William A. Dembski

No Free Lunch

Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

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. The paperback is updated with a new Preface by the author.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• 2. Auflage
• Seitenzahl: 432
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Februar 2007
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 697g
• ISBN-13: 9780742558106
• ISBN-10: 074255810X
• Artikelnr.: 22534278

Autorenporträt

William A. Dembski is a mathematician and philosopher who serves on the board of directors for Discovery Institute and is a Distinguished Fellow of The Walter Bradley Center. Bill is the author/editor of more than twenty books as well as the writer of many peer-reviewed articles spanning mathematics, engineering, philosophy, and theology. Bill is an entrepreneur who builds educational software and websites. He lives in Denton, TX.

Inhaltsangabe

Part 1 List of Illustrations
Part 2 Preface
Part 3 The Third Mode of Explanation
Chapter 4 Necessity, Chance, and Design
Chapter 5 Rehabilitating Design
Chapter 6 The Complexity-Specification Criterion
Chapter 7 Specification
Chapter 8 Probabilistic Resources
Chapter 9 False Negatives and False Positives
Chapter 10 Why the Criterion Works
Chapter 11 The Darwinian Challenge to Design
Chapter 12 The Constraning of Contingency
Chapter 13 The Darwinian Extrapolation
Part 14 Another Way to Detect Design?
Chapter 15 Fisher's Approach to Eliminating Chance
Chapter 16 Generalizing Fisher's Approach
Chapter 17 Case Study: Nicholas Caputo
Chapter 18 Case Study: The Comprehensibility of Bit Strings
Chapter 19 Detachability
Chapter 20 Sweeping the Field of Chance Hypotheses
Chapter 21 Justifying the Generalization
Chapter 22 The Inflation of Probabilistic Resources
Chapter 23 Design by Comparison
Chapter 24 Design by Elimination
Part 25 Specified Complexity as Information
Chapter 26 Information
Chapter 27 Syntactic, Statistical, and Algorithmic Information
Chapter 28 Information in Context
Chapter 29 Conceptual and Physical Information
Chapter 30 Complex Specified Information
Chapter 31 Semantic Information
Chapter 32 Biological Information
Chapter 33 The Origin of Comlex Specified Information
Chapter 34 The Law of Conservation of Information
Chapter 35 A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics?
Part 36 Evolutionary Algorithms
Chapter 37 METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
Chapter 38 Optimization
Chapter 39 Statement of the Problem
Chapter 40 Choosing the Right Fitness Function
Chapter 41 Blind Search
Chapter 42 The No Free Lunch Theorems
Chapter 43 The Displacement Problem
Chapter 44 Darwinian Evolution in Nature
Chapter 45 Following the Information Trail
Chapter 46 Coevolving Fitness Landscapes
Part 47 The Emergence of Irreducibly Complex Systems
Chapter 48 The Casual Specificity Problem
Chapter 49 The Challenge of Irreducible Complexity
Chapter 50 Scaffolding and Roman Arches
Chapter 51 Co-optation, Patchwork, and Bricolage
Chapter 52 Incremental Indispensability
Chapter 53 Reducible Complexity
Chapter 54 Miscellaneous Objections
Chapter 55 The Logic of Invariants
Chapter 56 Fine-Tuning Irreducible Complexity
Chapter 57 Doing the Calculation
Part 58 Design as a Scientific Research Program
Chapter 59 Outline of a Positive Research Program
Chapter 60 The Pattern of Evolution
Chapter 61 The Incompleteness of Natural Laws
Chapter 62 Does Specified Complexity Have a Mechanism?
Chapter 63 The Nature of Nature
Chapter 64 Must All Design in Nature Be Front-Loaded?
Chapter 65 Embodied and Unembodied Designers
Chapter 66 Who Designed the Designer?
Chapter 67 Testability
Chapter 68 Magic, Mechanism, and Design
Part 69 Index