just kidding, we already know what to expect from you. nothing

    So you are not going to try to support your claim?

  28. dazz: peanut butter jelly

    Can I suggest trying Noyau for indulging in personal spats. Tom English is making some specific arguments and I (and maybe others) would appreciate that the focus were maintained.

  29. colewd: To make this claim you need a definition of intelligence…

    Indeed! A definition of “intelligence” that made some sense could be the starting point for the “Intelligent Design” movement gaining some legitimacy. Let someone, anyone, have a go at producing a meaningful definition of “intelligence”.

  31. Alan Fox: Can I suggest trying Noyau for indulging in personal spats. Tom English is making some specific arguments and I (and maybe others) would appreciate that the focus were maintained.

    Sorry about that. All I intended there was to end the conversation with Bill with an incoherent response, to his incoherent response

  34. Alan Fox: Indeed! A definition of “intelligence” that made some sense could be the starting point for the “Intelligent Design” movement gaining some legitimacy. Let someone, anyone, have a go at producing a meaningful definition of “intelligence”.

    Beats what has been going on here. Note the outline of the final chapter of the book.

    Intelligent Design & Artificial Intelligence
    * Turing & Lovelace: One is Strong and the Other One’s Dead
    * Turing’s Failure
    * The Lovelace Test and Intelligent Design
    * “Flash of Genius”
    * ID & the Unknowable

    This is Marks’s chapter, I’m sure. I don’t know what he’s been saying about this stuff. The Lovelace test assesses creativity. As I have observed many times, Dembski and Marks say that intelligence creates information. Intelligence creates physical information ex nihilo. The ID movement likes to tell a story about materialistic science refusing to accept the physical reality of information. The story is hogwash, but ignore that. The IDers are not owning up to the fact that there’s got to be something that is not-mass, not-energy, not-information that is creating physical information out of nothing. So they need to add more to physics than information. I cannot imagine what that would be, other than something along the lines of mind or spirit.

    Something rather funny (I have a weird sense of humor, of course) about Bro. Errington’s blessed self-assurance is that the intellect is passive for Augustine and active for Aquinas. So Christians actually disagree among themselves as to whether intelligence is a cause.

  35. Intelligence:

    Noun

    The apparent awareness or sense of specific effects or sensations some objects possess along with an apparent ability to associate specific behaviors (or apparent behaviors) with pursuing and avoiding the effects.

  36. The Library of Congress has, on pre­publication review of the book, classified the authors’ technical contributions as I did in a post last year: “Engineering mathematics. Engineering analysis.” Not scientific analysis.

    This is one of the ironies that amuses me.

    The ID proponents are pushing a view of design that is very much engineering oriented. As such, it is highly materialistic and mechanistic.

    Yet when they are not pushing ID, they are criticizing materialism and mechanism.

  37. Robin:
    Intelligence:

    Noun

    The apparent awareness or sense of specific effects or sensations some objects possess along with an apparent ability to associate specific behaviors (or apparent behaviors) with pursuing and avoiding the effects.

    I would be okay with that, though I think it is a bit too vague to pin down.

    At least you connect it with perception (by using “awareness”).

  38. Now, if you’re a Christian who would like very much to believe that two Christian engineers and a Christian mathematician can use engineering analysis to provide evidence that evolution is engineered, how are you going to respond to what I have to say?

    The way I’d respond is that I think these are swell guys and even though I don’t agree with the way they approach ID, I think they are still swell guys.

    Furthermore, all this stuff is moot if what happens in the ordinary world is that selection favors simplicity over complexity, which seems to be the net case since all lab and field observations suggest this is so. No need for NFL if what happens under ordinary, dare I say natural, circumstances is that complexity is selected against, not for.

    Thus it would seem something other than natural selection evolved complexity, and hence the label of “natural” by Darwin is false advertising.

    I wrote this essay to that effect:
    The Blind Watchbreaker would dispose of lunches even if they were free — mootness of anti-NFL arguments

    So in response to this question:

    Now, if you’re a Christian who would like very much to believe that two Christian engineers and a Christian mathematician can use engineering analysis to provide evidence that evolution is engineered, how are you going to respond to what I have to say?

