LIFE’S CONSERVATION LAW
Why Darwinian Evolution Cannot Create Biological Information
William A. Dembski a nd Robert J. Marks II
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Laws of nature are universal in scope, hold with unfailing regularity, and
receive support from a wide array of facts and observations. The Law of
Conservation of Information (LCI) is such a law. LCI characterizes the information
costs that searches incur in outperforming blind search.
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Searches that have a greater
probability of success than blind search do not just magically materialize. They form
by some process. According to LCI, any such search-forming process must build into
the search at least as much information as the search displays in raising the
probability of success.
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... we are challenging the claim that evolution can create information from
scratch where previously it did not exist.
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Complexity theorist Stuart
Kauffman understands the challenge:
The no-free-lunch theorem says that, averaged over all possible fitness landscapes, no
search procedure outperforms any other.... In the absence of any knowledge, or
constraint, [read “information”] on the fitness landscape, on average, any search
procedure is as good as any other. But life uses mutation, recombination, and selection.
These search procedures seem to be working quite well. Your typical bat or butterfly has
managed to get itself evolved and seems a rather impressive entity. The no-free-lunch
theorem brings into high relief the puzzle. If mutation, recombination, and selection only
work well on certain kinds of fitness landscapes, yet most organisms are sexual, and
hence use recombination, and all organisms use mutation as a search mechanism, where
did these well-wrought fitness landscapes come from, such that evolution manages to
produce the fancy stuff around us?73
According to Kauffman, “No one knows.”74
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To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking natural selection is to
explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the information that
natural selection requires to execute evolutionary searches. You have to say something
like “the information was always there,” and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way
out, you might as well just say “DNA was always there,” or “Life was always there,” and
be done with it.79
...
Conservation of information therefore points to an information source behind evolution that
imparts at least as much information to the evolutionary process as this process in turn is capable
of expressing by producing biological form and function. As a consequence, such an information
source has three remarkable properties: (1) it cannot be reduced to purely material or natural
causes; (2) it shows that we live in an informationally porous universe; and (3) it may rightly be
regarded as intelligent. The Law of Conservation of Information therefore counts as a positive
reason to accept intelligent design. In particular, it establishes ID’s scientific bona fides.