William Dembski will be talking at the University of Chicago next week about “Conservation of Information in Evolution Search” — and Jerry Coyne is steamed: “Creationist Dembski gives academic talk at MY university!” Coyne finds it significant that in the official description of Dr. Dembski’s presentation, a “Computations in Science” seminar, there’s a typo in the spelling of “Discovery Institute.” (The final “t” is omitted.) But can you spot the two factual errors in Coyne’s headline?
Yes, first Dembski isn’t a creationist, and second the University of Chicago clearly isn’t Jerry Coyne’s university, despite teaching on the campus, since in contrast to Ball State he’s unable to exercise his power as censor there. Check out his own colleague at the U. of C., biologist James Shapiro, prominent advocate of a “third way” in thinking about evolution that is neither for Darwin nor design.
Anyway, for those in the Chicago area, by all means join us for Dr. Dembski’s seminar. For others, get a look in the meantime at this compact and entertaining presentation by Dembski’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab co-worker and ENV contributor Dr. Robert Marks of Baylor University. He was speaking at the American Scientific Affiliation conference a couple of weeks ago on “Algorithmic Specified Complexity.” The venue was McMaster University in Ontario.
For more information on Dembski’s speech, see here. It’s at 12:15 pm on Wednesday, August 13, here. Ah, and I see they’ve corrected the spelling of “Institute.” Good.