Recursivity

I spent a little more time digging into the treasure trove of dreck that is Claire Berlinski's video oeuvre.

Ms. Berlinski, it seems, was present at a by-invitation only conference in Italy entitled "Great Expectations". It's hard to find anything about this conference online because, you see, it was "secret". But it's not hard to figure out the agenda. After all, the people present seem to have been

- Paul Nelson, creationist and remarkably unproductive philosopher for whom Paul Nelson Day was named. Watch Nelson squirm, evade, and do everything possible except answer the question of how old he thinks the earth is!

- Robert Marks, intelligent design proponent and writer of some remarkably silly papers about evolutionary algorithms

- David Berlinski, father of Ms. Berlinski, author of some remarkably bad popular books about mathematics, and contributor to such eminent scientific journals as Commentary. You can see Berlinski in all his superciliousness here. (Yet more superciliousness: David Berlinski on Gödel; David Berlinski on Popper.)

Berlinski claims we should be more open intellectually and some ideas are off limits to discussion. As usual, he's wrong. We just laugh at his ideas, and those of Nelson, because they are so incoherent. Even his daughter doesn't seem to buy it!

- Moshe Averick, creationist rabbi and sucker who apparently fell hook, line, and sinker for the scam that is "specified complexity", despite it having been debunked long ago

- Stephen Meyer, creationist, philosopher, and author of a a bad book containing misunderstandings of information theory. You can see his
videos here: Part 1A, Part 1B, Part 2, Part 2B, Part 3, and Part 4. It's funny to hear Meyer claiming that he "works on the origin of life". I wonder what experiments he has done and what labs he does them in. You can also hear Meyer extolling his creationist journal, Bio-Complexity, which has thus far published a grand total of 4 articles and one "critical review" -- every single one of which has at least one author listed on the editorial team page. It's a creationist circle jerk!

Meyer is allowed to repeat his bogus claim that "Whenever we find information, and we trace it back to its source ... we always come to an intelligence, to a mind, not a material process." Ms. Berlinski doesn't question him at all on this, despite the fact that it is evidently false.

- Richard von Sternberg, professional creationist martyr and co-author with Meyer of a drecky article filled with misunderstandings and misrepresentations.

- Michael Denton, author of a wildly wrong book, filled with misunderstandings about basic biology. Video here.

- perhaps Jonathan Wells. I can't be absolutely sure, but Meyer in this interview refers to cancer, and Wells is well-known for his wacky ID cancer theory. Of course, "journalist" Berlinski doesn't ask many hard questions. In the one hard question she does ask, about what are the best arguments against ID, Meyer can't even bring himself to mention the name of the person responsible.

You can watch Ms. Berlinski's "interviews" with Marks and Averick here (at a site where you have to pay them money to leave comments). You'd think with some of Marks' work on the record as being deficient, a journalist would have some hard questions to ask. But no, a giggling Ms. Berlinski lets Marks maunder on, making bogus claims like "All biological models of evolution which have been implemented in computer code only work because the information has been front-loaded into the program and the evolutionary process in itself creates no information" without asking any tough questions at all. (Marks, by the way, seems to think that Shannon coined the word "bit", when it fact it was Tukey.)

Reading the comments at that page is a real hoot, too. We have one commenter who "grew up with Information Theory from its early days", yet makes the false claims that (1) "there is still vigorous debate about which algorithms produce a truly random number; (2) "Whether you can determine the stopping point of a Turing machine is unsettled"; (3) "Many of these problems are essentially involved with extending Godel's Theorem beyond the realm of integers"; (4) "you have to consider what in Computation Theory is termed np-complete or in Penrose's term, non-computable". He also adds, helpfully, "I hope this sheds some light". Indeed it does, but not the kind of light he thinks.

It's just so funny to hear the people in Berlinski's interviews talk about how "orthodoxy" is "stifling" discussion when at least three of the attendees are members of conservative religious denominations that claim for themselves the right to determine truth for everyone else. Project much?

One thread that runs through many of Berlinski's interviews can be summarized as follows: "Waah! We're not taken seriously!" I'm not at all impressed with this. If you want to be taken seriously, don't hold "secret" conferences and make dark implications about being suppressed. If you want to be taken seriously, do some serious science; don't post videos with fart noises making fun of court decisions you don't like. If you want to be taken seriously, respond to critics in a professional way; don't depend on igorant attack-dog lawyers as your surrogates. If you want to be taken seriously, don't use credential inflation on your supporters and denigrate the actual scientific achievements of your detractors. You want some respect? Then earn it.

Here's an interview of David Berlinski by creationist Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell.

It's really fascinating for all the mistakes and false claims made by Berlinski, none of which are corrected by Meyer. Here are just a few:

1. Despite the fact that he claims to be intimate with Marco Schützenberger, Berlinski mispronounces his name consistently as ending in "berger" with a hard g, instead of soft g as in French.

2. He claims that Schützenberger was a "professional biologist". This is not accurate. Schützenberger's first doctorate was in medicine, not biology. He apparently did publish at least one paper on a biological topic, but one paper does not make someone a "professional biologist". (I've published a paper in a philosophy journal, but no one would call me a "professional philosopher".) In this interview, Schützenberger admits forthrightly that "Biology is, of course, not my specialty."

3. He claims that Schützenberger was a "world-famous physician". As far as I can tell, this is not true.

4. Berlinski draws an analogy between evolution and the difference in computational power of finite automata and pushdown automata. In finite automata, only simple outcomes are possible because they have no memory; pushdown automata can do more interesting things because they have an unbounded stack. Evolution has no memory, Berlinski says, and therefore is analogous to finite automata.

But this analogy is simple-minded for a variety of reasons. First, while finite automata are limited in their computational power, in practical applications this can sometimes be remedied simply by increasing the number of states. Second, neither finite automata nor pushdown automata are self-replicating models. Third, if you consider that replication is based on DNA, which is potentially unbounded in size, then evolution does have access to a form of memory that is, for all practical purposes, unbounded in size.

5. Berlinski claims that "Until about 1950 or 1960, the mathematicians had not really interested themselves in Darwin's theory of evolution". This is false. The Hardy-Weinberg theorem, for example, dates from 1908. Population genetics was developed by biologists and statisticians in the 1920's and 1930's. Population dynamics goes back to the 1800's.

6. Berlinski claims that "Every mathematician that I've known ... they all had the same reaction [about evolution]: it's kind of nutty." Berlinski knows me - we have corresponded - and I never expressed this reaction to him. There are many books and papers about mathematical biology, and essentially none of the authors express this view.

But then, we already know that Berlinski's claims about what mathematicians believe about evolution are not reliable.