Hey everyone, we're back again to even
further expose your favorite creationist
propaganda outlet and mine, Discovery
Institute. How are there still more of
these jerks left to cover? Today, for
part 12, we hit one of their star
players, Bill Dembski. What's his
problem? Let's check it out. Bill is
just like other DI senior fellows, such
as Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, in
that he went through academia and got a
doctorate in mathematics, only to spend
his life as a pointless apologist
writing crappy books and contributing
nothing legitimate whatsoever to any
field of inquiry. The reason he's top
brass at the DI is because he came up
with one of their favorite scripts for
pushing intelligent design propaganda,
and that is specified information, which
essentially says that the genome is so
super crazy complicated, like a crazy
complicated code, and only things that
think can make codes, which proves the
Christian God exists. Yes, much like
Behe's irreducible complexity, it's just
another life is too complicated
argument, but from the perspective of
mathematics and information theory. But,
unlike irreducible complexity, which
they seem to have more or less abandoned
because of how thoroughly it has been
debunked, perhaps most thoroughly in
this series, this DNA is a crazy code
crap is what Meyer has been pushing like
gangbusters recently. He's been making
lots of appearances. He made a shitty
propaganda movie for theatrical release,
and this talking point is perhaps the
focal point of all of it. So, it's about
time we perform a surgical dissection
and debunk it to smithereens, starting
right from the source. Obviously, this
specified information nonsense will be
what we spend the most time talking
about, but let's build up to that and
get some context. Just like everyone
else at the DI, Bill knows me quite
well, and he participated in the
desperate wave of damage control the
entire organization enacted immediately
after I began exposing them, especially
James Tour. Here's what Bill had to say
about me and Jimbo the very next day
after our debate at Rice. Keep in mind
that James was coached by Bill, since
his fourth talking point in the debate
was Bill's pseudoscientific concept of
specified information. Farina focused on
Tour's lies while Tour focused on
chemistry. Mr. Farina.
>> got it? Farina's antics were so
wearisome. Mr. Farina.
>> got it? Farina just attacked poor Tour
while Tour was trying to engage in
substantive questions about prebiotic
chemistry. Mr. Farina. Mr. Farina.
>> it?
Yes, it's the pathetic script they all
agreed on at the damage control board
meeting the morning after James
humiliated himself. Dave just cited
titles of papers. He totally didn't use
a pile of scientific literature to prove
James is a lying fraud. Trust me, bro.
And what's this? Consistent with my
YouTube channel where I promote atheism.
Well, I've never done that a single
time, so it sounds like Bill's a lying
piece of [\h__\h] who has never visited my
channel, which is a shame since he could
learn something. And of course all this
crying about arrogance is laughable
given that James pretends to be the
world's leading expert in a field he is
completely clueless about. And what's
this? The interruptions of Tour by
Farina, which of course didn't happen a
single time since James was the one
shrieking over me for a solid 90 minutes
and shouting, "This is my time." during
open discussion sections. And it's just
a hand in a Right here. I just showed
you.
>> Do it. YOU JUST SAID HOMOCHIRALITY.
AND I'M showing you another paper.
>> MR. FARINA.
HERE. WHAT DO YOU GO. GO. GO. GO. GO.
YOU DON'T DO IT. I'M GOING TO NARRATE.
This is my time now. Anyway, that's
enough about the debate. Let's continue
to his botched criticism of a very
simple point I made in my very first
video about James. I was discussing the
idiotic way that creationists throw
around big numbers for shock value, such
as the probability of a particular
sequence of amino acids arising by
chance. For example, given a particular
protein with 100 amino acid residues,
the odds of that specific sequence
arising would be one in 20 to the 100,
which is a huge number. In comparison, I
took 10 people in a room with their 10
birthdays and showed that the
probability of that particular
configuration of birthdays had a
probability of one in 42 trillion
trillion, also a very big number. And
yet, there they are, just like the
protein. Everybody in a room must have a
birthday, all proteins must have an
amino acid sequence, and these numbers
don't mean anything. It's like confusing
the infinitesimal odds of a specific
person winning the lottery with the 100%
probability that somebody will win.
Bill's big brain retorts to my
explanation that a small child could
understand was to bring up his buzzword
of specification. Birthdays are
unspecified. For the analogy to work, it
would have to be a special pattern of
birthdays, like everyone having the same
birthday. Nope, it's arbitrary, just
like the arbitrary amino acid sequence I
was comparing it to. There is no
specification in either case. Pathetic.
But, this is what Bill and the rest of
the DI have to do. They blindly assert
that Dave is a dummy who just doesn't
understand anything. When I reference
primary scientific literature, they have
to pretend that I fumble it left and
right, especially when I use it to show
how they are actually the ones who
fumble all the primary scientific
literature. And this little dig about me
playing to the gallery is quite
hilarious, since the target audience of
the DI is exclusively science-illiterate
Christians who have absolutely no idea
what any of them are talking about. This
is why the big scary numbers approach
works on them, whether it's complaining
about a particular sequence of amino
acids to yield a protein or a particular
sequence of nucleotides in the genome.
