Customer Reviews

No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

No Free Lunch, the sequel to mathematician and philosopher William Dembski's Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference, explores key questions about the origin of specified complexity. Dembski explains that the Darwinian search mechanism of random mutation coupled with natural selection is incapable of generating novel complex, specified information (CSI).

This observation translates into "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems, which Dembski explains are inherent constraints upon natural systems. Natural Darwinian mechanisms can shuffle this information around, but only intelligence can generate novel CSI. In other words, when it comes to generating truly novel biological complexity, Darwin can have no free lunch.

Some critics have asserted that he has never applied his model for detecting design to any real biological systems. The latter half of this book debunks this fallacious objection, and provides a detailed calculation of the CSI found in the bacterial flagellum. Dembski assesses the complexity of the flagellum on various levels, including its protein parts and its assembly instructions, finding that the amount of CSI contained in the flagellum vastly outweigh the probabilistic resources available in the history of the universe to construct such a structure, absent intelligent design.

No Free Lunch demonstrates that design theory shows great promise of providing insight in the field of evolutionary computation. If Dembski is right, then the ability of genetic algorithms to solve complex problems is a function of the amount of intelligent design inputted by their programmers.

This book is a strong addition to the growing body of literature on Intelligent Design theory and its applicability to questions of biological origins. To those who are interested in ID, its progress, its arguments, etc., No Free Lunch (NFL) should be considered required reading; it contains important, milestone arguments for that school of thought.

NFL should also be required reading for ID's critics -- *especially* those who would assume to review it! I am dumbfounded that some of this book's reviewers here on Amazon presume to criticize Dembski, the book, or ID in general while failing to in any way engage the substance of the book; e.g. Tim Beazley comments that Dembski overlooks the possibility of common descent and Intelligent Design being compatible, when nowhere does NFL claim to disprove common descent. Jean P Villard complains that ID-proponents have failed to demonstrate that Christian doctrine follows from the truth of ID, a claim that is so far outside the scope of NFL that I question whether Villard read the book or not.

In sum, No Free Lunch speaks to the question of whether genetic algorithms - and hence Darwin's mechanism - are or are not capable of creating the sort of specified complexity that we find in the biological world, as many neo-Darwinians claim (e.g., in different ways, Stuart Kauffman and Richard Dawkins). In this work, Dembski claims to demonstrate that they are not.
Those kudos and criticisms of this book which do not deal with that claim are largely irrelevant. Time will tell whether Dembski is right or wrong about the NFL theorems and their applicability to biological origins. In the meanwhile, interested readers would be well advised to stay informed about Dembski's actual arguments and the relevant responses to them from competent critics, and one cannot know the latter without knowing the former.

Ignore the one-star reviews. The unifying factor in all of them is an irrational hatred of Christianity, a misrepresentation of both Christian teachings and ID, and a reliance on ad hominem attacks. Really, now, I thought most people got beyond such name-calling by about, oh, the third grade.

Despite the bombast, no one has adequately answered either Behe or Dembski. I think the evolutionists would be embarrassed by now by their reliance on so many just-so stories to support an increasingly implausible theory.

It is disappointing to see one reviewer rely on the discredited Richard Wein, and use the "God in the gaps" argument. (If there is a Designer, of course, He/She/It/They would necessraily be in the "gaps." Where else would He/She/It/They be? Since naturalistic philosophy assumes no designer, no conceivable gap could ever convince them otherwise. NeoDarwinism is just as non-falsifiable as any alternative.) The Issue, of course, is the gaps themselves. And the nature of the gaps, which at this point turns out to be the specified complexity of these marvelous nano-machines we call biological cells. And despite the zeal of the naturalists, the gaps are huge. Grand Canyon sized and getting bigger.

