Exposing Discovery Institute Part 12: William Dembski

Ajouté : 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, we're back again to even further expose your favorite creationist propaganda outlet and mine, Discovery Institute. How are there still more of these jerks left to cover? Today, for part 12, we hit one of their star players, Bill Dembski. What's his problem? Let's check it out. Bill is just like other DI senior fellows, such as Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, in that he went through academia and got a doctorate in mathematics, only to spend his life as a pointless apologist writing crappy books and contributing nothing legitimate whatsoever to any field of inquiry. The reason he's top brass at the DI is because he came up with one of their favorite scripts for pushing intelligent design propaganda, and that is specified information, which essentially says that the genome is so super crazy complicated, like a crazy complicated code, and only things that think can make codes, which proves the Christian God exists. Yes, much like Behe's irreducible complexity, it's just another life is too complicated argument, but from the perspective of mathematics and information theory. But, unlike irreducible complexity, which they seem to have more or less abandoned because of how thoroughly it has been debunked, perhaps most thoroughly in this series, this DNA is a crazy code crap is what Meyer has been pushing like gangbusters recently. He's been making lots of appearances. He made a shitty propaganda movie for theatrical release, and this talking point is perhaps the focal point of all of it. So, it's about time we perform a surgical dissection and debunk it to smithereens, starting right from the source. Obviously, this specified information nonsense will be what we spend the most time talking about, but let's build up to that and get some context. Just like everyone else at the DI, Bill knows me quite well, and he participated in the desperate wave of damage control the entire organization enacted immediately after I began exposing them, especially James Tour. Here's what Bill had to say about me and Jimbo the very next day after our debate at Rice. Keep in mind that James was coached by Bill, since his fourth talking point in the debate was Bill's pseudoscientific concept of specified information. Farina focused on Tour's lies while Tour focused on chemistry. Mr. Farina.

[00:02:05]>> got it? Farina's antics were so wearisome. Mr. Farina.

[00:02:09]>> got it? Farina just attacked poor Tour while Tour was trying to engage in substantive questions about prebiotic chemistry. Mr. Farina. Mr. Farina.

[00:02:19]>> it?

[00:02:24]Yes, it's the pathetic script they all agreed on at the damage control board meeting the morning after James humiliated himself. Dave just cited titles of papers. He totally didn't use a pile of scientific literature to prove James is a lying fraud. Trust me, bro.

[00:02:38]And what's this? Consistent with my YouTube channel where I promote atheism.

[00:02:42]Well, I've never done that a single time, so it sounds like Bill's a lying piece of [ __ ] who has never visited my channel, which is a shame since he could learn something. And of course all this crying about arrogance is laughable given that James pretends to be the world's leading expert in a field he is completely clueless about. And what's this? The interruptions of Tour by Farina, which of course didn't happen a single time since James was the one shrieking over me for a solid 90 minutes and shouting, "This is my time." during open discussion sections. And it's just a hand in a Right here. I just showed you.

[00:03:16]>> Do it. YOU JUST SAID HOMOCHIRALITY.

[00:03:19]AND I'M showing you another paper.

[00:03:21]>> MR. FARINA.

[00:03:23]HERE. WHAT DO YOU GO. GO. GO. GO. GO.

[00:03:26]YOU DON'T DO IT. I'M GOING TO NARRATE.

[00:03:28]This is my time now. Anyway, that's enough about the debate. Let's continue to his botched criticism of a very simple point I made in my very first video about James. I was discussing the idiotic way that creationists throw around big numbers for shock value, such as the probability of a particular sequence of amino acids arising by chance. For example, given a particular protein with 100 amino acid residues, the odds of that specific sequence arising would be one in 20 to the 100, which is a huge number. In comparison, I took 10 people in a room with their 10 birthdays and showed that the probability of that particular configuration of birthdays had a probability of one in 42 trillion trillion, also a very big number. And yet, there they are, just like the protein. Everybody in a room must have a birthday, all proteins must have an amino acid sequence, and these numbers don't mean anything. It's like confusing the infinitesimal odds of a specific person winning the lottery with the 100% probability that somebody will win.

[00:04:27]Bill's big brain retorts to my explanation that a small child could understand was to bring up his buzzword of specification. Birthdays are unspecified. For the analogy to work, it would have to be a special pattern of birthdays, like everyone having the same birthday. Nope, it's arbitrary, just like the arbitrary amino acid sequence I was comparing it to. There is no specification in either case. Pathetic.

[00:04:51]But, this is what Bill and the rest of the DI have to do. They blindly assert that Dave is a dummy who just doesn't understand anything. When I reference primary scientific literature, they have to pretend that I fumble it left and right, especially when I use it to show how they are actually the ones who fumble all the primary scientific literature. And this little dig about me playing to the gallery is quite hilarious, since the target audience of the DI is exclusively science-illiterate Christians who have absolutely no idea what any of them are talking about. This is why the big scary numbers approach works on them, whether it's complaining about a particular sequence of amino acids to yield a protein or a particular sequence of nucleotides in the genome.

