Steve Fuller’s book Science v. Religion? ID and the Problem of Evolution is thoroughly discredited in a review by Prof. Norman Levitt, a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:
Fuller… is a professor of sociology of science at the University of Warwick (UK), whose career has been built on a lofty and careless disdain for science itself. The book under review… is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position….
I want to consider Fuller’s very extensive discussion of “complexity” and “randomness.” … Fuller… shows no awareness of the actual mathematical literature (even though much of it is accessible, at the basic level, to anyone with minimal mathematical skill). Instead, he seems content to take ID-theorist William Dembski as his guide. He attributes to Dembski a maxim to the effect that it is “impossible” to design a true random-number generator because it is ultimately possible to “infer” the algorithm that lies behind it (p. 61). But this grossly misunderstands a basic principle of complexity theory, the insight that in general it is not possible to devise an effective method for distinguishing a random from a non-random stream of data.
Indeed, it is easily possible for virtually anyone to devise a simple way of generating such a data stream (making it highly “compressible” or non-random), which will, for all practical purposes, defeat any human attempt to say whether it is or isn’t random or how “compressible” it really is. …in the context of I.D. “theory,” the effect is to refute the naïve notion that design by an intelligent agent is always discernible….
Fuller has done little to come to terms with Dembski’s most trenchant critics, actual experts in complexity and information theory, such as Mark Perakh and Jeffrey Shallit, the latter of whom has justifiably damned Dembski’s work as “pseudo-mathematics.” (Read more.)
(Hat tip to Pharyngula)