Dembski's book is an essential for anyone interested in the NeoDarwinism vs Intellegent Design. It is refreshing to see a genuine scientific treatment of this subject without all the young earth Bible thumping from the creationists. Dembski succeeds in showing the bankruptcy of NeoDarwinism when it comes to how cells actually acquired their specified complexity. Does this prove that there is a Designer? Of course not. And Dembski claims nothing of the sort. But it clearly demonstrates the current utter bankruptcy (or non-existence) of the NeoDarwinists explanations and approaches the question from an entirely new paradigm.

Buy this book and tell your friends to buy it.

This work by Professor Dembski attempts to defend the idea that life not only is, but must be, the product of intelligence. As a cell biologist, my graduate course work and teaching experience has demonstrated this over and over, but Dembski in this book looks at the mathematics and logic that supports this premise. He also does an excellent job responding to the arguments against the irreducible complexity concept. In my opinion, this is one of the strongest arguments for ID. The arguments concocted against it have, in my mind, only confirmed this concept. Dembski also does an excellent job responding to Dawkins and his ME THINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL analogy, which proves the opposite of what Dawkins intended. A common claim is that Dembski (and the ID movement as a whole) is only concerned about polemics and propaganda, and the movement lacks a genuine interest and competence to do real science (which I assume refers to empirical research and collecting data). I have spent much of my career collecting data. This requires a special skill but more important in science is the ability to understand and integrate this data, which takes a skill that I have come to appreciate is less common and more important than doing number crunching of measurements. There is a place for both, but a clear need exists to make sense of the data we already have. I find that students can gather date fairly effectively, but the real challenge and talent is to make sense of that data. In grading their labs I always stress this. Dembski has done an invaluable service in making sense of the extant data. The only factor preventing acceptance of his conclusions is an emotional commitment to fundamentalist Darwinism.

William Dembski's newest book, No Free Lunch, helps complete the job he started in his 1998 book, The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press). The Design Inference laid out Dembski's rigorous formal apparatus for determining whether an event or an object is the result of chance, natural law/necessity, or intelligent design. What he didn't do in that book is apply the theory to the natural world. In No Free Lunch, he does so. Not only does he tweak and strengthen his earlier theory, but he applies it to biology, and offers a devastating critique of various self-organizational theories, which recognize that Darwin's theory is inadequate, but hope to get information for free. Dembski argues convincingly that you can't. Although No Free Lunch does have some fairly technical sections, for the most part it is accessible to the educated non-specialist. Besides, it's worth the effort.

Although the reading may be a bit difficult for some, the ideas and arguments presented in this book should be able convince intelligent, open-minded individuals that Intelligent Design offers a better scientific framework than Darwinism or neo-Darwinism. Dogmatic Darwinian apologists, however, will not be moved from their cherished preconceptions.

This book is the latest ammunition in the war between creationists and scientists over whether public school science classes ought to teach theology along with science. This book is also the first time that any of the advocates of "Intelligent Design" have attempted to set forth any actual scientific methodology in an attempt to convince open-minded scientists (who the creationists claim do not exist) that "Intelligent Design" is a valid scientific conclusion when examining evidence of biological changes over time (also know as "evolution").

Unfortunately, Dembski's setting forth of his actual mathematical equations backfires on the entire "Intelligent Design" movement as now real scientists and real mathematicians have something to grab hold of when attempting to critique the idea that "Intelligent Design" isn't just a new label for theology. Needless to say, Dembski is caught weilding smoke and mirrors, and he failed to even convince a Chemistry Professor from a Calvinist private college who faulted Dembski twice on theological grounds and twice on scientific grounds. The response of the non-religious scientific community hasn't even been that generous.

Richard Wein posted roughly 37,000 words of criticism of this book on the Talk.Origins site, and elicited two rounds of replies from Dembski himself. The high-level summary is that Dembski admits that his system is subjective. This means that if you are predisposed towards believing that "God did it" then you will tend to value the underlying probabilities in such a way that his mathematical model will crank out a "God did it" answer.

