Who thinks Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics should be on your summer reading list?
| July 1, 2017 | Posted by News under Informatics |
Robert Marks sends these endorsements for Evolutionary Informatics:
(Note: It is surprisingly easy to read.)
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“An honest attempt to discuss what few people seem to realize is an important problem. Thought provoking!”
Gregory Chaitin, Ph.D.
Professor, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Eponyms: Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solomonov Information Theory
Chaitin’s Number
Chaitin’s algorithm
Author of:The Unknowable
Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega
The Limits of Mathematics
Thinking about Gödel and Turing: Essays on Complexity
Algorithmic Information Theory.
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“Darwinian pretensions notwithstanding, Marks, Dembski, and Ewert demonstrate rigorously and humorously that no unintelligent process can account for the wonders of life.”
Michael J. Behe, Ph.D.
Professor of Biological Sciences , Lehigh University
Author of: Darwin’s Black Box
The Edge of Evolution
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“This is a fine summary of an extremely interesting body of work. It is clear, well-organized, and mathematically sophisticated without being tedious (so many books of this sort have it the other way around). It should be read with profit by biologists, computer scientists, and philosophers.”
David Berlinski, Ph.D.
Author of: The Devil’s Delusion, The Deniable Darwin and Other Essays, The King of Infinite Space: Euclid and His Elements
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“For decades and decades, the ubiquitous cultural lie is that Intelligent Design advocates do nothing but rehash old criticisms of evolutionary theory. They never present fresh, positive research that supports ID theory. Now repeating serious criticisms of evolution is very important, especially since the universities, state school boards, and the ACLU have guaranteed that students must never hear of the problems with evolutionary theory. Still, the ID movement must present positive research for its views, and since this has been done for years through a number of publications, it is now a sign of ignorance, intellectual bigotry and bad faith for people to perpetuate this cultural lie. It is itself a lie. But with the publication of the ground-breaking book, Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, there is now a cutting-edge positive ID research volume that does fresh, heretofore unpublished (and un-thought of!!) ideas that get to the very deepest bottom of recent science that is not only relevant to the ID/Evolution debate, but actually devastates evolutionary theory at the ground floor. In my view, no one reading this book can continue to adopt Theistic Evolution on philosophical and scientific grounds alone. This is must reading for all believers and unbelievers interested in the debate, and Christians who are scientists have, I believe, a moral and spiritual duty to read this book. Though somewhat difficult, Marks, Dembski and Ewert have done a masterful job of making the book accessible to the engaged and thoughtful layperson. I could not endorse this book more highly.”
J.P. Moreland, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University,
Author of: The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters
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“With penetrating brilliance, and with a masterful exercise of pedagogy and wit, the authors take on Chaitin’s challenge, that Darwin’s theory should be subjectable to a mathematical assessment and either pass or fail. Surveying over seven decades of development in algorithmics and information theory, they make a compelling case that it fails.”
Bijan Nemati, Ph.D.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
California Institute of Technology
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“Dr. Marks has been at the forefront of research on evolutionary algorithms for three decades. However, in 2007 his university removed the website of his Evolutionary Informatics group because his research was a threat to the status quo in evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, Dr. Marks and his colleagues continued to pursue research into the informational requirements of evolutionary algorithms, the result of which is found in this volume. If you want to know what information theory says about evolution, this is the volume to read.”
Jonathan Bartlett, Director
The Blyth Institute
Author Programing from the Ground Up
Building Scalable Web Applications Using the Cloud
Coeditor Engineering and the Ultimate: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Order and Design in Nature and Craft
Naturalism and Its Alternatives in Scientific Methodologies
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“Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics is a lucid, entertaining, even witty discussion of important themes in evolutionary computation, relating them to information theory. It’s far more than that, however. It is an assessment of how things might have come to be the way they are, applying an appropriate scientific skepticism to the hypothesis that random processes can explain many observed phenomena. Thus the book is appropriate for the expert and non-expert alike.”
Donald Wunsch, Ph.D.
Mary K. Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor
Director of the Applied Computational Intelligence Lab
Missouri University of Science & Technology
IEEE Fellow, INNS Fellow
Past President of the International Neural Networks Society
Coauthor of Neural Networks and Micromechanics
Unified Computational Intelligence for Complex Systems Clustering
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“Evolution requires the origin of new information. In this book, information experts Bob Marks, Bill Dembski, and Winston Ewert provide a comprehensive introduction to the models underlying evolution and the science of design. The authors demonstrate clearly that all evolutionary models rely implicitly on information that comes from intelligent design, and that unguided evolution cannot deliver what its promoters advertise. Though mathematically rigorous, the book is written primarily for non-mathematicians. I recommend it highly.”
Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute
Author of: Zombie Science,
Icons of Evolution
The Myth of Junk DNA
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“When biologists finally come to terms with the fact that Darwinism was a long experiment in collective self-deception, the work described in this book will deserve much of the credit for putting things right.”
