tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689592451067041352.post5270903688510351000..comments2023-05-08T07:41:01.071-07:00Comments on DiEbLog: A new erratum for Dembski's and Marks's The Search for a SearchDiEbhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02099109109735165335noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1689592451067041352.post-90682041989442763852012-05-24T15:55:26.865-07:002012-05-24T15:55:26.865-07:001. DiEb sent me copies of email notes, and I belie...1. DiEb sent me copies of email notes, and I believe that Dembski and Marks must have understood well in advance of publication that the "Horizontal No Free Lunch Theorem" was terribly flawed.<br /><br />2. The erratum is itself erroneous in its arguments, though perhaps correct in its claims. I suspect that Ewert wrote it, given the confusion of probability measures with algorithms. There are prominent statements in the paper that contradict the main "no free lunch" theorem, and the erratum does nothing to identify and correct them. No one at the EvoInfo Lab is owning up to how terribly confused they are about NFL.<br /><br />3. This echoes my experience with Marks, more than a year before his and Dembski's first publication. At that time, I was affiliated with his Evolutionary Informatics Lab, in protest of what I considered to be Baylor's infringement of his academic freedom. I thought that he was operating in good faith, and that he would respond appropriately to feedback from someone with more experience than he in NFL and evolutionary computation. I pointed out that his and Dembski's first article characterized Dawkins' Weasel program incorrectly, and showed clearly that it implements an evolutionary algorithm that has been analyzed (as a Markov chain) many times. He did not respond. He and Dembski analyzed (as Markov chains), in the same article, very similar algorithms, with alphabet {0,1} instead of {A, B, ..., Z, *}. The analyses had been in the literature I pointed Marks to for at least ten years. Furthermore, Marks had served, along with me, as a technical advisor for David Fogel's Evolutionary Computation: The Fossil Record, and had seen one of the algorithms in an early paper in evolutionary computation.<br /><br />4. What these incidents have in common is that the papers were in review or had already been accepted for publication. Dembski and Marks do not care so much about getting things right as getting things published.<br /><br />5. It's become clear that Marks was incensed by the outcome of the Dover trial. My guess is that he joined up with Dembski in order to prepare "scientific" evidence for the next judicial test of public-school instruction in ID creationism. IDC had a woefully short list of peer-reviewed publications in the Dover trial, so volume matters. Also, D&M are obviously planting loaded terminology and plain-language exposition in their papers that will, when quoted in expert testimony, give a cooperative judge good verbiage for his or her decision.Tom Englishhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03887540845396409340noreply@blogger.com