No Evo Challenge from Dembski

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/p/no-evo-challenge-from-dembski.html

From "Life's Conservation Law" by William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II (https://evoinfo.org/papers/ConsInfo_NoN.pdf), on page 29 we have,

"Let’s be clear where our argument is headed. We are not here challenging common descent, the claim that all organisms trace their lineage to a universal common ancestor. Nor are we challenging evolutionary gradualism, that organisms have evolved gradually over time. Nor are we even challenging that natural selection may be the principal mechanism by which organisms have evolved. Rather, we are challenging the claim that evolution can create information from scratch where previously it did not exist. The conclusion we are after is that natural selection, even if it is the mechanism by which organisms evolved, achieves its successes by incorporating and using existing information."

"The conclusion we are after" is a rather questionable phrase. A bit of a giveaway. In science, and in any respectable form of scholarship in any subject, we do not start with a "conclusion" and then try to fit the facts, screaming and kicking, into supporting it. We derive conclusions from the facts and from using reason. 

Anyway:

Dembski is the darling of the Unidentifiable Flying Intelligent Designer Spotting Club, and is often used by cdesign proponentsists (https://ncse.ngo/cdesign-proponentsists) because they see him as a highly qualified advocate of anti-evolutionism.

But he is not denying evolution here. Indeed, he acknowledges it. He understands it. What he is trying to do is to insert "God" into his worldview. The source of information", he claims, has been "front loaded" into the world so that evolution can work, and so that it can convert that information into a genomic form. All the information in our genomes is derived from the environment by evolution, but, he tries to argue, it cannot create 'new' information.

Now Dembski's view here is very similar to the views of Richard Dawkins, who says that our genomes represent information about the environment gathered by evolution, information about how to live and successfully reproduce in that environment. The only difference I can see, between Dawkins and Dembski, is that Dembski wants to argue that his "God"  - (or the Unidentifiable Intelligent Designer) is the source of all information, which it embodied in the world it created. Dawkins has little to say about this. He is a biologist and not one given to philosophical speculations about the nature of reality. Strictly speaking, such philosophical speculations are irrelevant to biological evolution.

The issue of whether or not evolution can create new information strikes me as the equivalent of the old pre-scientific discussions about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Thanks to Jason Rosenhouse whose book, "The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism" (https://www.amazon.com/Failures-Mathematical-Anti-Evolutionism-Jason-Rosenhouse-ebook/dp/B0B523NRCB) brought Dembski and Marks' article to my attention.