Douglas Axe, Ph.D.
Director of Biologic Institute
Author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is.
Coauthor of Science and Human Origins
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“Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics helps the non-expert reader grapple with a fundamental problem in science today: We cannot model information in the same way as we model matter and energy because there is no relationship between the metrics. As a result, much effort goes into attempting to explain information (and intelligence) away. The authors show, using clear and simple illustrations, why that approach not only does not work but cannot work. It impedes understanding of our universe. The picture that emerges from their work is of a universe that is at the same time more mysterious than we had been led to expect and more familiar.”
Denyse O’Leary, Science Writer.
Author/Coauthor of:
The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul
By Design Or By Chance?: The Growing Controversy On The Origins Of Life In The Universe
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“Marks, Dembski, and Ewert have written a book summarizing in a very accesible way all of their research at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab for the last decade. If the blind watchmaker says “me thinks it is like a weasel”, they say “perhaps, but in order to see it you need these active-information glasses.” When the watchmaker is able to see with the glasses (and he needs them to be certain it is a weasel), he is not blind anymore. He is, like the programmer of an evolutionary algorithm, an intelligent designer with a very clear sight of his target. —‘Oh, yes, it was a weasel!’ “
Daniel Andrés Díaz Pachón, Ph.D.
Research Assistant Professor, Biostatistics, University of Miami
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“This is an important and much needed step forward in making powerful concepts available at an accessible level.”
Ide Trotter, Ph.D.
Trotter Capital Management Inc.
Founder:Trotter Prize & Endowed Lecture Series on Information, Complexity and Inference (Texas A&M)
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“Steampunk fiction anachronistically fuses Victorian steam powered technology into the digital age. Darwinism is ‘steampunk science.’ It is an analog-based Victorian relic trying to make its way in the digital information age. Darwin had no conception of the information problem facing any account of naturalistic evolution. Darwin’s 21st century successors certainly know about the problem, but as Marks, Dembski and Ewert demonstrate in Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, in 2017 they are no closer to solving the problem than Darwin was in 1859. This lay-accessible introduction to the information issue and how it remains unsolved is absolutely essential to anyone who wants to understand how all life is fundamentally information-based, and how naturalistic evolutionary science has not come remotely close to solving the problem of how meaningful information can arise in the absence of intelligence.”
Barry Arrington, D.Jur.
Colorado House of Representatives (1997-1998)
Editor-in-Chief, UncommonDescent.com
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“One of the things Intelligent Design theorists do is take what is obvious to the layman, that unintelligent forces cannot do intelligent things, and state it in more rigorous, scientific terms, so that highly educated people can understand also. This book makes important contributions to that effort, using results and terminology from information theory.”
Granville Sewell, Ph.D.
Professor of Mathematics, University of Texas, El Paso
Author of: Computational Methods of Linear Algebra
In the Beginning: And Other Essays on Intelligent Design
Christianity for Doubters
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“A very helpful book on this important issue of information, which evolution cannot explain. Information is the jewel of all science and engineering which is assumed but barely recognised in working systems. In this book Marks, Dembski and Ewert show the major principles in understanding what information is and show that it is always associated with design.”
Andy C. McIntosh DSc, FIMA, C.Math, FEI, C.Eng, FInstP, MIGEM, FRAeS.
Visiting Professor of Thermodynamics, School of Chemical and Process Engineering, University of Leeds, LEEDS, UK. Adjunct Professor, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Mississippi State University, Starkville, Mississippi, USA
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People who don’t like the book still won’t.
But see also: Information theory is bad news for Darwin: Evolutionary informatics takes off
5 Responses to Who thinks Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics should be on your summer reading list?
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Some familiar names there.
It’s telling that the authors expect their readers to know important verses of the Bible by heart (“Secondly we believe a la Romans 1:20 and like verses that the implications of this work in the apologetics of perception of meaning are profound”), but that they have not heard of the most common technical terms (“JPG: pronounced JAY-peg”).
The nature of this book allows the authors to skip over all the problems of their ideas and omit difficult definitions: while they talk about “searches” for dozens and dozens of pages, they never define what a “search” is.
One of the most problematic sentences is on page 173: “We note, however, the choice of an [search] algorithm along with its parameters and initialization imposes a probability distribution over the search space”.
Does it really? They authors have tried to show this in a couple of ways in various papers, and each of their approaches seemed to be ridden with further problems. So, they just side-step this crucial bit of their theory.
It’s funny you take issue with a non-controversial comp. sci. statement.
Look, Marks’ book is correct. There is nothing in his book that is wrong from a engineering and comp. sci. perspective. The only thing you can take issue with is whether the models are good representations of evolution. But, the models themselves are proposed by Darwinists as being good representations. All Marks & co. do is show that the models cannot produce information. It is Darwinists making the claim and Marks showing the claim is false, and he succeeds.