Bill pretends it just can't come about
naturally. Forget the fact that nature
can try billions of random sequences
until it finds a few that self-replicate
and therefore amplify themselves. Forget
the fact that nature isn't aiming for a
specific target, but simply finds
something functional and then refines
the sequence and corresponding function
over time via natural selection. Forget
the fact that no specific individual
sequence is needed, that there is
tremendous variability for any
biopolymer without sacrificing
functionality. Basically, forget all of
molecular biology, which is easy for him
since he genuinely truly does not
understand this stuff. Some some
evolutionary theorists, by the way, they
say, well, you know, it's like whenever
we design people, we use some term, it's
like, well, you're talking about
evolutionary search, but we're not
really searching for things cuz there's
no pre-specified target. Well,
there there is a target. Being alive is
a target. You know, if you're if you're
dead, as Steve Meyer so eloquently put
it, you're not really a viable candidate
for anything. No, Bill, life was never a
target. It's just a natural process
where complex self-organizing molecular
systems emerge to efficiently consume
and dissipate free energy gradients like
sunlight and increase global entropy.
These systems maintain internal order by
exporting disorder to their
surroundings. In other words, life is a
naturally occurring pattern of matter
specifically prompted by the laws of
thermodynamics. This has been well
understood since the 1970s, and I've
explained the relevant physics in my
content debunking James Tour. This is
what you ideologically captured asshats
will never let through your thick
skulls. But forget these esoteric
physics principles. Dembski is so dumb
that he doesn't even actually understand
basic principles of evolutionary
biology. I'm talking about high
school-level stuff.
>> Dawkins stops it here and says is uh
well, see how cuz
Darwinian processes do better than
random processes. And I would say,
"Amen. That's right, they do." But why
do they do it? Because you fed
information into them. No, Bill, nobody
is feeding information into anything.
There is no target genome. Genomes exist
and mutations occur. The non-randomness
of natural selection is based on
survival advantage. If there's a point
mutation in the genome that results in
the associated protein functioning more
efficiently, that organism is more
likely to survive and pass on the
mutation. So, the mutation proliferates
in a statistically significant way. It
is genuinely [\h__\h] astounding that he
does not understand this. When you read
the Darwinian literature, it's as though
if you put heredity,
random variation,
uh natural selection, replication, you
put those things together, you're
automatically going to get a lot of
interesting stuff happening. And it's
not the case. You can put all those key
Darwinian elements together and nothing
interesting will happen. Nothing will
happen. Evolution doesn't happen. Except
for yes, it [\h__\h] does, which is why
we observe evolution every single day.
Can you believe this jerk? This is
flat-earth level science denial. First
of all, referring to primary scientific
literature in evolutionary biology as
Darwinian literature makes him sound
like a complete [\h__\h] No modern
evolutionary biologist is a Darwinist.
We are at least a century past that.
Darwin would have no clue what's
happening right now. He didn't even know
that DNA exists. Bill is just
desperately trying to reduce an entire
field of science to the utterances of a
single prophet, since that's actually
how his propaganda operates, and he
wants to level the playing field. But
second, he has no idea what mutation and
natural selection actually mean. He has
no idea what macro mutations are, gene
duplication and neo-functionalization,
de novo genes, entire chromosome
duplication. There can be profound
changes made to the genome in even a
single generation, which dramatically
alter the morphology of an organism.
This has been documented thoroughly. So,
I'm sorry, Billy boy, evolutionary
biology is plenty interesting. You're
just too stupid and lazy to learn
anything about it. He's right on par
with the science-illiterate Christians
he's pandering to. So, unfortunately,
for anyone who likes to prop him up by
playing the credentials game, I have
some bad news. He is not an actual
scholar, nor is he anyone to be taken
seriously by the scientific community.
This assessment of him on debunking
denial is quite accurate. He does not
publish in legitimate journals, he
writes shitty books full of lies, or
publishes fake papers in fake journals
invented exclusively to make intelligent
design look like real science. As
Forrest and Grose state, Bill evades
criticism like the plague, and once
scholars give up on trying to explain to
him how he's wrong, he proudly exclaims
that nobody can explain how he's wrong.
This is not how science works. These are
infantile tactics of the ID community.
And of course, what does any fraud do
when they are ignored by legitimate
scholars? Play the victim. The brave
rebel with the super secret truth that
the dogmatic establishment just can't
handle. A tale as old as time. Bill lays
this narrative on thick. It probably
would have been a way for me to get a
good academic position,
uh except that I immediately applied
these ideas to biology, and that uh that
was uh you know, that was a bridge too
far as far as the scientific community
was concerned because
uh they didn't want these ideas being
applied there. Stupid closed-minded
academics always spotting your shitty
apologetics a mile away and writing you
off as the fraud that you are. The nerve
of them. Anyway, at the end of the
video, we will put the motives of
Discovery Institute in context by
outlining the insidious agenda of the
wealthy Christian nationalists who fund
them, and their relentless efforts to
capture every sector of the American
government such that they can obliterate
the separation of church and state with
the eventual goal of establishing a
theocracy. Never forget that this is the
political alignment of the DI as we've
demonstrated several times before. First
by combing through the internally leaked
wedge document that outlines their
overtly political strategy, and also by
pointing out their involvement with
Project 2025. This is a very dark and
evil organization posing as the pious
and persecuted voices of the dirty
dogmatic atheist scientific community.
