Not too long ago I became aware that William Dembski had a new article (here) in the BIO-Complexity (the Discovery Institute’s house journal). And that a section of that article disputed my statements about smooth fitness landscapes (or fitness surfaces).

He is replying to a post by me here at Panda’s Thumb on 6 February 2025 (here). He and Robert Marks (and also Winston Ewert) had argued that there was a Conservation of Information law, that showed that when information gets into genomes, it must have already existed elsewhere. They said that this was even true when natural evolutionary processes put adaptive information into the genome – it must have already existed, for example, in the fitness landscape.

Their argument (which can be seen here and here) uses the concept of “active information”. For situations in which there is a population evolving on a fitness landscape, active information can include the information embodied in the assignment of fitnesses to genotypes.

Dembski, in his BIO-Complexity paper, summarizes my arguments thusly (the list is quoted from that article):

1. Real-life biological evolution requires smooth fitness landscapes.
2. Physics and chemistry guarantee that real-life fitness landscapes are smooth.
3. Any probability estimates of smooth fitness landscapes among the totality of fitness landscapes are therefore irrelevant.
4. No-free-lunch theorems hold for the totality of fitness landscapes, both smooth and non-smooth.
5. No-free-lunch theorems therefore do not apply to real-life biological evolution.
6. Conservation of information is equivalent to no freelunch, so conservation of information is likewise irrelevant to real-life biological evolution.

He argues that there are exceptions to all fitness landscapes being smooth, that I have conflated the No Free Lunch argument with his Conservation of Information argument, and that the latter is his essential argument.

Let’s look at his refutation in some detail:

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I recently listened to Jared Diamond interviewed on an episode of The Michael Shermer Show: How Much Can One Person Change History? Diamond is probably best known for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I had read when it came out. His newest book, published this fall, is Profits, Prophets, Coaches, and Kings: (When) Do Leaders Matter? The content of the book is well summarized in the Shermer Show and also reflected accurately in the titles. That said, when someone as bright as Diamond wonders about Darwin, I have to take notice, so I picked up the book and read it, followed by three reviews, in the Times, the Guardian, and the Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail article was favorable, the Guardian article mixed, and the Times article properly critical but sometimes perhaps a bit catty.

Before we get to Darwin, let us back up a little bit and discuss what Diamond calls the Hamlet test.

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Photograph by David Young.

A penpal of mine, Scott Goodman, recently asked the following question:

What is the psychology behind contrarian belief systems? Having been involved in this now for some 30 years, I have concluded, as have others, that this phenomenon of latching on to a nonsense belief and defending it to the death against all reason is, at its root, psychologically and emotionally driven. And it certainly isn’t limited to creationism. Across the board, from climate change denial to anti-vaccine hysteria to insisting that elections are rigged, I believe the same thing is at work. Consider the characteristics:

• Impervious to facts or logic. The facts simply must be wrong.
• A desire to focus on the best and most robust scientific (or political) explanations.
• Along with that, attacking the most prominent scientists; Darwin, Einstein, etc.
• And several other characteristics that one might describe.

I throw this out to the group because it might point to finding more effective ways of combatting all of this nonsense. Clearly, facts are water off a duck’s back to creationists and other science deniers. They have a mental force field to keep facts and logic out. To me the question becomes, “What is the emotional payoff for this behaviour?” It appears to be overwhelming and compelling for those who adopt this way of thinking.

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