This piece was a downright pleasure to read! Easily understood, yet depth of implications is extensive in grounding our perception of how the world functions through verbs--for good or ill. 'Tis my habit daily to engage in word studies (as I read and meditate on the Scriptures) in Hebrew and Greek which frequently leads to the history of English words. So your etymological unpacking of information, intelligence, and choice was sheer enjoyment.
Re formal cause, material cause, and actualization seems I've noticed that in Hebrew verbs most often anchor nouns, not the other way around. Does this correspond with the pathway of your information>intelligence>decision/choice model? Does this three-part verb(al) pathway actualize purpose-filled, material nouned-entities?
Lucid, appropriate "side note" re Darwin's rebellion against the etymology of "selection" as you parsed these three words in your title for this piece.
Glad you liked it George. Regarding verbs versus nouns, I've addressed this point at length in chapter 13 of my book BEING AS COMMUNION: A METAPHYSICS OF INFORMATION:
"Yet in most real-life situations, information is not static but dynamic—it is more verb than noun. Information is rarely if ever stored in a hermetic compartment. To be sure, information storage is an important aspect of information. But so is information processing. Information is in practice not something that sits by idly but something that happens and makes things happen. Information lives, moves, and works. Information changes dynamically, with information passing in, through, and out of matter. Even the book in a hermetic compartment was at one point in its history a collection of blank pages onto which ink had to be applied. Nothing in our experience preserves its information eternally. Anything that exhibits information needed at some point to be imparted with information. What causes information to undergo such dynamic transformations? The usual answer to this question is stated in one word: energy..."
Isaiah (40:8) would add to this: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever."
Hi Dr. Dembski, this was really good, thought-provoking post, along with the previous one about the "missing law" of information.
Regarding that other post, I think the problem that guys like Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Leroy Cronin, and Robert Hazen have is that what they're looking for is implicitly a contradiction in terms. They understand at least intuitively that functional information is an objectively real thing that cannot in principle be explained by or reduced to blind mechanism, but they want to find or formulate a new "law" or blind mechanism to account for it. They aren't willing to expand their categories of what is fundamentally real to allow for something actually sufficient to account for it in principle.
I agree that Darwin's great coup was joining the word "selection" to "natural" to try to evoke the idea of a process that was blind and mechanistic, yet still somehow had all of the powers of a conscious, designing mind. However, this was a merely rhetorical coup, not a logical one. Like Davies, Kauffman, etc, Darwin understood intuitively that functional information is an objectively real thing that needs explanation (Indeed, in terms of biology, it is THE thing needing explanation), and that it couldn't in principle be accounted for by blind mechanisms, so he attempted to come up with a "law" that was a blind mechanism and not a blind mechanism at the same time. But the idea is simply logically incoherent.
As it happens, I have recently been taking part in discussion at the blog of John C Wright in which we've been talking about the same concepts you covered here, so I'd like to link to a couple of recent comments I made there that you might find useful.
First, I made a comment going into why "natural selection" isn't even a legitimate concept, and explaining the precise sleight of hand by which it is made to seem legitimate, which John liked enough to repost as an article. That is here: https://scifiwright.com/2025/09/empirical-and-metaphysical-darwinism/
In another comment, using a thought experiment about what it would take to add a functioning camera eye to an organism that only had a light-sensitive spot, I illustrate why biological function is not only improbable to the point of impossibility to account for in terms of blind mechanisms, but is of an order that is in principle impossible to account for even by intelligent human engineering, much less unintelligent processes, because it implicitly depends on the concept of the organism as an objectively irreducible whole or substance (in Aristotelean/Thomistic terms), which is a metaphysical divide that we have no clue how to even go about bridging: https://scifiwright.com/2025/09/fine-tuning-the-fine-tuning-argument-2/#comment-6776081482
Dr. Demski. Thank you for your comment above. Seems an embarrassing oversight not to have known to give Gitt credit on my post, which I think you were pointing to here in a kind way. I have corrected this on the post to give Gitt credit for his ideas I was borrowing from. Thank you.
I have thought perhaps I should share my idea on butterflies with Stephen Meyer and/or Michael Behe to see if they know anyone studying the morphology of Lepidoptera who could examine the DNA and other epigenetics involved in the life cycle changes, but who the heck am I? My degree is in English Lit, and while I read constantly on various topics, credentials don’t work that way.