[00:05:29]Bill pretends it just can't come about naturally. Forget the fact that nature can try billions of random sequences until it finds a few that self-replicate and therefore amplify themselves. Forget the fact that nature isn't aiming for a specific target, but simply finds something functional and then refines the sequence and corresponding function over time via natural selection. Forget the fact that no specific individual sequence is needed, that there is tremendous variability for any biopolymer without sacrificing functionality. Basically, forget all of molecular biology, which is easy for him since he genuinely truly does not understand this stuff. Some some evolutionary theorists, by the way, they say, well, you know, it's like whenever we design people, we use some term, it's like, well, you're talking about evolutionary search, but we're not really searching for things cuz there's no pre-specified target. Well, there there is a target. Being alive is a target. You know, if you're if you're dead, as Steve Meyer so eloquently put it, you're not really a viable candidate for anything. No, Bill, life was never a target. It's just a natural process where complex self-organizing molecular systems emerge to efficiently consume and dissipate free energy gradients like sunlight and increase global entropy.

[00:06:39]These systems maintain internal order by exporting disorder to their surroundings. In other words, life is a naturally occurring pattern of matter specifically prompted by the laws of thermodynamics. This has been well understood since the 1970s, and I've explained the relevant physics in my content debunking James Tour. This is what you ideologically captured asshats will never let through your thick skulls. But forget these esoteric physics principles. Dembski is so dumb that he doesn't even actually understand basic principles of evolutionary biology. I'm talking about high school-level stuff.

[00:07:13]>> Dawkins stops it here and says is uh well, see how cuz Darwinian processes do better than random processes. And I would say, "Amen. That's right, they do." But why do they do it? Because you fed information into them. No, Bill, nobody is feeding information into anything.

[00:07:29]There is no target genome. Genomes exist and mutations occur. The non-randomness of natural selection is based on survival advantage. If there's a point mutation in the genome that results in the associated protein functioning more efficiently, that organism is more likely to survive and pass on the mutation. So, the mutation proliferates in a statistically significant way. It is genuinely [ __ ] astounding that he does not understand this. When you read the Darwinian literature, it's as though if you put heredity, random variation, uh natural selection, replication, you put those things together, you're automatically going to get a lot of interesting stuff happening. And it's not the case. You can put all those key Darwinian elements together and nothing interesting will happen. Nothing will happen. Evolution doesn't happen. Except for yes, it [ __ ] does, which is why we observe evolution every single day.

[00:08:21]Can you believe this jerk? This is flat-earth level science denial. First of all, referring to primary scientific literature in evolutionary biology as Darwinian literature makes him sound like a complete [ __ ] No modern evolutionary biologist is a Darwinist.

[00:08:37]We are at least a century past that.

[00:08:39]Darwin would have no clue what's happening right now. He didn't even know that DNA exists. Bill is just desperately trying to reduce an entire field of science to the utterances of a single prophet, since that's actually how his propaganda operates, and he wants to level the playing field. But second, he has no idea what mutation and natural selection actually mean. He has no idea what macro mutations are, gene duplication and neo-functionalization, de novo genes, entire chromosome duplication. There can be profound changes made to the genome in even a single generation, which dramatically alter the morphology of an organism.

[00:09:15]This has been documented thoroughly. So, I'm sorry, Billy boy, evolutionary biology is plenty interesting. You're just too stupid and lazy to learn anything about it. He's right on par with the science-illiterate Christians he's pandering to. So, unfortunately, for anyone who likes to prop him up by playing the credentials game, I have some bad news. He is not an actual scholar, nor is he anyone to be taken seriously by the scientific community.

[00:09:38]This assessment of him on debunking denial is quite accurate. He does not publish in legitimate journals, he writes shitty books full of lies, or publishes fake papers in fake journals invented exclusively to make intelligent design look like real science. As Forrest and Grose state, Bill evades criticism like the plague, and once scholars give up on trying to explain to him how he's wrong, he proudly exclaims that nobody can explain how he's wrong.

[00:10:02]This is not how science works. These are infantile tactics of the ID community.

[00:10:07]And of course, what does any fraud do when they are ignored by legitimate scholars? Play the victim. The brave rebel with the super secret truth that the dogmatic establishment just can't handle. A tale as old as time. Bill lays this narrative on thick. It probably would have been a way for me to get a good academic position, uh except that I immediately applied these ideas to biology, and that uh that was uh you know, that was a bridge too far as far as the scientific community was concerned because uh they didn't want these ideas being applied there. Stupid closed-minded academics always spotting your shitty apologetics a mile away and writing you off as the fraud that you are. The nerve of them. Anyway, at the end of the video, we will put the motives of Discovery Institute in context by outlining the insidious agenda of the wealthy Christian nationalists who fund them, and their relentless efforts to capture every sector of the American government such that they can obliterate the separation of church and state with the eventual goal of establishing a theocracy. Never forget that this is the political alignment of the DI as we've demonstrated several times before. First by combing through the internally leaked wedge document that outlines their overtly political strategy, and also by pointing out their involvement with Project 2025. This is a very dark and evil organization posing as the pious and persecuted voices of the dirty dogmatic atheist scientific community.

