Specified information is earliy measrurable and defined. As with the examples of the face in the clouds which is a rough outline of something we know is more detailed. It is the detail of facial features that determine the complexity and specified information and is the difference between a rough image of a face and a real face and how we can tell designed.
Dembski has defended "specified complexity"-or "complex specified information" (CSI)-as a reliable design detection criterion in numerous writings, including his peer-reviewed paper, The Design Inference.
In simplified sum, a long string of random letters is complex without being specified (that is, without conforming to an independently given pattern that we have not simply read off the object or event in question). A short sequence of letters like "this" or "that" is specified without being sufficiently complex to outstrip the capacity of chance to explain this conformity (for example, letters drawn at random from a Scrabble bag will occasionally form a short word). Neither complexity without specificity nor specificity without complexity compels us to infer design. However, this paper is both specified (conforming to the functional requirements of grammatical English) and sufficiently complex (doing so at a level of complexity that makes it unreasonable to attribute this match to luck) to trigger a design inference on the grounds that "in all cases where we know the causal origin of . . . specified complexity, experience has shown that intelligent design played a causal role.
William Albert Dembski, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities - PhilPapers
Other mainstream academic such as Dawkins have also implicitly supported specified info. By arguing that objects may lack specified info and complexity when measuring design, they are implicitly supporting complex specific info.
The Design Inference from Specified Complexity Defended by Scholars Outside the Intelligent Design Movement
The thing about specified and complex info is that it is also about functional info as in biology. This paper seems to show that it is near impossible for evolution to produce the type of functional info needed to produce the high level of complex and specific info for life.
Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds: Doug Axe:
Excerpt: The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10^64 signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10^77, adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences.
Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds. - PubMed - NCBI
First you say specified info cannot be defined and then you question the assertion that evolution cannot account for it. As described above it is about specific complex info and what I find with explanations from evolution when they claim that it can create things like eyes is that they may give a rough explanation for how evolution may create a simple step but never any detail of the other 99% of steps that fill in the detail of the rest. An eye patch is easy to explain though I think the explanation is still short of the mark as an eye patch has much more detail than ever given. But if you go to the level of a human eye where there is much more detail there is no way evolution can explain or account for this through a detailed step by step explanation. That is the specified and complex info that is required for design.
The other explanations I was thinking of have nothing to do with the Discovery Institute. Really, they come from mainstream science. For example, in the paper
Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Which probably sums up most of the ideas within the new synthesis and attribute change to other mechanisms that Darwinian evolution relegates to the sidelines as noise but are now being shown as causes perhaps more than natural selection.
Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?
We believe that the EES will shed new light on how evolution works. We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems.
The story that SET tells is simple: new variation arises through random genetic mutation; inheritance occurs through DNA; and natural selection is the sole cause of adaptation, the process by which organisms become well-suited to their environments. In this view, the complexity of biological development — the changes that occur as an organism grows and ages — are of secondary, even minor, importance.
In our view, this ‘gene-centric’ focus fails to capture the full gamut of processes that direct evolution. Missing pieces include how physical development influences the generation of variation (developmental bias); how the environment directly shapes organisms’ traits (plasticity); how organisms modify environments (niche construction); and how organisms transmit more than genes across generations (extra-genetic inheritance). For SET, these phenomena are just outcomes of evolution. For the EES, they are also causes.
Valuable insight into the causes of adaptation and the appearance of new traits comes from the field of evolutionary developmental biology (‘evo-devo’). Some of its experimental findings are proving tricky to assimilate into SET. Particularly thorny is the observation that much variation is not random because developmental processes generate certain forms more readily than others3.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090107134529.htm
So, from what I understand with the above paper is that living things have an inbuilt mechanism that allows them to switch on genes in development and in life and change features that help them adapt to environments. They may even work with in other creatures and organisms and the environment when they are under pressure and can turn on the right sort of genetic material needed or extract it from their surroundings and other living things rather than go through some random and blind process of hit and miss finding the right stuff through mutation and natural selection to adapt.
It is not just that evolution may weed out any harmful mutations but that it is capable of evolving complex networks and systems in the first place.
According to Lynch Natural selection is insufficient and even perhaps not a necessary force for evolving the complexity of organisms and there are non-adaptive forces which are more likely to evolve complexity.
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity
What is in question is whether natural selection is a necessary or sufficient force to explain the emergence of the genomic and cellular features central to the building of complex organisms.
Jacob (46) argues that “it is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species.” The vast majority of biologists almost certainly agree with such statements. But where is the direct supportive evidence for the assumption that complexity is rooted in adaptive processes? No existing observations support such a claim and given the massive global dominance of unicellular species over multicellular eukaryotes, both in terms of species richness and numbers of individuals, if there is an advantage of organismal complexity, one can only marvel at the inability of natural selection to promote it.
Lynch again questions Natural selections ability in that compared to simple organism’s complex creatures suffer a lot more problems which implicates evolution by natural selection and random mutation as being something that harms complex life by introducing more deleterious mutations.
Multicellular species experience reduced population sizes, reduced recombination rates, and increased deleterious mutation rates, all of which diminish the efficiency of selection (13). It may be no coincidence that such species also have substantially higher extinction rates than do unicellular taxa (47, 48).
Lynch also supports what is mentioned above in that it is not natural selection but other processes through development that allow living things to change and adapt to their environments.
One could even argue that the stringency of natural selection is reduced in complex organisms with behavioral and/or growth-form flexibilities that allow individuals to match their phenotypic capabilities to the local environment. Some of these shortcomings have recently attracted attention, and a scaffold for connecting evolutionary genetics, genomics, and developmental biology is slowly beginning to emerge (
59⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓⇓–
66).
As far as natural selection weeding out deleterious mutations and keeping beneficial ones in populations Lynch states that
Thus, contrary to popular belief, natural selection may not only be an insufficient mechanism for the origin of genetic modularity, but population-genetic environments that maximize the efficiency of natural selection may actually promote the opposite situation, alleles under unified transcriptional control.
The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity
Eugene Koonin also seems to agree and think along similar lines.
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept. An adequate depiction of evolution requires the more complex concept of a network or ‘forest’ of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non-adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation.
Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics
There are many other scientists who say similar things. For me it is also about the origins of complex features. As some scientists talking about the new synthesis have said natural selection is good at explaining the survival of the fittest but not the arrival of the fittest. There may be support that complex life having always been around from the beginning or at least having some code that could switch on new functions rather than having to create this from a blind and random process which implies a more directed process and seems to fit with the observations being found especially with ideas from the new synthesis of evolution and how the fossil evidence shows the sudden appearence of well defined life such as in the Cambrian explosion.
Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa: Thoughts About Evolution
According to this model, (a) the Universal Genome that encodes all major developmental programs essential for various phyla of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism shortly before the Cambrian period; (b) The Metazoan phyla, all having similar genomes, are nonetheless so distinct because they utilize specific combinations of developmental programs. This model has two major predictions, first that a significant fraction of genetic information in lower taxons must be functionally useless but becomes useful in higher taxons, and second that one should be able to turn on in lower taxons some of the complex latent developmental programs.
http://www.researchgate.net/publica...he_Origin_of_Metazoa_Thoughts_About_Evolution
