Perry Marshall: Proving God or Proving his Ignorance?

Perry Marshall is a computer science expert who knows a few things about evolution, though there are some fundamental errors of his understanding of the process. His argument, which I intend to refute, can be found here.

Marshall's argument is essentially a modified watchmaker argument. He claims that, while things that perform a function which simply follow patterns, such as tornadoes and planetary orbits, do not require a designer, information does require a designer. Is he saying, as a Christian, that God didn't create tornadoes and the universe as a whole, but only created life within said universe?

Despite his argument being invalid, it seems reasonable on the surface. It just seems reasonable that a sentence describing a thing would have something writing that sentence. There's something different about genetic code, though. It only has four letters, and out of the 64 possible combinations of three, every one of them forms a meaningful codon. In other words, here we have a language in which there are no non-words, and there are different spellings for each word, to the point where there are only 20 words in the language. Suddenly it seems more feasible to create a sentence with some meaning out of random letters. Change one letter, the word might be the same, or it might be different, but it's still going to be a word, and there's a 1 in 20 chance that it will be the best word for that place in that sentence.

Marshall argues that noise is not information and therefore could not produce anything useful, but his argument is a case of equivocation which the average person likely would not catch. When biologists refer to information, they refer to it in the sense of information theory. In this sense, noise is exactly what information is. DNA is information that has become useful for the production of a specific organism through a process of natural selection. In our sentence analogy, if natural selection produced the line, "A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fish-stick," in one organism, and in the other organism produced the proper line, "A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool," the latter would be far more likely to survive the selection pressures of English literature and live on to modern times, though the former would perhaps survive in the form of mild humor until the mutation to the proper line occurred by chance.

Marshall seems to be arguing that natural selection does not exist, which is ridiculous at best. Even a fairly devout fundamentalist Christian can see that natural selection occurs because it's so obvious. He mentions repeatedly that noise cannot be the source of meaningful information, completely ignoring the concept of natural selection, and whenever natural selection comes up, he says that it must be the work of a designer, having given an argument for that assumption that is inductive at best, and invalid at worst. In either case, this is not the stuff of proof, but rather, a way of making assumptions until a better concept comes about.

This guy also makes mention of an experiment done with fruit flies, whereby they were given a strong dose of radiation to accelerate mutation, and all of the changes were detrimental to the insects. Of course they were. Natural selection, above all else, takes time to work. When radiation levels are so high that we can expect hundreds of mutations per generation in every offspring, of course it's not going to work. Evolution works one step at a time, allowing the most viable organisms to survive and reproduce, while the less fit struggle more and reproduce less until certain genes are wiped out of the population as a whole.

For an hour and some change of talking, there's not really that much left to say. Marshall argues that all languages have certain characteristics without looking at why they have those characteristics. He takes advantage of the abstractness of information to confuse the audience through equivocation. He equivocates about the meaning of 'junk' DNA, a term of which even most biologists aren't too fond. He claims that the fossil record matches the Bible better than it does naturalistic evolution, a drastic and controversial claim which he fails to support. I found it funny that he reversed stalagmites and stalactites at the beginning of his speech, not really proof that he didn't know what he was talking about, but it turned out to be a good indicator.