[00:11:32]And don't forget that for a single second. But this section will have a lot more weight once we have thoroughly debunked the pseudoscience itself. So let's tear apart Dembski's [ __ ] first. Specified information. DNA has super special information that only a god could put there. All right, let's give this crap the full treatment. So what is the genesis here? The first thing we have to do is discuss a related term, specified complexity. This is a term coined by Leslie Orgel in his 1973 book The Origins of Life, Molecules and Natural Selection. This was an early era of origin of life research that began to hint at what would later become systems chemistry, the first musings of the potentiality for systems of molecules to replicate themselves, which has been thoroughly demonstrated since the beginning of the 21st century. Specified complexity is a term that distinguishes between simple order or random noise and patterns that seem both unlikely and meaningful, like a random sequence of nucleotides versus the sequence found in the genome of a living organism. This is a perfectly sensible and intuitive idea, but Dembski takes this vague intuition and attempts to weaponize it against evolutionary principles. He dresses it up with technical vocabulary from information theory, pretends it functions like a rigorous design detector, and then applies it to biology as though evolution were just a one-shot random search. That's where the whole thing goes off the rails. We're talking about the desperate denial that functional nucleotide sequences can arise by chance and subsequently become refined through natural selection. For reference, we can use his 2024 blog post Specified Complexity Made Simple.

[00:13:05]Remember, the game here is to get the reader to believe that specified complexity is not just a loose intuition that intelligent design advocates have inflated far beyond its legitimate scope, but rather a rigorous mathematical concept that critics simply refuse to understand. So let's go ahead and understand it so that we can watch it completely fall apart under even light scrutiny. Right off the bat, Dembski starts with the usual credential laundering. He exclaims that he didn't invent the phrase, Leslie Orgel used it, and Crick said something about specification, therefore this whole thing has scientific pedigree. Nope.

[00:13:38]Using a phrase that appeared in origin of life discussions half a century ago does not magically validate the very specific creationist use Dembski wants to make of it now by coining the related but separate term specified information.

[00:13:50]In fact, he admits that Orgel's formulation was vague, confused, and different from his own. So, he immediately fails in his attempt at pretending that legitimate science somehow endorses his deceptive language and bogus arguments. He's pointing at words and aura farming to do apologetics, nothing more. Then we get to the toddler examples that he hopes will bring an uneducated reader to his side. We can hear Dembski explain this stuff in person as well. So, the complexity there is improbability, and we can think of that as uh if I flip a coin 100 times, uh the the improbability of that or the probability is 1 over 2 to the 100. You keep the the probabilities multiply because coin flipping the individual flips are independent of each other.

[00:14:35]So, the thing is that's 1 over 2 to the 100, that's about 1 in 10 to the 30. Um you know, so very small number, 1 in a trillion trillion million, okay?

[00:14:51]Uh but you can also uh think of it in terms of bits. How many bits does it take to characterize that sequence of coin tosses? It could be head, tails, head, tails, you know, and and so on. And so, if you let head be one, tails be zero, then you can get a sequence of length 100 that will carry that will precisely identify this the the the coin tosses. So, probabilities and number of bits are directly related.

[00:15:23]So, one in two to the 100 probability it corresponds to 100 bits of information.

[00:15:29]Okay, so we've got the crazy probability numbers and we're defining bits of information. Now, back to the blog post where he applies this to letters and words. Okay, we've got boat repeated a bunch of times which is like a crystal, specified simplicity. Random gibberish which is like a random sequence of monomers, unspecified simplicity. And then a meaningful English sentence which is like a gene, specified complexity.

[00:15:52]These labels are reasonable. Nobody disputes that repetition is different from noise and both are different from a meaningful message. But here's the problem, a meaningful English sentence is meaningful because human beings use language. That meaning exists in a linguistic community with conventions, intentions, grammar, and semantics. DNA is not secretly English and it is not a language. We use the letters ACTG to represent nucleotides, but that's our own human convention. You don't get to say, "Hey, this thing can be represented symbolically, therefore it must be mind generated in the same way as a sentence." That's ridiculous. The codon anticodon basis for gene expression is absolutely not as complex as the words I'm speaking right now, nor does the former require a mind to come about just like the latter so obviously does.

[00:16:40]Dembski loves me so much that he brings up my birthday analogy again to try to strengthen his position. The birthdays are unspecified. It would only work if all the birthdays were something specific like January 1st. This is idiotic. That date is no more specific than any other and no series of birth dates are any more special or privileged or complex than any other. Just like no amino acid sequence is inherently special, nor would 100 glycines in a row guarantee function like his meaningless series of January 1sts. The birthdays are arbitrary just like what I was specifically comparing them to, the odds of getting a specific sequence of amino acids, no matter what it is. He is very clearly trying to insert the concept of biopolymer function, which has nothing to do with what I was talking about, and would make the analogy fall apart anyway, since no specific set of birthdays would serve any inherent function. If he doesn't like the world of analogy, he would have to actually discuss molecular evolution and how specific sequences can both come to be and proliferate in a statistically significant way. But, that's a big no-no for the ID camp. They don't like to admit that molecules can evolve by natural selection, a thing that we have physically observed for several decades now. This should all be relatively easy to understand, but Demski deliberately tries to make it harder to understand with math and jargon to confuse the reader into thinking he's smart and therefore probably right. So, let's debunk his obfuscation by over intellectualization. To do so, we can get a little help from an even more pointless loser apologist, good old Aaron boy Jonathan McLatchie. You remember him, right? The guy who hallucinated a fake Twitter debate with me. Let's watch. So, to take um an an illustration, take an ATM machine. And you put your bank card into ATM machine, and you have to dial four-digit PIN number.