And don't forget that for a single
second. But this section will have a lot
more weight once we have thoroughly
debunked the pseudoscience itself. So
let's tear apart Dembski's [\h__\h]
first. Specified information. DNA has
super special information that only a
god could put there. All right, let's
give this crap the full treatment. So
what is the genesis here? The first
thing we have to do is discuss a related
term, specified complexity. This is a
term coined by Leslie Orgel in his 1973
book The Origins of Life, Molecules and
Natural Selection. This was an early era
of origin of life research that began to
hint at what would later become systems
chemistry, the first musings of the
potentiality for systems of molecules to
replicate themselves, which has been
thoroughly demonstrated since the
beginning of the 21st century. Specified
complexity is a term that distinguishes
between simple order or random noise and
patterns that seem both unlikely and
meaningful, like a random sequence of
nucleotides versus the sequence found in
the genome of a living organism. This is
a perfectly sensible and intuitive idea,
but Dembski takes this vague intuition
and attempts to weaponize it against
evolutionary principles. He dresses it
up with technical vocabulary from
information theory, pretends it
functions like a rigorous design
detector, and then applies it to biology
as though evolution were just a one-shot
random search. That's where the whole
thing goes off the rails. We're talking
about the desperate denial that
functional nucleotide sequences can
arise by chance and subsequently become
refined through natural selection. For
reference, we can use his 2024 blog post
Specified Complexity Made Simple.
Remember, the game here is to get the
reader to believe that specified
complexity is not just a loose intuition
that intelligent design advocates have
inflated far beyond its legitimate
scope, but rather a rigorous
mathematical concept that critics simply
refuse to understand. So let's go ahead
and understand it so that we can watch
it completely fall apart under even
light scrutiny. Right off the bat,
Dembski starts with the usual credential
laundering. He exclaims that he didn't
invent the phrase, Leslie Orgel used it,
and Crick said something about
specification, therefore this whole
thing has scientific pedigree. Nope.
Using a phrase that appeared in origin
of life discussions half a century ago
does not magically validate the very
specific creationist use Dembski wants
to make of it now by coining the related
but separate term specified information.
In fact, he admits that Orgel's
formulation was vague, confused, and
different from his own. So, he
immediately fails in his attempt at
pretending that legitimate science
somehow endorses his deceptive language
and bogus arguments. He's pointing at
words and aura farming to do
apologetics, nothing more. Then we get
to the toddler examples that he hopes
will bring an uneducated reader to his
side. We can hear Dembski explain this
stuff in person as well. So, the
complexity there is improbability, and
we can think of that as
uh if I flip a coin 100 times,
uh the the improbability of that or the
probability is 1 over 2 to the 100. You
keep the the probabilities multiply
because coin flipping the individual
flips are independent of each other.
So, the thing is
that's 1 over 2 to the 100, that's about
1 in 10 to the 30. Um you know, so very
small number, 1 in a trillion trillion
million, okay?
Uh but you can also
uh
think of it in terms of bits. How many
bits does it take to characterize that
sequence of coin tosses? It could be
head, tails, head, tails, you know, and
and so on. And so, if you let head be
one, tails be zero, then you can get a
sequence of length 100 that will carry
that will precisely identify this the
the the coin tosses. So, probabilities
and number of bits are directly related.
So, one in two to the 100 probability it
corresponds to 100 bits of information.
Okay, so we've got the crazy probability
numbers and we're defining bits of
information. Now, back to the blog post
where he applies this to letters and
words. Okay, we've got boat repeated a
bunch of times which is like a crystal,
specified simplicity. Random gibberish
which is like a random sequence of
monomers, unspecified simplicity. And
then a meaningful English sentence which
is like a gene, specified complexity.
These labels are reasonable. Nobody
disputes that repetition is different
from noise and both are different from a
meaningful message. But here's the
problem, a meaningful English sentence
is meaningful because human beings use
language. That meaning exists in a
linguistic community with conventions,
intentions, grammar, and semantics. DNA
is not secretly English and it is not a
language. We use the letters ACTG to
represent nucleotides, but that's our
own human convention. You don't get to
say, "Hey, this thing can be represented
symbolically, therefore it must be mind
generated in the same way as a
sentence." That's ridiculous. The codon
anticodon basis for gene expression is
absolutely not as complex as the words
I'm speaking right now, nor does the
former require a mind to come about just
like the latter so obviously does.
Dembski loves me so much that he brings
up my birthday analogy again to try to
strengthen his position. The birthdays
are unspecified. It would only work if
all the birthdays were something
specific like January 1st. This is
idiotic. That date is no more specific
than any other and no series of birth
dates are any more special or privileged
or complex than any other. Just like no
amino acid sequence is inherently
special, nor would 100 glycines in a row
guarantee function like his meaningless
series of January 1sts. The birthdays
are arbitrary just like what I was
specifically comparing them to, the odds
of getting a specific sequence of amino
acids, no matter what it is. He is very
clearly trying to insert the concept of
biopolymer function, which has nothing
to do with what I was talking about, and
would make the analogy fall apart
anyway, since no specific set of
birthdays would serve any inherent
function. If he doesn't like the world
of analogy, he would have to actually
discuss molecular evolution and how
specific sequences can both come to be
and proliferate in a statistically
significant way. But, that's a big no-no
for the ID camp. They don't like to
admit that molecules can evolve by
natural selection, a thing that we have
physically observed for several decades
now. This should all be relatively easy
to understand, but Demski deliberately
tries to make it harder to understand
with math and jargon to confuse the
reader into thinking he's smart and
therefore probably right. So, let's
debunk his obfuscation by over
intellectualization. To do so, we can
get a little help from an even more
pointless loser apologist, good old
Aaron boy Jonathan McLatchie. You
remember him, right? The guy who
hallucinated a fake Twitter debate with
me. Let's watch. So, to take um an an
illustration, take an ATM machine. And
you put your bank card into ATM machine,
and you have to dial four-digit PIN
number.
