I’m pleased to see that the Intelligent Design creationists do actually occasionally challenge themselves — it’s just too bad that they trip and fall flat every time they do. Over at Uncommon Descent, that hotbed of hot air hosted by William Dembski, one poster slipped the leash and asked an uncomfortable question: how do we calculate Dembski’s measure of ‘complexity’, CSI, or Complex Specified Information? She didn’t know. It turns out that almost 300 comments in the subsequent thread are spinning their wheels — they don’t know either.

Doesn’t this sound just like Ontogenetic Depth, the magic metric Paul Nelson invented to describe the history of complexity of life on earth, which he couldn’t define and couldn’t explain how it was calculated? An immeasurable metric is a curious thing to hang a science on, I think.

By the way, we’re coming up on the 7th anniversary of Paul Nelson’s failure to deliver a promised explanation. I’m getting old here. He must be hoping to just outlive me.