[00:18:23]And there's only one PIN number which is specific to your bank card out of a out of a combinatorial space, if you will, of 10,000 ways of dialing a four-digit number.

[00:18:32]Um so, if you only have three attempts before the bank locks you out of your account, then the chances of you stumbling upon the correct PIN number by chance um is very, very small. Oh my gosh, you choose a PIN number for the ATM, and you have to get it right to get the money. Therefore, DNA is a code from God. That's what these morons come to the table with, complete with a David Fincher film soundtrack for maximum effect. Astounding. Likewise, when we're when we're looking at the the the context of biology, um if you take a proteins, proteins are comprised of subunits called amino acids, and there's [music] uh um if you take uh there's there's um 20 or so different type different amino acids, and they basically >> [music] >> um determine how a protein collapses into its three-dimensional conformation.

[00:19:16]And if you take a a protein residue of 150 amino acids long, you can ask, out of all these, and there's 20 to the 150th power of possible ways of arranging these amino acids, and out of all these possibilities, how many are functional? How many are gibberish? And it turns out that the prevalence of functional stable protein folds is astronomically small within this combinatorial [music] space.

[00:19:34]And it would argue exhaust the probably probabilistic resources at one's disposal, and it conforms to the independent like given pattern of specifying what you need for specific protein functions. So, that's what we mean by specified complexity.

[00:19:49]Right, except that's not true at all.

[00:19:51]All of these clowns just blindly assert it. First of all, he pretends that most proteins would somehow be unstable.

[00:19:57]That's insane. Virtually any sequence would be stable. There is no amino acid sequence that just falls apart for no reason. The question is function. It's certainly true that not just any old sequence will exhibit function, but plenty of research has been done to determine what fraction of potential sequences of a given length will exhibit function, and it's not astronomically low at all. It could be as many as one in a million, even when considering a highly specific individual function, like binding ATP. Jack Szostak showed that at the very least one in a trillion sequences of 80 amino acids will do this. Again, that's one specific function out of countless possible functions. And while one in a trillion sounds pretty low, remember that molecules are very tiny, and chemical reactions are very fast. For nature to make a trillion polypeptides is trivial.

[00:20:46]It's just a matter of stumbling upon a sequence that does something, and then that sequence can be refined over time.

[00:20:52]But don't worry, there's more jargon to get through. He's super smart, remember?

[00:20:55]Dembski is always talking about things called Shannon information and Kolmogorov information. Sounds pretty technical and sexy, no? He clearly knows more than you do, so stop asking questions and just trust him. Well, not today. Since these are real terms, let's define them in order to then debunk him.

[00:21:12]Shannon information is about probability. The less likely an event is, the more information it carries. So, if I tell you the sun rose this morning, that conveys very little Shannon information because it was expected. If I tell you it started snowing in the Sahara, that carries more Shannon information because it is far less likely. Kolmogorov information or complexity is different. This is about how short or long the simplest description of something can be. A string of characters like A A A A A A A A has low Kolmogorov complexity because you can describe it very briefly by saying it's just eight A's. But, a string like Q7L9X2MP looks much more random. So, the shortest description is the string itself, which means it has higher Kolmogorov complexity. Shannon information comes from Claude Shannon's information theory in the 1940s, where the goal was to study communication and uncertainty.

[00:22:03]Kolmogorov information comes from algorithmic information theory in the 1960s, especially the work of Andrei Kolmogorov, and it asks how short the simplest description of something can be. Again, these are real ideas. Nobody disputes that. What is absolutely not established is what Demski does with them. He proposes the spurious mathematical relationship of specified complexity being equal to Shannon information minus Kolmogorov information. And this is an equation that points to intelligent design. So, he is claiming that taking one minus the other gives you some universal detector for intelligent design in biology.

[00:22:38]That's the huge leap in a nutshell.

[00:22:40]First off, the whole idea is a non-starter. Kolmogorov complexity is not something you can generally compute exactly, and the probability model you choose is doing all the heavy lifting.

[00:22:50]So, when Bill presents this as some clean objective metric that design just pops out of, that's nonsense, or more accurately, propaganda. But, let's get to the mushiest part, specification.

[00:23:01]Bill wants a specification to be some short description, some salient pattern, but short according to what language?

[00:23:07]Salient to whom? Chosen when? Before the event or after it? Because if you get to look at the outcome first and then invent a cute short description for it, you can make all kinds of things look spooky. Humans do this constantly. We see shapes in clouds, faces on Mars, lucky streaks, hidden messages, conspiracies. This is why genuine statistical reasoning is fixated on avoiding post hoc pattern fishing.