Yes. Though I haven’t had significant courses in information theory which may challenge some things stated here, I do recall taking a course on basic genetics in college where we were told about DNA and how the sequencing was like computer code and immediately asked the professor, at a time I fully believed Darwinian Theory, “Wait, so Darwin had to be wrong. No way this sophisticated language could be produced by chemical reactions and mutations.” This was obvious to me then, and it made me very concerned that something that obvious could be missed by so many.
I actually have a suggestion as to where to test to find a replacement theory for evolution, though the new theory would need a new name: Innovation Theory, perhaps.
I reading about butterfly genetics, it is clear to me that the morphological body changes taking place from larvae to caterpillar and then caterpillar to butterfly are preset programming within the first stage triggered by a time release mechanism in the program. This happening on an individual level for this species could be extrapolated from one species and its life time to ALL species in all of biology where somewhere coded in biological lifeforms, there are preset timing or environmental triggers which make one species suddenly go through morphological changes in multiple organisms of that species leading to a bunch of fiah suddenly laying eggs with amphibians in them instead of fish.
Studying the butterflies informational changes during its morphological processes could allow us to see what mechanisms and information are happening at those stages and then see how a slower process in all of life might be present in all lifeforms.
This sudden change of body designs in one generation would answer the questions of the PreCambrian Explosion and other large scale explosions of new life forms in the fossil record and replace Darwinian evolution with Information Design Theory Pre-programming of innovation in biological history.
Wisdom seems to have a moral and aesthetic dimension that is absent from knowledge as such, so it's not clear to me if the transition from knowledge to wisdom is informational in the sense of narrowing possibilities.
This is great stuff Bill. I'm wondering how much of this informs what I'm thinking about in terms of artificial intelligence.
Nice to hear from you, Erik. We should catch up some time and talk.
This piece was a downright pleasure to read! Easily understood, yet depth of implications is extensive in grounding our perception of how the world functions through verbs--for good or ill. 'Tis my habit daily to engage in word studies (as I read and meditate on the Scriptures) in Hebrew and Greek which frequently leads to the history of English words. So your etymological unpacking of information, intelligence, and choice was sheer enjoyment.
Re formal cause, material cause, and actualization seems I've noticed that in Hebrew verbs most often anchor nouns, not the other way around. Does this correspond with the pathway of your information>intelligence>decision/choice model? Does this three-part verb(al) pathway actualize purpose-filled, material nouned-entities?
Lucid, appropriate "side note" re Darwin's rebellion against the etymology of "selection" as you parsed these three words in your title for this piece.
Glad you liked it George. Regarding verbs versus nouns, I've addressed this point at length in chapter 13 of my book BEING AS COMMUNION: A METAPHYSICS OF INFORMATION:
"Yet in most real-life situations, information is not static but dynamic—it is more verb than noun. Information is rarely if ever stored in a hermetic compartment. To be sure, information storage is an important aspect of information. But so is information processing. Information is in practice not something that sits by idly but something that happens and makes things happen. Information lives, moves, and works. Information changes dynamically, with information passing in, through, and out of matter. Even the book in a hermetic compartment was at one point in its history a collection of blank pages onto which ink had to be applied. Nothing in our experience preserves its information eternally. Anything that exhibits information needed at some point to be imparted with information. What causes information to undergo such dynamic transformations? The usual answer to this question is stated in one word: energy..."
Isaiah (40:8) would add to this: "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever."
Hi Dr. Dembski, this was really good, thought-provoking post, along with the previous one about the "missing law" of information.
Regarding that other post, I think the problem that guys like Paul Davies, Stuart Kauffman, Leroy Cronin, and Robert Hazen have is that what they're looking for is implicitly a contradiction in terms. They understand at least intuitively that functional information is an objectively real thing that cannot in principle be explained by or reduced to blind mechanism, but they want to find or formulate a new "law" or blind mechanism to account for it. They aren't willing to expand their categories of what is fundamentally real to allow for something actually sufficient to account for it in principle.