And there's only one PIN number which is
specific to your bank card out of a out
of a combinatorial space, if you will,
of 10,000 ways of dialing a four-digit
number.
Um so, if you only have three attempts
before the bank locks you out of your
account, then the chances of you
stumbling upon the correct PIN number by
chance um is very, very small. Oh my
gosh, you choose a PIN number for the
ATM, and you have to get it right to get
the money. Therefore, DNA is a code from
God. That's what these morons come to
the table with, complete with a David
Fincher film soundtrack for maximum
effect. Astounding. Likewise, when we're
when we're looking at the the the
context of biology, um if you take a
proteins, proteins are comprised of
subunits called amino acids, and there's
[music] uh um if you take uh there's
there's um 20 or so different type
different amino acids, and they
basically
>> [music]
>> um determine how a protein collapses
into its three-dimensional conformation.
And if you take a a protein residue of
150 amino acids long, you can ask, out
of all these, and there's 20 to the
150th power of possible ways of
arranging these amino acids, and out of
all these possibilities, how many are
functional? How many are gibberish? And
it turns out that the prevalence of
functional stable protein folds is
astronomically small within this
combinatorial [music] space.
And it would argue exhaust the probably
probabilistic resources at one's
disposal, and it conforms to the
independent like given pattern of
specifying what you need for specific
protein functions. So, that's what we
mean by specified complexity.
Right, except that's not true at all.
All of these clowns just blindly assert
it. First of all, he pretends that most
proteins would somehow be unstable.
That's insane. Virtually any sequence
would be stable. There is no amino acid
sequence that just falls apart for no
reason. The question is function. It's
certainly true that not just any old
sequence will exhibit function, but
plenty of research has been done to
determine what fraction of potential
sequences of a given length will exhibit
function, and it's not astronomically
low at all. It could be as many as one
in a million, even when considering a
highly specific individual function,
like binding ATP. Jack Szostak showed
that at the very least one in a trillion
sequences of 80 amino acids will do
this. Again, that's one specific
function out of countless possible
functions. And while one in a trillion
sounds pretty low, remember that
molecules are very tiny, and chemical
reactions are very fast. For nature to
make a trillion polypeptides is trivial.
It's just a matter of stumbling upon a
sequence that does something, and then
that sequence can be refined over time.
But don't worry, there's more jargon to
get through. He's super smart, remember?
Dembski is always talking about things
called Shannon information and
Kolmogorov information. Sounds pretty
technical and sexy, no? He clearly knows
more than you do, so stop asking
questions and just trust him. Well, not
today. Since these are real terms, let's
define them in order to then debunk him.
Shannon information is about
probability. The less likely an event
is, the more information it carries. So,
if I tell you the sun rose this morning,
that conveys very little Shannon
information because it was expected. If
I tell you it started snowing in the
Sahara, that carries more Shannon
information because it is far less
likely. Kolmogorov information or
complexity is different. This is about
how short or long the simplest
description of something can be. A
string of characters like A A A A A A A
A has low Kolmogorov complexity because
you can describe it very briefly by
saying it's just eight A's. But, a
string like Q7L9X2MP
looks much more random. So, the shortest
description is the string itself, which
means it has higher Kolmogorov
complexity. Shannon information comes
from Claude Shannon's information theory
in the 1940s, where the goal was to
study communication and uncertainty.
Kolmogorov information comes from
algorithmic information theory in the
1960s, especially the work of Andrei
Kolmogorov, and it asks how short the
simplest description of something can
be. Again, these are real ideas. Nobody
disputes that. What is absolutely not
established is what Demski does with
them. He proposes the spurious
mathematical relationship of specified
complexity being equal to Shannon
information minus Kolmogorov
information. And this is an equation
that points to intelligent design. So,
he is claiming that taking one minus the
other gives you some universal detector
for intelligent design in biology.
That's the huge leap in a nutshell.
First off, the whole idea is a
non-starter. Kolmogorov complexity is
not something you can generally compute
exactly, and the probability model you
choose is doing all the heavy lifting.
So, when Bill presents this as some
clean objective metric that design just
pops out of, that's nonsense, or more
accurately, propaganda. But, let's get
to the mushiest part, specification.
Bill wants a specification to be some
short description, some salient pattern,
but short according to what language?
Salient to whom? Chosen when? Before the
event or after it? Because if you get to
look at the outcome first and then
invent a cute short description for it,
you can make all kinds of things look
spooky. Humans do this constantly. We
see shapes in clouds, faces on Mars,
lucky streaks, hidden messages,
conspiracies. This is why genuine
statistical reasoning is fixated on
avoiding post hoc pattern fishing.
