Bill Dembski

Articles: 97

Culture, Intelligent Design

Julian Huxley and Magnus Carlsen on the Meaning of Life

The other night, I was watching Lex Fridman interview the world’s strongest chess player, Magnus Carlsen. That same night a friend emailed me a statement by Julian Huxley on Darwinian evolution, in which Huxley treated Darwinism as a sealed deal.…

Bill Dembski
August 9, 2023

Culture, Nostalgia

Loving 70s Music Without Guilt

A few years ago I provided on this blog a complete listing of all the songs and episodes of Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 Countdown. I had listened to this program during high school, and to this day it elicits…

Bill Dembski
August 3, 2023

Culture, Economics and Finance, Society

Replacing Dirty with Clean Water

“Don’t throw out the dirty water until you have the clean water” was my paternal grandfather’s favorite expression. As an immigrant from Poland, he may have picked it up as a proverb from the old country. Clearly, it is a…

Bill Dembski
July 28, 2023

Culture, Society

RFK Jr’s Letter to Liberals — Book Review

A friend of mine wrote this review for a website whose livelihood depends on SEO-generated traffic. He was therefore unable to post it for fear of offending the search engines and thereby getting the site penalized. I have no such…

Bill Dembski
July 18, 2023

Intelligent Design

Intelligence Metrics: Measuring the Degree of Intelligence in Design

A terrific conference just took place in Denton, Texas (June 1-3, 2023): Conference on Engineering in Living Systems, or CELS. Its aim was to inspire cross-disciplinary research between biology and engineering by bringing together biologist, engineers, and some fellow travelers…

Bill Dembski
June 4, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Breaking ChatGPT: Its Inability to Find Patterns in Numerical Sequences

Here’s a sequence of numbers: 2,4,6,8,10,12,… What’s the next number in the sequence? Obviously 14. That one was simple. But what if we make finding the pattern more difficult? It turns out ChatGPT has serious difficulties with numerical patterns. The…

Bill Dembski
May 27, 2023

Intelligent Design

James Tour Debates David Farina (aka “Professor Dave”)

Yesterday (May 19, 2023), Rice University professor James Tour “debated” (I use that word advisedly) YouTube personality and influencer David Farina (known as “Professor Dave”). The question up for discussion was “Are we clueless about the origin of life?” Tour…

Bill Dembski
May 20, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Breaking Google Bard

I’ve finally started playing around with Google Bard. With self-referential sentences, it seems even more at sea than ChatGPT. Here is an exchange from 5/18/23: Me: Consider the following six sentences: This is the first sentence. Ignore this sentence. Why…

Bill Dembski
May 18, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Getting ChatGPT to Lay Aside Biases

A concern about ChatGPT is that its training data may include a lot of information that is false or biased. As one colleague of mine puts it, “No one is curating the internet.” It might seem, then, that endless duplication…

Bill Dembski
May 10, 2023

Baseball, Sports

The Pitching Wisdom of Fergie Jenkins

Ferguson Jenkins, or “Fergie,” is not just one of baseball’s greats, but one of baseball’s Hall of Fame’s greats. He is the last pitcher to have achieved seven twenty-or-more-win seasons. Fergie’s “dream season” came in 1971, when he had an…

Bill Dembski
May 9, 2023