No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without IntelligenceDarwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. In this book Dembski extends his theory of intelligent design. Building on his earlier work in The Design Inference (Cambridge, 1998), he defends that life must be the product of intelligent design. Critics of Dembski's work have argued that evolutionary algorithms show that life can be explained apart from intelligence. But by employing powerful recent results from the No Free Lunch Theory, Dembski addresses and decisively refutes such claims. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate. |
Contents
The Third Mode of Explanation | xxiii |
12 Rehabilitating Design | xxiii |
14 Specification | xxv |
15 Probabilistic Resources | xxv |
16 False Negatives and False Positives | 2 |
17 Why the Criterion Works | 8 |
18 The Darwinian Challenge to Design | 10 |
19 The Constraining of Contingency | 14 |
43 Statement of the Problem | 167 |
44 Choosing the Right Fitness Function | 172 |
45 Blind Search | 176 |
46 The No Free Lunch Theorems | 179 |
47 The Displacement Problem | 183 |
48 Darwinian Evolution in Nature | 187 |
49 Following the Information Trail | 192 |
410 Coevolving Fitness Landscapes | 204 |
110 The Darwinian Extrapolation | 17 |
Another Way to Detect Design? | 25 |
22 Generalizing Fishers Approach | 29 |
Nicholas Caputo | 35 |
The Compressibility of Bit Strings | 38 |
25 Detachability | 42 |
26 Sweeping the Field of Chance Hypotheses | 47 |
27 Justifying the Generalization | 51 |
28 The Inflation of Probabilistic Resources | 63 |
29 Design by Comparison | 81 |
210 Design by Elimination | 90 |
Specified Complexity as Information | 105 |
32 Syntactic Statistical and Algorithmic Information | 109 |
33 Information in Context | 113 |
34 Conceptual and Physical Information | 117 |
35 Complex Specified Information | 120 |
36 Semantic Information | 125 |
37 Biological Information | 127 |
38 The Origin of Complex Specified Information | 129 |
39 The Law of Conservation of Information | 139 |
310 A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics? | 146 |
Evolutionary Algorithms | 159 |
42 Optimization | 164 |
The Emergence of Irreducibly Complex Systems | 217 |
52 The Challenge of Irreducible Complexity | 224 |
53 Scaffolding and Roman Arches | 230 |
54 Cooptation Patchwork and Bricolage | 232 |
55 Incremental Indispensability | 234 |
56 Reducible Complexity | 239 |
57 Miscellaneous Objections | 245 |
58 The Logic of Invariants | 249 |
59 FineTuning Irreducible Complexity | 257 |
510 Doing the Calculation | 265 |
Design as a Scientific Research Program | 287 |
62 The Pattern of Evolution | 290 |
63 The Incompleteness of Natural Laws | 301 |
64 Does Specified Complexity Have a Mechanism? | 304 |
65 The Nature of Nature | 309 |
66 Must All Design in Nature Be FrontLoaded? | 319 |
67 Embodied and Unembodied Designers | 323 |
68 Who Designed the Designer? | 329 |
69 Testability | 331 |
610 Magic Mechanism and Design | 341 |
Index | 357 |
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Common terms and phrases
actual Alice argue argument bacterial flagellum Behe Behe's biological systems blind search Cambridge Caputo causal specificity chance hypotheses chapter claim class of possibilities complex specified information complexity-specification criterion consider Darwin Darwinian mechanism Darwinists Dawkins Dawkins's Dembski Design Inference design theorists detecting design eliminate chance event evolutionary algorithm exhibit specified complexity explanation Fisher's approach fitness function fitness landscapes flagellum Free Lunch function f given hypothesis identify improbable instance intelligent agent intelligent causes intelligent design irreducible complexity irreducibly complex irreducibly complex biochemical irreducibly complex system Kauffman logical mathematical measure mousetrap natural causes natural laws natural selection Nonetheless object optimization organisms original pattern perturbation phase space physical probabilistic resources probability distribution problem proteins quantum mechanics question random reference class rejection function rejection region relevant requires sample scientific specified complexity statistical target sequence theorems tion unembodied designer universal probability bound University Press What's York Z-factors