Dembski talks as if any event with a
neat little label suddenly defeats
chance. No, it doesn't. Not unless the
specification is independently justified
in advance, and even then you still need
the right probabilistic model. As usual,
Dembski has cute little examples meant
to convince his science-illiterate
targets that they understand what he's
talking about. Namely, Mount Rushmore
with carved faces in rock and poker,
which can involve cheating. Bill loves
these examples because they're already
soaked in human intentionality. Poker is
a game designed by humans. Cheating is
done by humans. Mount Rushmore was
carved by humans and has human faces on
it. Amazing. And now he wants you to
slide from those examples directly into
proteins and genomes as though the logic
transfers automatically. It doesn't. In
archaeology or forensics, you infer
design because you already know that
minds exist in the causal environment,
and you have independent knowledge of
what minds do. In biology, the causal
environment includes evolution, a blind
naturalistic process. So you don't get
to ignore mutation, selection, drift,
and deep time and then baselessly
announce that chance failed. That's
ignoring the entire process. To be
clear, this is the tactic you have to
catch every time. Bill says chance can't
do it, therefore intelligence. But
evolution is not just chance. It never
was. Selection is non-random. Lineages
accumulate changes step-by-step. So when
Dembski frames the issue as random
assembly versus design, he is not
refuting evolution. He is refusing to
talk about evolution. It's the
hallucination of the fingerprint of the
god he is ideologically bound to
assuming exists and made everything
while refusing to engage with what
science actually says. These frauds
never once engage with the actual
principles of molecular biology that are
inconvenient to their propaganda. It's
just poker hands and carved faces since
that's what their targets can
understand. They may use real terms like
Shannon and Kolmogorov but the bridge to
biology is never actually built just
blindly asserted to make a
run-of-the-mill argument from
incredulity look like science. At the
risk of sounding like a broken record,
let's reiterate all of this with more
examples. Many viewers will already have
understood perfectly well what I'm
saying but we really have to thoroughly
expose the biggest trick in this whole
specified information game which is that
Dembski wants you to imagine biology as
a one-shot event. One exact outcome, one
exact sequence, one exact moment, pure
blind luck and if the number is tiny
enough then according to him we must
infer design. But that's just not how
nature works. This is how these
probability games are always rigged.
They take some modern biological
feature, pretend nature was aiming at
that exact final form from the
beginning, calculate the odds of getting
that exact thing in one random draw and
then wave around a big scary number. But
chemistry was not happening once,
molecular interactions were not
happening once, replication was not
happening once, mutation was not
happening once. On Earth alone there
were a billion years of chemical
activity before and during early life.
And beyond Earth, the scale gets
absurdly large very fast. The Milky Way
contains at least 100 billion stars and
the observable universe contains at
least 100 billion galaxies which would
imply something like 10 sextillion stars
if galaxies were all roughly similar in
size. And that's just the observable
universe. Planets are not rare either.
There is at least one planet for every
star in our galaxy on average, which
implies roughly 100 to 400 billion
planets in the Milky Way alone.
Kepler-based estimates suggest that our
galaxy may contain about 300 million
potentially habitable worlds under
conservative assumptions. While other
analyses have estimated that about one
in five sun-like stars may host an
Earth-sized planet in the habitable
zone. This is another way in which
Dembski's entire framing is dead on
arrival. We are not talking about one
draw. We are talking about potentially
hundreds of millions of habitable zone
worlds in one galaxy and at least 100
billion galaxies in the observable
universe. Even if only a tiny fraction
of those environments ever had chemistry
remotely conducive to life, the number
of opportunities is still mind-boggling.
Let's say we're looking at something
that has a one in a billion shot at
happening. Sounds impossibly rare,
right? Now give it one trillion chances.
So n equals 10 to the 12. The chance
that it happens at least once is one
minus the quantity one minus 10 to the
negative nine to the 10 to the 12.
That's approximately one minus e to the
negative 1,000. This is so close to one
that for all practical purposes, it is
certain to occur. In other words,
something that sounds absurdly unlikely
in one attempt becomes overwhelmingly
likely if the number of opportunities is
large enough. That is to say, when
infinitesimal odds meet astronomical
opportunity, [\h__\h] happens. And that is
before we even get to the fact that
molecular evolution is not just repeated
random trials. It is cumulative
selection. This is why systems chemistry
is the ultimate boogeyman for them. This
is why James Tour is always whining
about how molecules don't move towards
life. It's a desperate denial of the
properties of systems of molecules that
we have begun to understand over the
past 50 years. Molecules can exhibit
autocatalytic behavior. Self-replication
for networks of molecules is possible
and has been demonstrated. The sequences
involved are not static. They are
changing all the time. That's mutation.
Useful changes are retained, built upon,
and amplified over immense spans of
time. So, Dembski's one-shot probability
framing is wrong in multiple ways at
once. First, he ignores the enormous
number of opportunities available across
time and space. Complaining about rarity
means nothing when the opportunities are
practically endless. Second, he ignores
that biological evolution is not a
one-step random assembly process in the
first place. There is no goal, just
constant change and the proliferation of
useful sequences via principles of
statistical dynamics. Then there is the
observer bias, which makes his argument
look even worse. Of course, we would
find ourselves in one of the cases where
the rare event happened. Only in such a
case could there be observers around to
notice it. Again, even if the odds of
life originating spontaneously on a
planet were one in a billion, that event
would still happen on billions of
planets. That's how many [\h__\h] planets
there are. So, when Dembski stares at
DNA or life in general and says, "What
are the odds?" The answer is that he has
asked the wrong question. The relevant
question is not "What are the odds of
this exact outcome in one shot?" The
relevant question is, "What are the odds
of some life-permitting chemistry
emerging somewhere given billions of
years, planetary-scale chemistry,
hundreds of millions of potentially
habitable worlds in our galaxy, and at
least 100 billion galaxies in the
observable universe?" Once you frame it
properly, the supposed miracle starts
looking a lot less miraculous,
especially given principles of systems
chemistry that not one DI member has
ever or will ever acknowledge. Most of
what I've been saying here is pretty
intuitive. That's why the DI can do
nothing but whine about how unqualified
I am or other pathetic attempts at
argumentum ad hominem, a thing that they
actually routinely do, unlike me,
despite their accusations otherwise. My
qualifications are irrelevant when I
simply refer to well-established
scientific principles. But, we can also
look at the work of professionals in the
field who have debunked the crap out of
Dembski's [\h__\h] as well. Here's a
2008 paper from Landman called Dembski's
specified complexity, a simple error in
arithmetic. As a quick preview, we find
the quantitative assessment that
Demski's math is off by a factor of 10
to the 117. Yikes, that's pretty bad.