[00:23:30]Dembski talks as if any event with a neat little label suddenly defeats chance. No, it doesn't. Not unless the specification is independently justified in advance, and even then you still need the right probabilistic model. As usual, Dembski has cute little examples meant to convince his science-illiterate targets that they understand what he's talking about. Namely, Mount Rushmore with carved faces in rock and poker, which can involve cheating. Bill loves these examples because they're already soaked in human intentionality. Poker is a game designed by humans. Cheating is done by humans. Mount Rushmore was carved by humans and has human faces on it. Amazing. And now he wants you to slide from those examples directly into proteins and genomes as though the logic transfers automatically. It doesn't. In archaeology or forensics, you infer design because you already know that minds exist in the causal environment, and you have independent knowledge of what minds do. In biology, the causal environment includes evolution, a blind naturalistic process. So you don't get to ignore mutation, selection, drift, and deep time and then baselessly announce that chance failed. That's ignoring the entire process. To be clear, this is the tactic you have to catch every time. Bill says chance can't do it, therefore intelligence. But evolution is not just chance. It never was. Selection is non-random. Lineages accumulate changes step-by-step. So when Dembski frames the issue as random assembly versus design, he is not refuting evolution. He is refusing to talk about evolution. It's the hallucination of the fingerprint of the god he is ideologically bound to assuming exists and made everything while refusing to engage with what science actually says. These frauds never once engage with the actual principles of molecular biology that are inconvenient to their propaganda. It's just poker hands and carved faces since that's what their targets can understand. They may use real terms like Shannon and Kolmogorov but the bridge to biology is never actually built just blindly asserted to make a run-of-the-mill argument from incredulity look like science. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let's reiterate all of this with more examples. Many viewers will already have understood perfectly well what I'm saying but we really have to thoroughly expose the biggest trick in this whole specified information game which is that Dembski wants you to imagine biology as a one-shot event. One exact outcome, one exact sequence, one exact moment, pure blind luck and if the number is tiny enough then according to him we must infer design. But that's just not how nature works. This is how these probability games are always rigged.

[00:26:02]They take some modern biological feature, pretend nature was aiming at that exact final form from the beginning, calculate the odds of getting that exact thing in one random draw and then wave around a big scary number. But chemistry was not happening once, molecular interactions were not happening once, replication was not happening once, mutation was not happening once. On Earth alone there were a billion years of chemical activity before and during early life.

[00:26:27]And beyond Earth, the scale gets absurdly large very fast. The Milky Way contains at least 100 billion stars and the observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies which would imply something like 10 sextillion stars if galaxies were all roughly similar in size. And that's just the observable universe. Planets are not rare either.

[00:26:49]There is at least one planet for every star in our galaxy on average, which implies roughly 100 to 400 billion planets in the Milky Way alone.

[00:26:57]Kepler-based estimates suggest that our galaxy may contain about 300 million potentially habitable worlds under conservative assumptions. While other analyses have estimated that about one in five sun-like stars may host an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone. This is another way in which Dembski's entire framing is dead on arrival. We are not talking about one draw. We are talking about potentially hundreds of millions of habitable zone worlds in one galaxy and at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Even if only a tiny fraction of those environments ever had chemistry remotely conducive to life, the number of opportunities is still mind-boggling.

[00:27:33]Let's say we're looking at something that has a one in a billion shot at happening. Sounds impossibly rare, right? Now give it one trillion chances.

[00:27:41]So n equals 10 to the 12. The chance that it happens at least once is one minus the quantity one minus 10 to the negative nine to the 10 to the 12.

[00:27:50]That's approximately one minus e to the negative 1,000. This is so close to one that for all practical purposes, it is certain to occur. In other words, something that sounds absurdly unlikely in one attempt becomes overwhelmingly likely if the number of opportunities is large enough. That is to say, when infinitesimal odds meet astronomical opportunity, [ __ ] happens. And that is before we even get to the fact that molecular evolution is not just repeated random trials. It is cumulative selection. This is why systems chemistry is the ultimate boogeyman for them. This is why James Tour is always whining about how molecules don't move towards life. It's a desperate denial of the properties of systems of molecules that we have begun to understand over the past 50 years. Molecules can exhibit autocatalytic behavior. Self-replication for networks of molecules is possible and has been demonstrated. The sequences involved are not static. They are changing all the time. That's mutation.

[00:28:46]Useful changes are retained, built upon, and amplified over immense spans of time. So, Dembski's one-shot probability framing is wrong in multiple ways at once. First, he ignores the enormous number of opportunities available across time and space. Complaining about rarity means nothing when the opportunities are practically endless. Second, he ignores that biological evolution is not a one-step random assembly process in the first place. There is no goal, just constant change and the proliferation of useful sequences via principles of statistical dynamics. Then there is the observer bias, which makes his argument look even worse. Of course, we would find ourselves in one of the cases where the rare event happened. Only in such a case could there be observers around to notice it. Again, even if the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were one in a billion, that event would still happen on billions of planets. That's how many [ __ ] planets there are. So, when Dembski stares at DNA or life in general and says, "What are the odds?" The answer is that he has asked the wrong question. The relevant question is not "What are the odds of this exact outcome in one shot?" The relevant question is, "What are the odds of some life-permitting chemistry emerging somewhere given billions of years, planetary-scale chemistry, hundreds of millions of potentially habitable worlds in our galaxy, and at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe?" Once you frame it properly, the supposed miracle starts looking a lot less miraculous, especially given principles of systems chemistry that not one DI member has ever or will ever acknowledge. Most of what I've been saying here is pretty intuitive. That's why the DI can do nothing but whine about how unqualified I am or other pathetic attempts at argumentum ad hominem, a thing that they actually routinely do, unlike me, despite their accusations otherwise. My qualifications are irrelevant when I simply refer to well-established scientific principles. But, we can also look at the work of professionals in the field who have debunked the crap out of Dembski's [ __ ] as well. Here's a 2008 paper from Landman called Dembski's specified complexity, a simple error in arithmetic. As a quick preview, we find the quantitative assessment that Demski's math is off by a factor of 10 to the 117. Yikes, that's pretty bad.