    This is my response:

    The Blind Watchbreaker would dispose of lunches even if they were free — mootness of anti-NFL arguments

  39. Neil Rickert: This is one of the ironies that amuses me.

    The ID proponents are pushing a view of design that is very much engineering oriented.As such, it is highly materialistic and mechanistic.

    Yet when they are not pushing ID, they are criticizing materialism and mechanism.

    Sometimes the argument seems to be “I see something in lifeforms that reminds me of how humans design things, so a god must have designed it”.

    WTF ?

  40. Robin:
    Intelligence:

    Noun

    The apparent awareness or sense of specific effects or sensations some objects possess along with an apparent ability to associate specific behaviors (or apparent behaviors) with pursuing and avoiding the effects.

    I got yer slime mold right here.

  41. Neil Rickert,

    Wouldn’t we first need to settle on a meaning for “intelligent” and “unintelligent”?

    Yes, I agree and all the grey areas in between.

    What is not discussed is all the processes that go on in the cell. Are they blind and unguided, no. Are they the result of intelligence, maybe. Is intelligence required for their function, this is where it gets grey.

    When I think about the 100k+ nucleotides that are required to code for Behe’s bacterial flagellum it is very hard to conceive of that code coming about by trial and error. All the computer power on our planet could not even begin to explore the number of possible DNA sequences in a small fraction of the flagellum’s total DNA sequence space.

    It is hard to imagine that code being developed without knowledge of what the result of certain strings of amino acid paired together would fold into. This would be the only way to avoid an exhaustive search. I would go out on a limb and say that this project most likely required intelligence.

  42. colewd:I would go out on a limb and say that this project most likely required intelligence.

    And what do you mean by “intelligence”? And whose intelligence?

  43. It takes supercomputers a long time to calculate the 3-d structure of a single folded protein. Exactly what intelligence could do that over such a phase space?

  44. Alan Fox,

    And what do you mean by “intelligence”? And whose intelligence?

    Good questions.

    The who would be speculation beyond the observation so if you’re ok I would like to table that.

    By intelligence I mean the ability to understand conceptually the cause and effect of how the DNA code will translate to a protein sequence that ultimately will result in proteins that fit together and collective work together to rotate a propeller. Also the assembly protein sequences must be designed and all these DNA sequences must be transcripted and translated reliably during cell division.

    To summarize the intelligence is required to form the code that can assemble proteins able to form and build a molecular outboard motor.

    Another cellular process like apoptosis may not require intelligence to function but this is a grey area. The intelligence in my mind appears to be required in generating a novel functional sequence where forward knowledge of the ultimate design may be required.

  45. colewd: What is not discussed is all the processes that go on in the cell. Are they blind and unguided, no. Are they the result of intelligence, maybe. Is intelligence required for their function, this is where it gets grey.

    Until we have agreement on what we mean by “intelligent”, we cannot even address that question.

    And note that you omitted “they are intelligent processes” from the choices.

  47. Fair Witness: Sometimes the argument seems to be “I see something in lifeforms that reminds me of how humans design things,so a god must have designed it”.

    WTF ?

    Some day the dimbulb ID-Creationists will realize analogies to human designed things aren’t evidence of design in biological life. But not any time soon it seems.

  48. Neil Rickert,

    Until we have agreement on what we mean by “intelligent”, we cannot even address that question.

    And note that you omitted “they are intelligent processes” from the choices.

    Good points. Do you have any thoughts on a definition of intelligence?

  50. Neil Rickert: This is one of the ironies that amuses me.

    The ID proponents are pushing a view of design that is very much engineering oriented.As such, it is highly materialistic and mechanistic.

    Yet when they are not pushing ID, they are criticizing materialism and mechanism.

    This is completely nonsensical. You can’t have a mechanistic system, without saying that in order for the system to work it requires an intelligently designed plan? Which is something that is NOT inherent in a completely materialist worldview, no matter how much you want to contort the word intelligence.

    Intelligence- “The ability to know, perceive or understand.”

    It’s that hard?

    You think mechanical systems know things? Now I understand why you believe in evolution. You believe it is intelligent. Welcome to our world Neil.

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