Let's expand on that so that we can see
how on top of all the conceptual
problems we outlined, Demski also just
genuinely sucks at math. The core claim
here is that once you correct the
formula, it no longer does what Demski
wants it to do. The paper starts by
laying out Demski's setup in
stripped-down form. First, Demski
defines a chance hypothesis, basically a
model under which the event happened
randomly. Landman immediately notes a
problem here, which is that Demski is
vague about exactly what this means, and
that vagueness matters because
biological evolution is not just chance.
It also includes non-chance components
like selection, even for molecular
evolution. So right away, Landman is
already hinting that Demski's framework
may not even cleanly apply to evolution
in the first place. He states that
Demski assigns a probability to some
target pattern T. So far, fine. Then he
adds this extra term phi sub S of T,
which is supposed to count how many
patterns are at least as simply
describable as the target pattern. In
plain English, he is trying to account
for the fact that there are many
patterns an observer might notice, not
just one. Then Landman explains how the
derivation already breaks. Demski
multiplies these things together and
treats that as an upper bound on the
probability of getting some equally
simple pattern. But Landman points out
that simpler patterns are not
necessarily less probable. His example
is nice and concrete. If your target is
a very specific 10-digit string, the
probability is 1 in 10 billion, but a
simpler pattern like contains the digit
one is vastly more probable, around
0.35. So Demski's move from simplicity
to probability just does not hold.
That's the first error. Landman then
says this first problem is at least
fixable. You could redefine the pattern
counting term so that it only counts
patterns that are both at least as
simple and at least improbable as the
target. With that repair, the derivation
can continue. So he's being pretty
charitable there. But, then comes the
much bigger problem. Dembski later
brings in Seth Lloyd's estimate for the
computational capacity of the observable
universe, this famous 10 to the 120
number, and plugs it into the formula as
a universal upper bound on opportunities
or resources. Landman says this is where
Dembski makes the truly catastrophic
mistake. Lloyd's numbers are already
logarithmic measures, meaning they
already summarize the size of a
possibility space in bits. Dembski then
effectively takes the logarithm again
when he should not. Dembski drops two
logs instead of one, just like every DI
member does in their pants when I make
another one of these videos. And once
you fix this toddler mistake, the
intended conclusion is obliterated.
According to Landman, the corrected
formula becomes useless for Dembski's
purposes because it would only let you
infer non-randomness for something more
unlikely than the entire state space of
the universe, which is not a meaningful
criterion for detecting design in
biology or anywhere else. And guess
what? Dembski knows information theory
well enough to know exactly what he's
doing and why it's wrong to do.
>> Typically what information theorists do,
in fact always what they do, is they
transform probabilities by using a
logarithmic transform. It's a logarithm
to the base two, which basically
translates
probabilities into bits. This is not
just an error on his part. He's being
deliberately deceptive. At any rate,
Landman goes on to deconstruct this
conclusion in two different ways. First
is the information theory argument. If
you are considering Shannon information,
you take the log of the number of
possibilities. But again, Lloyd's
numbers are already logs of the
underlying possibilities. So, plugging
them directly into another logarithm is
just mathematically wrong. And second is
the dimensional analysis argument. This
is the units argument. You can't take
the log of something with units
attached, like bit operations, any more
than you can sensibly take the log of 88
feet, because the log of feet doesn't
mean anything. The thing inside the
logarithm has to be dimensionless. So,
Landman says Dembski's formula violates
that, too. So, the simple version of
this paper is, even if you temporarily
set aside all the philosophical and
biological objections to Dembski's
version of specified complexity, his
formula still fails on basic
mathematical grounds. First, the
probability bound does not follow from
the way Dembski defines pattern
simplicity. Second, the universal
resource bound is plugged in incorrectly
by a gigantic margin. And once
corrected, the formula no longer
supports the grand ideological
conclusions Dembski is desperate to
arrive at. So, in short, he is not just
vague or misleading, his math also
sucks. That was fun, huh? Let's try
another one. Here's the 2003 paper by
Elsberry and Shallit, "Information
Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and
Dembski's Complex Specified
Information." This one's a little more
in-depth, but we can highlight a few
points. First, the authors argue that
Dembski never gives a coherent positive
account of design or intelligence.
Instead, design is often treated as
whatever is left over after chance and
necessity are ruled out, which they say
is a bad way to infer causation. They
also argue that this makes design too
easy to infer from ignorance, especially
for events with complicated or poorly
known causal histories. In other words,
pretending that anything unexplained
equals design is a stupid way of
thinking. This is famously called the
God of the Gaps, no matter how much that
label triggers the DI bozos. Then, when
this paper gets to biology, it basically
argues that Dembski's applications are
some of the weakest parts of his whole
framework. One problem is that his
discussion of biological information
does not even sit cleanly with his own
concepts. He talks as though DNA is
packed with this kind of specified
information in a way that points to
design, but the authors point out that
DNA does not behave in this simple tidy
way his framework would suggest.
