Intelligent Design and the NFL Theorems: Debunking Dembski
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Simulation of biological evolution and the NFL theorems
William Dembski (No free lunch: why specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence, 2002) claimed that the NFL theorems from optimization theory render darwinian biological evolution impossible. Häggström (Biology and Philosophy 22:217-230, 2007) argued that the NFL theorems are not relevant for biological evolution at all, since the assumptions of the NFL theorems are not met. A...
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The title of William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch (Dembski 2002a) indicates that he perceives the no free lunch (NFL) theorems (Wolpert and Macready 1997) as pivotal to his thesis asserting that “specified complexity cannot be purchased without intelligence.” Indeed, many statements in Dembski’s book emphasize the crucial role of the NFL theorems. However, in his response (2002b) to a review re...
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William Dembski (2002) claimed that the NFL-theorems from optimization theory render Darwinian biological evolution impossible. Häggström (2006) argued that the NFL-theorems are not relevant for biological evolution, since the assumptions of the NFL-theorems are not met. Although I agree with Häggström (2006), in this article I argue that the NFL-theorems should be interpreted as dealing with a...
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Perhaps it is not surprising that mathematics has always been popular among anti-evolutionists. Math is unique in its ability to bamboozle a lay audience, making it well-suited to their purposes. William Dembski, of Baylor University, represents the cutting edge in anti-Darwinian mathematics. His bailiwick is probability and information theory, which he fashions into a formidable, but ultimatel...
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In this note I want to point out a relation between the No-Free-Lunch (NFL) Theorem and some simple models of biological evolution. This point is mathematically trivial, but I believe it nevertheless is of some interest. The NFL theorem characterizes the relative average performance of search algorithms and without being an expert in the field, I believe that its main impact has been to make re...
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