No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence / Edition 1

by William A. Dembski author of No Free Lunc William A. Dembski author of No Free Lunc

Overview

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. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742512979
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/18/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.26(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

William A. Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle.

Table of Contents

Part 1 List of Illustrations
Part 2 Preface
Part 3 The Third Mode of Explanation
Chapter 4 Necessity, Chance, and Design
Chapter 5 Rehabilitating Design
Chapter 6 The Complexity-Specification Criterion
Chapter 7 Specification
Chapter 8 Probabilistic Resources
Chapter 9 False Negatives and False Positives
Chapter 10 Why the Criterion Works
Chapter 11 The Darwinian Challenge to Design
Chapter 12 The Constraning of Contingency
Chapter 13 The Darwinian Extrapolation
Part 14 Another Way to Detect Design?
Chapter 15 Fisher's Approach to Eliminating Chance
Chapter 16 Generalizing Fisher's Approach
Chapter 17 Case Study: Nicholas Caputo
Chapter 18 Case Study: The Comprehensibility of Bit Strings
Chapter 19 Detachability
Chapter 20 Sweeping the Field of Chance Hypotheses
Chapter 21 Justifying the Generalization
Chapter 22 The Inflation of Probabilistic Resources
Chapter 23 Design by Comparison
Chapter 24 Design by Elimination
Part 25 Specified Complexity as Information
Chapter 26 Information
Chapter 27 Syntactic, Statistical, and Algorithmic Information
Chapter 28 Information in Context
Chapter 29 Conceptual and Physical Information
Chapter 30 Complex Specified Information
Chapter 31 Semantic Information
Chapter 32 Biological Information
Chapter 33 The Origin of Comlex Specified Information
Chapter 34 The Law of Conservation of Information
Chapter 35 A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics?
Part 36 Evolutionary Algorithms
Chapter 37 METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Chapter 38 Optimization
Chapter 39 Statement of the Problem
Chapter 40 Choosing the Right Fitness Function
Chapter 41 Blind Search
Chapter 42 The No Free Lunch Theorems
Chapter 43 The Displacement Problem
Chapter 44 Darwinian Evolution in Nature
Chapter 45 Following the Information Trail
Chapter 46 Coevolving Fitness Landscapes
Part 47 The Emergence of Irreducibly Complex Systems
Chapter 48 The Casual Specificity Problem
Chapter 49 The Challenge of Irreducible Complexity
Chapter 50 Scaffolding and Roman Arches
Chapter 51 Co-optation, Patchwork, and Bricolage
Chapter 52 Incremental Indispensability
Chapter 53 Reducible Complexity
Chapter 54 Miscellaneous Objections
Chapter 55 The Logic of Invariants
Chapter 56 Fine-Tuning Irreducible Complexity
Chapter 57 Doing the Calculation
Part 58 Design as a Scientific Research Program
Chapter 59 Outline of a Positive Research Program
Chapter 60 The Pattern of Evolution
Chapter 61 The Incompleteness of Natural Laws
Chapter 62 Does Specified Complexity Have a Mechanism?
Chapter 63 The Nature of Nature
Chapter 64 Must All Design in Nature Be Front-Loaded?
Chapter 65 Embodied and Unembodied Designers
Chapter 66 Who Designed the Designer?
Chapter 67 Testability
Chapter 68 Magic, Mechanism, and Design
Part 69 Index

Editorial Reviews

This sequel to The Design Inference further enhances the credibility of Intelligent Design as a sound research program. Through solid historical and philosophical arguments, Dembski succeeds in showing how specified complexity reliably detects design. His critique of Darwinian and other naturalistic accounts of evolution is built on a set of powerful and lucid arguments; his formulation of an alternative to these accounts is simply compelling.

Muzaffar Iqbal

In No Free Lunch, William Dembski gives the most profound challenge to the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution since this theory was first formulated in the 1930s. I differ from Dembski on some points, mainly in ways which strengthen his conclusion.

Frank J. Tipler

Dembski lays the foundations for a research project aimed at answering one of the most fundamental scientific questions of our time: What is the maximal specified complexity that can be reasonably expected to emerge (in a given time frame) with and without various design assumptions?

Moshe Koppel

No Free Lunch is written for scholars and is filled with equations and careful technical definitions. Much of the text, however, is accessible for a broad audience and the book should prove useful to anyone wishing to explore the degree to which intelligent design can be formulated in a mathematically rigorous way.

Research News and Opportunities In Science and Theology

The valid philosophical arguments and historical examples make the study really agreeable to a large audience.

Auss

One of the best books available about ID.

Journal of Scientific Exploration

I disagree strongly with the position taken by William Dembski. But I do think that he argues strongly and that those of us who do not accept his conclusions should read his book and form our own opinions and counterarguments. He should not be ignored.

Michael Ruse

In this book, William Dembski takes his statistical work on inferring design and translates it into an information-theoretic apparatus relevant to understanding biological fitness. In doing so, he has brought his argument for intelligent design into a domain that overlaps current work in evolutionary biology. As I see it, this is a landmark for intelligent design theory because, for the first time, it makes it possible to objectively evaluate the claims of evolutionary biology and intelligent design on common ground.

Martin Poenie

In No Free Lunch, William Dembski gives the most profound challenge to the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution since this theory was first formulated in the 1930s. I differ from Dembski on some points, mainly in ways which strengthen his conclusion.--Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics, Tulane University; coauthor of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle; and author of The Physic

In this book, William Dembski takes his statistical work on inferring design and translates it into an information-theoretic apparatus relevant to understanding biological fitness. In doing so, he has brought his argument for intelligent design into a domain that overlaps current work in evolutionary biology. As I see it, this is a landmark for intelligent design theory because, for the first time, it makes it possible to objectively evaluate the claims of evolutionary biology and intelligent design on common ground.--Martin Poenie, associate professor of biology, University of Texas at Austin

Dembski lays the foundations for a research project aimed at answering one of the most fundamental scientific questions of our time: What is the maximal specified complexity that can be reasonably expected to emerge (in a given time frame) with and without various design assumptions?--Moshe Koppel, professor of mathematics, Bar-llan University, Israel

From the Publisher