Compression of DNA is actually a real
research problem, and only limited
compression is possible. So, right away,
his rhetoric about information,
complexity, and compressibility is
already on shaky ground when applied to
actual biological sequences. Then there
is the classic bacterial flagellum
[\h__\h] which we've debunked to
smithereens in other videos, so we don't
need to reiterate it here. But the
biggest problem is the way Dembski
handles probability in biology. Nature
isn't one-shot assembly, so on and so
forth, all stuff we've heard before. So
the critique here is not just that
Dembski got a few biological examples
wrong. It's that once he applies this
framework to real biology, it becomes
unrealistic, over-inclusive, and
basically useless. Biology, information
theory, math, philosophy, it looks like
the learned world is uniformly opposed
to the propaganda campaign that is
specified information. This is not a
coincidence, nor some grand conspiracy
from the evil atheist cabal that is
academia. It's scholars universally
rejecting religious propaganda.
Dembski's schtick is nothing but a turd
in a tuxedo. When you strip away the
dressing, the message to the
science-literate viewer is that
information is some magical ethereal
substance breathed into DNA from the
Christian God, because that's the only
way to explain life. What could be more
pseudo-scientific than that?
At this point, with Dembski's
pseudo-science firmly debunked, we can
now pivot to the broader political
context for these claims and their
promotion by Discovery Institute.
Although their rebranding from creation
science to intelligent design involved
pivoting away from explicit mentions of
the Christian God, so as to seem more
neutral and scientific, their true
intent is transparent at every turn. In
2007, Dembski told the group Focus on
the Family that the designer of
intelligent design is ultimately the
Christian God. In Dembski's book
Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between
Science and Theology, he states, "The
conceptual soundings of the intelligent
design theory can in the end only be
located in Christ." We've talked about
this rebranding at great length,
including the pseudo textbook of Pandas
and People, which involved a search and
replace of creation scientists with
design proponents that yielded one
hilarious typo, "C design
proponentsists." That's how obvious
their empty PR campaign is. This book is
propaganda, and Dembski wrote a
follow-up with fellow DI asshat Jonathan
Wells called The Design of Life:
Discovering Signs of Intelligence in
Biological Systems. All these pseudo
textbooks do is attack evolution,
propose their own ideologically driven
alternative absent any rigorous science,
make unfalsifiable claims, wind
endlessly about ancient science like the
Miller-Urey experiment, and make no
attempt to discuss modern biology. It's
just propaganda peddling frauds trying
to teach religion in public school
science classes. Nothing new. How else
do these clowns try to infiltrate the
educational space? In 1999, Baylor
University President Robert Sloan
brought Dembski in to establish the
Michael Polanyi Center, basically an
intelligent design hub at major research
university, but apparently with little
faculty consultation and very little
connection to Baylor's actual science,
philosophy, or religion departments.
This is a Christian university, mind
you. Then, after the center held a
conference on naturalism in science,
Baylor's faculty senate voted 27 to 2 to
dissolve it and fold it into an existing
institute. Here's the funny part.
Dembski responded by claiming the review
had given an unqualified affirmation of
his work, and that it marked the triumph
of intelligent design as a legitimate
form of academic inquiry. Right, because
getting your center dissolved and
absorbed elsewhere is obviously the
clearest sign of total victory. Baylor
pushed back, asked him to withdraw the
statement, he refused, and he was
removed as director. So, the Baylor
story is a perfect representation of the
entire intelligent design campaign. Weak
to non-existent institutional support,
enormous ideological spin, and declaring
victory while being shown the door. This
is the DI through and through. Science
is always dead last. It's about
brainwashing conservative Christians
into thinking that religion is science,
and that means participating in pathetic
culture war brain rot. Demski is always
thrilled to be a warrior for this cause.
How scientific materialism begot woke
ideology. Oh my goodness, it's the two
worst things ever in the same blog post.
Stupid icky materialism that denies our
magic sky daddy and our super awesome
souls that totally exist and that stupid
dumb woke DEI nonsense. You know how
those stupid libtards push the trans
stuff that makes you so angry and
uncomfortable? They're the same ones
pushing this naturalism crap. The nerve.
Here are some choice snippets from this
turd fest. Scientific materialism is the
view that science functions to advance
materialism. This is him whining about
the fact that science is science.
Science explains the natural world,
which is made of matter, and science
does indeed function to advance science.
Shocking. Darwin is this atheistic
ideology's principal prophet. As soon as
they start crapping their pants about
Darwin, you can check out completely.
There's only butt-hurt creationist brain
rot to follow. Darwin is nothing
remotely like a prophet. No field of
science can be represented by an
individual scholar, and modern
evolutionary biology would be totally
unrecognizable to Darwin. Scientists
aren't prophets and science isn't
religion, no matter how much these
frauds want their target audience to
think it is so that they can feel better
about being brain washed idiots who have
blind faith in their false prophet.
Here's a gem. Woke ideology did not
arise in a vacuum, but is the logical
outworking of a materialist worldview in
which humans are meat puppets. There's
that word again, woke. Not a single
anti-woke loser can define what woke
means and they never will because it
just means any facts that hurt their
feelings. Yearning for the ignorance of
antiquity and all of the slavery and
misogyny and other social injustice that
went along with it. This is just a
pathetic defense mechanism of angry
white Christian men who can't handle
sharing their wealth and power for the
first time in centuries. Can you believe
this [\h__\h] is what passes for publication
over at the DI? This blog post is what
happens when someone confuses a culture
war rant with intellectual history.
