No Free Lunch Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence
by Dembski, William A.Edition: Revised
Format: Paperback
Pub. Date: 2007-02-01
Publisher(s): Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
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Summary
Darwin'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. 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. Updated with a new Preface by the author.
Author Biography
William A. Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University cCover image: The bacterial flagellum.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. vi |
| Preface to the Paperback Edition | p. vii |
| Preface | p. xi |
| The Third Mode of Explanation | p. 1 |
| Necessity, Chance, and Design | p. 1 |
| Rehabilitating Design | p. 3 |
| The Complexity-Specification Criterion | p. 6 |
| Specification | p. 15 |
| Probabilistic Resources | p. 18 |
| False Negatives and False Positives | p. 22 |
| Why the Criterion Works | p. 28 |
| The Darwinian Challenge to Design | p. 30 |
| The Constraining of Contingency | p. 34 |
| The Darwinian Extrapolation | p. 37 |
| Another Way to Detect Design? | p. 45 |
| Fisher's Approach to Eliminating Chance | p. 45 |
| Generalizing Fisher's Approach | p. 49 |
| Case Study: Nicholas Caputo | p. 55 |
| Case Study: The Compressibility of Bit Strings | p. 58 |
| Detachability | p. 62 |
| Sweeping the Field of Chance Hypotheses | p. 67 |
| Justifying the Generalization | p. 71 |
| The Inflation of Probabilistic Resources | p. 83 |
| Design by Comparison | p. 101 |
| Design by Elimination | p. 110 |
| Specified Complexity as Information | p. 125 |
| Information | p. 125 |
| Syntactic, Statistical, and Algorithmic Information | p. 129 |
| Information in Context | p. 133 |
| Conceptual and Physical Information | p. 137 |
| Complex Specified Information | p. 140 |
| Semantic Information | p. 145 |
| Biological Information | p. 147 |
| The Origin of Complex Specified Information | p. 149 |
| The Law of Conservation of Information | p. 159 |
| A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics? | p. 166 |
| Evolutionary Algorithms | p. 179 |
| Methinks it is Like a Weasel | p. 179 |
| Optimization | p. 184 |
| Statement of the Problem | p. 187 |
| Choosing the Right Fitness Function | p. 192 |
| Blind Search | p. 196 |
| The No Free Lunch Theorems | p. 199 |
| The Displacement Problem | p. 203 |
| Darwinian Evolution in Nature | p. 207 |
| Following the Information Trail | p. 212 |
| Coevolving Fitness Landscapes | p. 224 |
| The Emergence of Irreducibly Complex Systems | p. 239 |
| The Causal Specificity Problem | p. 239 |
| The Challenge of Irreducible Complexity | p. 246 |
| Scaffolding and Roman Arches | p. 252 |
| Co-optation, Patchwork, and Bricolage | p. 254 |
| Incremental Indispensability | p. 256 |
| Reducible Complexity | p. 261 |
| Miscellaneous Objections | p. 267 |
| The Logic of Invariants | p. 271 |
| Fine-Tuning Irreducible Complexity | p. 279 |
| Doing the Calculation | p. 289 |
| Design as a Scientific Research Program | p. 311 |
| Outline of a Positive Research Program | p. 311 |
| The Pattern of Evolution | p. 314 |
| The Incompleteness of Natural Laws | p. 325 |
| Does Specified Complexity Have a Mechanism? | p. 328 |
| The Nature of Nature | p. 333 |
| Must All Design in Nature Be Front-Loaded? | p. 343 |
| Embodied and Unembodied Designers | p. 347 |
| Who Designed the Designer? | p. 353 |
| Testability | p. 355 |
| Magic, Mechanism, and Design | p. 365 |
| Index | p. 381 |
| About the Author | p. 404 |
| Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved. |
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