Product Description

Darwin's greatest accomplishment was to show how life might be explained as the result of natural selection. But does Darwin's theory mean that life was unintended? William A. Dembski argues that it does not. As the leading proponent of intelligent design, Dembski reveals a designer capable of originating the complexity and specificity found throughout the cosmos. Scientists and theologians alike will find this book of interest as it brings the question of creation firmly into the realm of scientific debate. Updated with a new Preface by the author.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #328845 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

About the Author
William A. Dembski is associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University and senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture in Seattle. Dr. Dembski has published articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author of seven books.

Customer Reviews

A Mathematical Proof of Intelligent Design
No Free Lunch, the sequel to mathematician and philosopher William Dembski's Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference, explores key questions about the origin of specified complexity. Dembski explains that the Darwinian search mechanism of random mutation coupled with natural selection is incapable of generating novel complex, specified information (CSI).

This observation translates into "No Free Lunch" (NFL) theorems, which Dembski explains are inherent constraints upon natural systems. Natural Darwinian mechanisms can shuffle this information around, but only intelligence can generate novel CSI. In other words, when it comes to generating truly novel biological complexity, Darwin can have no free lunch.

Some critics have asserted that he has never applied his model for detecting design to any real biological systems. The latter half of this book debunks this fallacious objection, and provides a detailed calculation of the CSI found in the bacterial flagellum. Dembski assesses the complexity of the flagellum on various levels, including its protein parts and its assembly instructions, finding that the amount of CSI contained in the flagellum vastly outweigh the probabilistic resources available in the history of the universe to construct such a structure, absent intelligent design.

No Free Lunch demonstrates that design theory shows great promise of providing insight in the field of evolutionary computation. If Dembski is right, then the ability of genetic algorithms to solve complex problems is a function of the amount of intelligent design inputted by their programmers.

Important, Milestone Arguments
This book is a strong addition to the growing body of literature on Intelligent Design theory and its applicability to questions of biological origins. To those who are interested in ID, its progress, its arguments, etc., No Free Lunch (NFL) should be considered required reading; it contains important, milestone arguments for that school of thought.

NFL should also be required reading for ID's critics -- *especially* those who would assume to review it! I am dumbfounded that some of this book's reviewers here on Amazon presume to criticize Dembski, the book, or ID in general while failing to in any way engage the substance of the book; e.g. Tim Beazley comments that Dembski overlooks the possibility of common descent and Intelligent Design being compatible, when nowhere does NFL claim to disprove common descent. Jean P Villard complains that ID-proponents have failed to demonstrate that Christian doctrine follows from the truth of ID, a claim that is so far outside the scope of NFL that I question whether Villard read the book or not.

In sum, No Free Lunch speaks to the question of whether genetic algorithms - and hence Darwin's mechanism - are or are not capable of creating the sort of specified complexity that we find in the biological world, as many neo-Darwinians claim (e.g., in different ways, Stuart Kauffman and Richard Dawkins). In this work, Dembski claims to demonstrate that they are not.
Those kudos and criticisms of this book which do not deal with that claim are largely irrelevant. Time will tell whether Dembski is right or wrong about the NFL theorems and their applicability to biological origins. In the meanwhile, interested readers would be well advised to stay informed about Dembski's actual arguments and the relevant responses to them from competent critics, and one cannot know the latter without knowing the former.

ignore the naysayers
Ignore the one-star reviews. The unifying factor in all of them is an irrational hatred of Christianity, a misrepresentation of both Christian teachings and ID, and a reliance on ad hominem attacks. Really, now, I thought most people got beyond such name-calling by about, oh, the third grade.

Despite the bombast, no one has adequately answered either Behe or Dembski. I think the evolutionists would be embarrassed by now by their reliance on so many just-so stories to support an increasingly implausible theory.