Evolutionary biology has nothing to do
with campus politics, no matter how
angry you are that trans people exist.
Get over it. It is this ideological
framework that elucidates Dembski's
pseudoscience and the rest of the output
of the DI. Their rhetoric does not
consist of neutral scientific tools that
just happen to land on design when the
evidence points that way. They are built
from the start to make that conclusion
seem inevitable. The probability
framing, the vague notion of
specification, the misuse of information
theory language, the caricature of
evolution as a one-shot random process,
all of it is arranged in a way that
pushes toward intelligent design from
the outset. And that is why it can't be
separated from the broader project of
rebranding creationism. The goal is not
to follow the evidence wherever it
leads, the goal is to take religiously
motivated conclusions and dress them up
in mathematical and scientific-sounding
language so they appear respectable.
Specified information is one example of
that strategy. It begins with a loose
intuition that is not inherently
ridiculous, but then it gets stretched,
weaponized, and applied in a way that is
fundamentally biased toward declaring
design whenever natural explanations are
inconvenient to their agenda. The point
was never to do science, the point was
always to protect a predetermined
worldview. And this predetermined
worldview can't be separated from the
nefarious culture war the DI is
fighting. I've outlined this agenda many
times, but it still seems that not
enough people are aware of it. And with
Meyer ramping up his activity, pumping
out theater-grade propaganda films, it
bears repeating. The DI is part of the
war on science. This war is being waged
by institutions with theocratic intent.
These are astonishingly well-funded, and
they leave very little to chance. They
employ marketing firms to come up with
strategic methods to improve their
public appearance, undermine the
public's trust in science and academia,
and market pseudoscience like
intelligent design as credible and
legitimate science. I'm not being even
remotely hyperbolic. A marketing firm
pioneered their whole wedge strategy
from the now infamous wedge document
I've brought up many times as a way to
successfully undermine public trust in
science. The DI threw everything they
had at Kitzmiller v. Dover to inject
religion into public education. But
luckily, the Bush-appointed right-wing
judge they drew had integrity and
respect for the law, and they've been
recovering from that failure ever since.
This means doing their best to craft new
propaganda, but they also strategically
fund campaigns for countless nationalist
judges in an effort to subvert this
hurdle in future legal challenges. This
includes the capturing of the Supreme
Court under Trump. The public does not
seem to be fully aware of how tenuous
the separation of church and state
really is, and how easily it can be
undermined by malicious interpretations
of the Constitution. The goal is to
destroy public education, corrupt
scientific research, and subjugate the
masses under theocratic rule. And these
organizations have spent millions, if
not billions of dollars over the past
few decades, strategically chipping away
at our protections with the goal of
successfully reinterpreting the
Constitution in a theocratic light.
Don't forget, they successfully
overturned a landmark legal decision,
Roe v. Wade, that was affirmed and
reaffirmed for over 50 years. That
wasn't coincidence. It was the direct
result of their successful infiltration
of our Supreme Court. This should
terrify you. They just recently came
dangerously close to demolishing the
separation of church and state aspect of
the establishment clause as well by
reinterpreting the withholding of public
funds to religious schools as a
violation of those students' right to
practice their religion. The only reason
it didn't happen is because Amy Barrett
apparently grew a conscience and recused
herself on the case. So, it ended in a
split 4-4 ruling and ultimately bounced
back to the state ruling for now. But,
make no mistake, they plan to break that
barrier by any means possible so that
red states can start giving public funds
to private Christian schools because
apparently the millions in tax-free
unregulated money the churches get just
isn't good enough. So, they want the
little amount of money dedicated to
public education to fund private
Christian schools. Schools that can
brainwash children with religion and can
also discriminate with regards to who
they let in. Make no mistake, that
ruling may be right around the corner.
They strategically choose which cases to
fund and appeal to the Supreme Court and
that case was without a doubt chosen for
a reason as Barrett had some kind of
personal connection to the school in
question. Liberals, conservatives,
atheists, rational religious people, I
don't think almost anyone truly
comprehends just how dire the situation
is. These theocrats have already
successfully infiltrated all three
branches of government to remove all the
checks on their power and dismantled
every federal agency that was
established to prevent these very abuses
from taking place. They've gained
control and influence over multiple
large social media platforms and
immediately removed any existing
regulations on misinformation so they
can control which content gets
recommended and which gets buried.
They're in the process of forcing the
last independent platforms remaining
like YouTube to comply citing their own
authority to declare any public
criticism of theocratic ideologies as
religious hate speech. They're
weaponizing our Constitution and using
our own rights against us by selectively
using some to justify their violation of
others. They're attacking free speech on
social media and weaponizing laws by
reinterpreting their definitions like
declaring legitimate concerns or
criticisms as inciting panic or
rebellion. They're attacking every news
and media network that doesn't peddle
their propaganda by using their control
over the remaining federal regulatory
agencies to strong-arm them into
compliance. We are genuinely on the
verge of an all-out authoritarian
takeover with Trump as the puppet leader
who's in it strictly for the cash. And
if the public doesn't wake up and start
fighting back with serious coordinated
political action, we will soon find
ourselves in a position where it will
take a lot more than just a vote to get
our power back.
So, that's it for Bill Dembski, one of
the biggest losers over at Discovery
Institute. They're going to have to put
up a second dartboard with my face on it
over there because I'm going to
absolutely ruin every last bit of
propaganda that Meyer and Paultz have
planned. So, stay tuned for a lot more
of that in the near future. Until next
time.