[00:30:52]Let's expand on that so that we can see how on top of all the conceptual problems we outlined, Demski also just genuinely sucks at math. The core claim here is that once you correct the formula, it no longer does what Demski wants it to do. The paper starts by laying out Demski's setup in stripped-down form. First, Demski defines a chance hypothesis, basically a model under which the event happened randomly. Landman immediately notes a problem here, which is that Demski is vague about exactly what this means, and that vagueness matters because biological evolution is not just chance.

[00:31:23]It also includes non-chance components like selection, even for molecular evolution. So right away, Landman is already hinting that Demski's framework may not even cleanly apply to evolution in the first place. He states that Demski assigns a probability to some target pattern T. So far, fine. Then he adds this extra term phi sub S of T, which is supposed to count how many patterns are at least as simply describable as the target pattern. In plain English, he is trying to account for the fact that there are many patterns an observer might notice, not just one. Then Landman explains how the derivation already breaks. Demski multiplies these things together and treats that as an upper bound on the probability of getting some equally simple pattern. But Landman points out that simpler patterns are not necessarily less probable. His example is nice and concrete. If your target is a very specific 10-digit string, the probability is 1 in 10 billion, but a simpler pattern like contains the digit one is vastly more probable, around 0.35. So Demski's move from simplicity to probability just does not hold.

[00:32:24]That's the first error. Landman then says this first problem is at least fixable. You could redefine the pattern counting term so that it only counts patterns that are both at least as simple and at least improbable as the target. With that repair, the derivation can continue. So he's being pretty charitable there. But, then comes the much bigger problem. Dembski later brings in Seth Lloyd's estimate for the computational capacity of the observable universe, this famous 10 to the 120 number, and plugs it into the formula as a universal upper bound on opportunities or resources. Landman says this is where Dembski makes the truly catastrophic mistake. Lloyd's numbers are already logarithmic measures, meaning they already summarize the size of a possibility space in bits. Dembski then effectively takes the logarithm again when he should not. Dembski drops two logs instead of one, just like every DI member does in their pants when I make another one of these videos. And once you fix this toddler mistake, the intended conclusion is obliterated.

[00:33:18]According to Landman, the corrected formula becomes useless for Dembski's purposes because it would only let you infer non-randomness for something more unlikely than the entire state space of the universe, which is not a meaningful criterion for detecting design in biology or anywhere else. And guess what? Dembski knows information theory well enough to know exactly what he's doing and why it's wrong to do.

[00:33:39]>> Typically what information theorists do, in fact always what they do, is they transform probabilities by using a logarithmic transform. It's a logarithm to the base two, which basically translates probabilities into bits. This is not just an error on his part. He's being deliberately deceptive. At any rate, Landman goes on to deconstruct this conclusion in two different ways. First is the information theory argument. If you are considering Shannon information, you take the log of the number of possibilities. But again, Lloyd's numbers are already logs of the underlying possibilities. So, plugging them directly into another logarithm is just mathematically wrong. And second is the dimensional analysis argument. This is the units argument. You can't take the log of something with units attached, like bit operations, any more than you can sensibly take the log of 88 feet, because the log of feet doesn't mean anything. The thing inside the logarithm has to be dimensionless. So, Landman says Dembski's formula violates that, too. So, the simple version of this paper is, even if you temporarily set aside all the philosophical and biological objections to Dembski's version of specified complexity, his formula still fails on basic mathematical grounds. First, the probability bound does not follow from the way Dembski defines pattern simplicity. Second, the universal resource bound is plugged in incorrectly by a gigantic margin. And once corrected, the formula no longer supports the grand ideological conclusions Dembski is desperate to arrive at. So, in short, he is not just vague or misleading, his math also sucks. That was fun, huh? Let's try another one. Here's the 2003 paper by Elsberry and Shallit, "Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's Complex Specified Information." This one's a little more in-depth, but we can highlight a few points. First, the authors argue that Dembski never gives a coherent positive account of design or intelligence.

[00:35:27]Instead, design is often treated as whatever is left over after chance and necessity are ruled out, which they say is a bad way to infer causation. They also argue that this makes design too easy to infer from ignorance, especially for events with complicated or poorly known causal histories. In other words, pretending that anything unexplained equals design is a stupid way of thinking. This is famously called the God of the Gaps, no matter how much that label triggers the DI bozos. Then, when this paper gets to biology, it basically argues that Dembski's applications are some of the weakest parts of his whole framework. One problem is that his discussion of biological information does not even sit cleanly with his own concepts. He talks as though DNA is packed with this kind of specified information in a way that points to design, but the authors point out that DNA does not behave in this simple tidy way his framework would suggest.