The unfortunate part of this whole mess is that Dembski suceeds in cloaking his religious tract in enough techno-babble that any school board faced with this book as evidence of the viability of "Intelligent Design Theory" as part of science classes could easily fail to see the many large flaws in Dembski's actual scientific assertions and might actually be led to believe that there really is scientific support for the idea of "Intelligent Design" when there is not. Thus, while this book isn't worth purchasing unless you are a creationist and want to use it as part of a battle with your own local school board, it is certain to cost the proponants of "real science" a pretty penny in the many forthcoming battles over the real meaning of this book. I would only hope that any school board who is presented with a copy of this book would also be required to read at least Richard Wein's rebuttal and the exchanges he had with Dembski over this book.

Frankly, as a believer that naturalism and "Intelligent Design" do not inherently conflict with each other, I would have far preferred discovering that this book by Dembski did finally prove that there really is a scientific case to be made for the idea of "Intelligent Design." In that case, those of us who believe in the sanctity of keeping religion out of our science classrooms could cave in and say that if it really is scientific, then we really do need to let "Intelligent Design" in. However, in this book Dembski once again demonstrates that there is no real science in the idea of "Intelligent Design." Instead, this appears to be only for the purpose of political posturing in front of thousands of local, regional, or statewide school boards.

Knowing all that, I must ultimately conclude that Dembski is incapable of being honest with himself as to exactly how bad his own theory actually is. The reviews I've read by esteemed mathematicians and statisticians have been about as negative as they could be. Surely, Dembski cannot be unaware of just how unsupported (or unsupportable) his idea actually is. So, I will leave it as an excercise for others to determine what Dembski's own culpability might be for this failure to support his theory in any meaningful way.

Darwin is dead. Let's get on with it and keep science within the realm of REAL alternatives in origins research.

That pretty well summarizes No Free Lunch, which brings the reader up to date with the latest in mathematical research and design theory. The "No Free Lunch" theorems establish that information does not arise by either chance or order - the two mechanisms available to naturalism, AKA atheistic Darwinism. The only thing left is intelligence as the source of information.

This is hardly the first book to make this claim (cf. Werner Gitt's In the Beginning was Information - or for that matter, the ancient Greek philosophers had it figured out). But in a world saturated with the religion of naturalism, this blunt work destroying that religion at its very foundation stands out. When the last Darwinist is dead and buried, William Dembski will be highly ranked among those who laid the evolutionary ideology to rest.

Demski's handling of Darwinian critics, blinded by their own preconceptions and faith commitments, is excellent. While the book as a whole is too technical for many readers, Dembski outlines the main themes very well, limiting the mathematical proofs to some sections so that the remainder of the work can be read profitably by just about anyone.

Be afraid of anyone who gives this book more than zero stars! They are all IDers.
This book is to lead people away from common sense and embrace a narrow, silly view of the way things work. Below is a example of non-math to prove the existence of a intelligent designer.
Let \varphi : \Omega \to \Omega be a universal function over the set ' of cardinality \aleph_0 (where ' is assumed to be the set of all possible organisms) which is instantiated by the universal Turing machine U_\varphi. Let ',' and ' be some funky symbols that are just along for the ride and let \S be a persian cat. Consider K_\varphi(\S), the complexity of \S \in \Omega relative to \varphi. Clearly, we have that if K_\varphi(\S) \ne 0 , then \int_{[\Phi,\Psi]}\Theta(\mu)d\mu = K_\varphi(\S) \Leftrightarrow |\Omega| = \aleph_0^{\aleph_0} - and that's proves that everything can really be anything, except the it would suggest that the meaning of life is not much of anything at all - unless you can get a good guitar and strum in the key of E, then you have a string theory. Hence K_\varphi(\S) = 0 and \S was just kind of created from nothing by U\varphi.
Hence U\varphi must be some intelligent entity and evolution is for stupid-heads.
Not only is the math bizarre, It is typical of someone who draws a conclusion then uses only the facts that support this conclusion.