I agree that Darwin's great coup was joining the word "selection" to "natural" to try to evoke the idea of a process that was blind and mechanistic, yet still somehow had all of the powers of a conscious, designing mind. However, this was a merely rhetorical coup, not a logical one. Like Davies, Kauffman, etc, Darwin understood intuitively that functional information is an objectively real thing that needs explanation (Indeed, in terms of biology, it is THE thing needing explanation), and that it couldn't in principle be accounted for by blind mechanisms, so he attempted to come up with a "law" that was a blind mechanism and not a blind mechanism at the same time. But the idea is simply logically incoherent.
As it happens, I have recently been taking part in discussion at the blog of John C Wright in which we've been talking about the same concepts you covered here, so I'd like to link to a couple of recent comments I made there that you might find useful.
First, I made a comment going into why "natural selection" isn't even a legitimate concept, and explaining the precise sleight of hand by which it is made to seem legitimate, which John liked enough to repost as an article. That is here: https://scifiwright.com/2025/09/empirical-and-metaphysical-darwinism/
In another comment, using a thought experiment about what it would take to add a functioning camera eye to an organism that only had a light-sensitive spot, I illustrate why biological function is not only improbable to the point of impossibility to account for in terms of blind mechanisms, but is of an order that is in principle impossible to account for even by intelligent human engineering, much less unintelligent processes, because it implicitly depends on the concept of the organism as an objectively irreducible whole or substance (in Aristotelean/Thomistic terms), which is a metaphysical divide that we have no clue how to even go about bridging: https://scifiwright.com/2025/09/fine-tuning-the-fine-tuning-argument-2/#comment-6776081482
A few weeks previous to that, I had a comment making much the same point about human reason: https://scifiwright.com/2025/08/creation-implies-a-creator/#comment-6760029729
Always appreciate your writing, Sir. A Post of mine within this topic and conversation: https://open.substack.com/pub/jamesd4a/p/the-origin-of-specious?r=b8cz7&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for sharing. You seem to find inspiration in Werner Gitt.
Dr. Demski. Thank you for your comment above. Seems an embarrassing oversight not to have known to give Gitt credit on my post, which I think you were pointing to here in a kind way. I have corrected this on the post to give Gitt credit for his ideas I was borrowing from. Thank you.
I have thought perhaps I should share my idea on butterflies with Stephen Meyer and/or Michael Behe to see if they know anyone studying the morphology of Lepidoptera who could examine the DNA and other epigenetics involved in the life cycle changes, but who the heck am I? My degree is in English Lit, and while I read constantly on various topics, credentials don’t work that way.
Yes. Though I haven’t had significant courses in information theory which may challenge some things stated here, I do recall taking a course on basic genetics in college where we were told about DNA and how the sequencing was like computer code and immediately asked the professor, at a time I fully believed Darwinian Theory, “Wait, so Darwin had to be wrong. No way this sophisticated language could be produced by chemical reactions and mutations.” This was obvious to me then, and it made me very concerned that something that obvious could be missed by so many.
I actually have a suggestion as to where to test to find a replacement theory for evolution, though the new theory would need a new name: Innovation Theory, perhaps.
I reading about butterfly genetics, it is clear to me that the morphological body changes taking place from larvae to caterpillar and then caterpillar to butterfly are preset programming within the first stage triggered by a time release mechanism in the program. This happening on an individual level for this species could be extrapolated from one species and its life time to ALL species in all of biology where somewhere coded in biological lifeforms, there are preset timing or environmental triggers which make one species suddenly go through morphological changes in multiple organisms of that species leading to a bunch of fiah suddenly laying eggs with amphibians in them instead of fish.
Studying the butterflies informational changes during its morphological processes could allow us to see what mechanisms and information are happening at those stages and then see how a slower process in all of life might be present in all lifeforms.
This sudden change of body designs in one generation would answer the questions of the PreCambrian Explosion and other large scale explosions of new life forms in the fossil record and replace Darwinian evolution with Information Design Theory Pre-programming of innovation in biological history.
I have heard from somewhere that there is a dynamic…
Data->Information->Knowledge-> Wisdom-> Insight
If that is so, can it be said that each step narrows the field in the manner you are speaking here?
Wisdom seems to have a moral and aesthetic dimension that is absent from knowledge as such, so it's not clear to me if the transition from knowledge to wisdom is informational in the sense of narrowing possibilities.
I have to ask if the image is AI-generated?
I was thinking of cropping out the reference to Grok in the lower right, but decided to keep it. Short answer, Yes.