[00:36:17]Compression of DNA is actually a real research problem, and only limited compression is possible. So, right away, his rhetoric about information, complexity, and compressibility is already on shaky ground when applied to actual biological sequences. Then there is the classic bacterial flagellum [ __ ] which we've debunked to smithereens in other videos, so we don't need to reiterate it here. But the biggest problem is the way Dembski handles probability in biology. Nature isn't one-shot assembly, so on and so forth, all stuff we've heard before. So the critique here is not just that Dembski got a few biological examples wrong. It's that once he applies this framework to real biology, it becomes unrealistic, over-inclusive, and basically useless. Biology, information theory, math, philosophy, it looks like the learned world is uniformly opposed to the propaganda campaign that is specified information. This is not a coincidence, nor some grand conspiracy from the evil atheist cabal that is academia. It's scholars universally rejecting religious propaganda.

[00:37:18]Dembski's schtick is nothing but a turd in a tuxedo. When you strip away the dressing, the message to the science-literate viewer is that information is some magical ethereal substance breathed into DNA from the Christian God, because that's the only way to explain life. What could be more pseudo-scientific than that?

[00:37:35]At this point, with Dembski's pseudo-science firmly debunked, we can now pivot to the broader political context for these claims and their promotion by Discovery Institute.

[00:37:45]Although their rebranding from creation science to intelligent design involved pivoting away from explicit mentions of the Christian God, so as to seem more neutral and scientific, their true intent is transparent at every turn. In 2007, Dembski told the group Focus on the Family that the designer of intelligent design is ultimately the Christian God. In Dembski's book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, he states, "The conceptual soundings of the intelligent design theory can in the end only be located in Christ." We've talked about this rebranding at great length, including the pseudo textbook of Pandas and People, which involved a search and replace of creation scientists with design proponents that yielded one hilarious typo, "C design proponentsists." That's how obvious their empty PR campaign is. This book is propaganda, and Dembski wrote a follow-up with fellow DI asshat Jonathan Wells called The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems. All these pseudo textbooks do is attack evolution, propose their own ideologically driven alternative absent any rigorous science, make unfalsifiable claims, wind endlessly about ancient science like the Miller-Urey experiment, and make no attempt to discuss modern biology. It's just propaganda peddling frauds trying to teach religion in public school science classes. Nothing new. How else do these clowns try to infiltrate the educational space? In 1999, Baylor University President Robert Sloan brought Dembski in to establish the Michael Polanyi Center, basically an intelligent design hub at major research university, but apparently with little faculty consultation and very little connection to Baylor's actual science, philosophy, or religion departments.

[00:39:28]This is a Christian university, mind you. Then, after the center held a conference on naturalism in science, Baylor's faculty senate voted 27 to 2 to dissolve it and fold it into an existing institute. Here's the funny part.

[00:39:41]Dembski responded by claiming the review had given an unqualified affirmation of his work, and that it marked the triumph of intelligent design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry. Right, because getting your center dissolved and absorbed elsewhere is obviously the clearest sign of total victory. Baylor pushed back, asked him to withdraw the statement, he refused, and he was removed as director. So, the Baylor story is a perfect representation of the entire intelligent design campaign. Weak to non-existent institutional support, enormous ideological spin, and declaring victory while being shown the door. This is the DI through and through. Science is always dead last. It's about brainwashing conservative Christians into thinking that religion is science, and that means participating in pathetic culture war brain rot. Demski is always thrilled to be a warrior for this cause.

[00:40:29]How scientific materialism begot woke ideology. Oh my goodness, it's the two worst things ever in the same blog post.

[00:40:37]Stupid icky materialism that denies our magic sky daddy and our super awesome souls that totally exist and that stupid dumb woke DEI nonsense. You know how those stupid libtards push the trans stuff that makes you so angry and uncomfortable? They're the same ones pushing this naturalism crap. The nerve.

[00:40:55]Here are some choice snippets from this turd fest. Scientific materialism is the view that science functions to advance materialism. This is him whining about the fact that science is science.

[00:41:07]Science explains the natural world, which is made of matter, and science does indeed function to advance science.

[00:41:14]Shocking. Darwin is this atheistic ideology's principal prophet. As soon as they start crapping their pants about Darwin, you can check out completely.

[00:41:23]There's only butt-hurt creationist brain rot to follow. Darwin is nothing remotely like a prophet. No field of science can be represented by an individual scholar, and modern evolutionary biology would be totally unrecognizable to Darwin. Scientists aren't prophets and science isn't religion, no matter how much these frauds want their target audience to think it is so that they can feel better about being brain washed idiots who have blind faith in their false prophet.

[00:41:47]Here's a gem. Woke ideology did not arise in a vacuum, but is the logical outworking of a materialist worldview in which humans are meat puppets. There's that word again, woke. Not a single anti-woke loser can define what woke means and they never will because it just means any facts that hurt their feelings. Yearning for the ignorance of antiquity and all of the slavery and misogyny and other social injustice that went along with it. This is just a pathetic defense mechanism of angry white Christian men who can't handle sharing their wealth and power for the first time in centuries. Can you believe this [ __ ] is what passes for publication over at the DI? This blog post is what happens when someone confuses a culture war rant with intellectual history.

[00:42:31]Evolutionary biology has nothing to do with campus politics, no matter how angry you are that trans people exist.

[00:42:37]Get over it. It is this ideological framework that elucidates Dembski's pseudoscience and the rest of the output of the DI. Their rhetoric does not consist of neutral scientific tools that just happen to land on design when the evidence points that way. They are built from the start to make that conclusion seem inevitable. The probability framing, the vague notion of specification, the misuse of information theory language, the caricature of evolution as a one-shot random process, all of it is arranged in a way that pushes toward intelligent design from the outset. And that is why it can't be separated from the broader project of rebranding creationism. The goal is not to follow the evidence wherever it leads, the goal is to take religiously motivated conclusions and dress them up in mathematical and scientific-sounding language so they appear respectable.

[00:43:23]Specified information is one example of that strategy. It begins with a loose intuition that is not inherently ridiculous, but then it gets stretched, weaponized, and applied in a way that is fundamentally biased toward declaring design whenever natural explanations are inconvenient to their agenda. The point was never to do science, the point was always to protect a predetermined worldview. And this predetermined worldview can't be separated from the nefarious culture war the DI is fighting. I've outlined this agenda many times, but it still seems that not enough people are aware of it. And with Meyer ramping up his activity, pumping out theater-grade propaganda films, it bears repeating. The DI is part of the war on science. This war is being waged by institutions with theocratic intent.

[00:44:05]These are astonishingly well-funded, and they leave very little to chance. They employ marketing firms to come up with strategic methods to improve their public appearance, undermine the public's trust in science and academia, and market pseudoscience like intelligent design as credible and legitimate science. I'm not being even remotely hyperbolic. A marketing firm pioneered their whole wedge strategy from the now infamous wedge document I've brought up many times as a way to successfully undermine public trust in science. The DI threw everything they had at Kitzmiller v. Dover to inject religion into public education. But luckily, the Bush-appointed right-wing judge they drew had integrity and respect for the law, and they've been recovering from that failure ever since.

[00:44:46]This means doing their best to craft new propaganda, but they also strategically fund campaigns for countless nationalist judges in an effort to subvert this hurdle in future legal challenges. This includes the capturing of the Supreme Court under Trump. The public does not seem to be fully aware of how tenuous the separation of church and state really is, and how easily it can be undermined by malicious interpretations of the Constitution. The goal is to destroy public education, corrupt scientific research, and subjugate the masses under theocratic rule. And these organizations have spent millions, if not billions of dollars over the past few decades, strategically chipping away at our protections with the goal of successfully reinterpreting the Constitution in a theocratic light.

[00:45:29]Don't forget, they successfully overturned a landmark legal decision, Roe v. Wade, that was affirmed and reaffirmed for over 50 years. That wasn't coincidence. It was the direct result of their successful infiltration of our Supreme Court. This should terrify you. They just recently came dangerously close to demolishing the separation of church and state aspect of the establishment clause as well by reinterpreting the withholding of public funds to religious schools as a violation of those students' right to practice their religion. The only reason it didn't happen is because Amy Barrett apparently grew a conscience and recused herself on the case. So, it ended in a split 4-4 ruling and ultimately bounced back to the state ruling for now. But, make no mistake, they plan to break that barrier by any means possible so that red states can start giving public funds to private Christian schools because apparently the millions in tax-free unregulated money the churches get just isn't good enough. So, they want the little amount of money dedicated to public education to fund private Christian schools. Schools that can brainwash children with religion and can also discriminate with regards to who they let in. Make no mistake, that ruling may be right around the corner.

[00:46:37]They strategically choose which cases to fund and appeal to the Supreme Court and that case was without a doubt chosen for a reason as Barrett had some kind of personal connection to the school in question. Liberals, conservatives, atheists, rational religious people, I don't think almost anyone truly comprehends just how dire the situation is. These theocrats have already successfully infiltrated all three branches of government to remove all the checks on their power and dismantled every federal agency that was established to prevent these very abuses from taking place. They've gained control and influence over multiple large social media platforms and immediately removed any existing regulations on misinformation so they can control which content gets recommended and which gets buried.

[00:47:18]They're in the process of forcing the last independent platforms remaining like YouTube to comply citing their own authority to declare any public criticism of theocratic ideologies as religious hate speech. They're weaponizing our Constitution and using our own rights against us by selectively using some to justify their violation of others. They're attacking free speech on social media and weaponizing laws by reinterpreting their definitions like declaring legitimate concerns or criticisms as inciting panic or rebellion. They're attacking every news and media network that doesn't peddle their propaganda by using their control over the remaining federal regulatory agencies to strong-arm them into compliance. We are genuinely on the verge of an all-out authoritarian takeover with Trump as the puppet leader who's in it strictly for the cash. And if the public doesn't wake up and start fighting back with serious coordinated political action, we will soon find ourselves in a position where it will take a lot more than just a vote to get our power back.

[00:48:14]So, that's it for Bill Dembski, one of the biggest losers over at Discovery Institute. They're going to have to put up a second dartboard with my face on it over there because I'm going to absolutely ruin every last bit of propaganda that Meyer and Paultz have planned. So, stay tuned for a lot more of that in the near future. Until next time.