There is a brief passage in Dembski’s “No Free Lunch” that sheds some light on that. See my almost equally brief post at AE:

William Dembski’s No Free Lunch contains the following passage:

The presumption here is that if a subject S can figure out an independently given pattern to which E conforms (i.e., a detachable rejection region of probability less than alpha that includes E), then so could someone else. Indeed, the presumption is that someone else used that very same item of background knowledge — the one used by S to eliminate H — to bring about E in the first place.

No Free Lunch, p. 75

Because Dembski’s framework is based upon the elimination of alternative explanations, what we end up with here is the situation that Dembski is attributing the complement of the probability that can be assigned to chance hypotheses to an implicit design hypothesis, the one that underlies a particular “specification”. When the “saturated” probability of the alternative is less than 1/2, Dembski says that we should prefer “design” as our causal explanation, and because we have this relationship between the specification and the putative causal story, we thus are adopting that particular causal hypothesis.

“Actualization” occurs as heritable variation arises. “Exclusion” results as some heritable variations lead to differential reproductive success. “Specification” occurs as environmental conditions specify which variations are preferred. By my reading, biologists can embrace a conclusion of design for an event of biological origin and still attribute that event to the agency of natural selection.

I’ve never been able to understand how Dembski turns “what we found” into “Specified.” Who specified it?

Clearly, what he must mean, is the it is clear that he dodge objections using CSI better because it is so much less definitive.

And sorry Joe, but no amount of research can ever confirm or deny design as that term is used by Dembski. Design in his sense exists in the shadows of what we don’t know yet, and even if every single shadow is illuminated in one system, he can simply shift to another. And even if all the shadows are illuminated, there STILL exists the possibility that thats just the way the designer did it. You need the learn the difference between ‘doesn’t’ explain and ‘can’t’ explain. Creationists tend to equivocate between the two.

Dembski design concoction is impotent as a scientific concept.

Unless we consider natural selection an intelligent designer. Which if we use Dembski’s definition of ‘intelligence’ as chosing between options sans conciousness, we can.

You said,

I wonder if these clowns think that all the success people have had using the EF or some reasonable fasimile thereof, is just an illusion?

There are plenty of flaws to the EF, as my commentary starting from a few minutes after Dembski presented in 1997 through a paper currently in press point out.

One big problem in discussion is that people often confuse, as you do, assertions with inference. The EF as given by Dembski in “The Design Inference” does not itself deliver a statement about agency. Dembski spends part of chapter 2 attempting to argue from his EF to claims about agency, but without result.

Dembski’s claims for the EF, though, are not the modest sort of thing that is open to results of “further research”. Dembski claimed, and never retracted the claim, that once the “design” category of his EF was invoked, no further information could possibly overturn that result. It is a false claim on his part, as John Wilkins and I effectively pointed out.

A rarefied design inference is not delivered by Dembski’s EF. Ordinary design inferences are something that John and I were clear can be made, just not via anything as error-ridden as Dembski’s EF. In the cases where Dembski’s urges people to make rarefied design inferences, we are pointing out that there is no justification or warrant for the claim. Where we know the properties, means, and motivations of designers, it is easy to justify an ordinary design inference based on that information, so I’d have to reject the misrepresentation that John and I have somehow rejected any form of detecting ordinary design.

As for a proposal for making ordinary design inferences, Jeff Shallit and I took that up in our examination of CSI. Dembski mentions “rational reconstruction”, but his EF fails to be rational. The faults extend to Dembski’s CSI, the property that the EF was supposed to reliably identify. Jeff and I developed an application of the “universal distribution” that we called “specified anti-information” or SAI. This is an application of algorithmic information theory and identifies just those phenomena that are best explained as the result of a simple computational process. In the case of agents following effective methods, it does the useful work of a “rational reconstruction” that Dembski claimed, but did not deliver, for his EF. SAI is simple to apply to real world problems. Dembski’s EF has “resisted detailed applications to real-world problems”.

As a matter of fact, nobody uses Dembski’s EF. Even Dembski has not done so for any non-trivial real world problem. Nobody goes to the trouble of following the full procedure given in “The Design Inference”. Nobody goes to the trouble of following the full procedure given in “No Free Lunch”. At best, you have people claiming that Dembski’s EF is in use when what they are actually talking about is what Jeff Shallit and I called “the sloppy chance elimination argument”. See also Gary Hurd’s excellent refutation of the canard that Dembski was describing how work gets done in archaeology, as a chapter in “How Intelligent Design Fails”.

Something that seems a perennial feature of antievolution cheerleaders is this major dose of braggadocio that many bring to a discussion. Bob Schadewald referred to it as “the elevation of mediocrities”. There’s nothing to back it up other than a bully’s temperament, so once they get started, one can predictably watch as they deploy loads of ad hominems into the discussion while making an inflated pretense to expertise.

Now, I should note that somebody coming into my living room and calling me a “clown” (or even stepping just outside and then shouting it) isn’t likely to be hanging out there long. So everybody wave good-bye to “Joe G.” Don’t bother coming back, Joe; the door is shut.

If, in reality, intelligence is a subset, or product, of regularity (i.e. generated by a natural processes) the EF would collapse into a decision tree about either chance or types of regularity.

Take a moment to drop the designer into the EF and the whole matter boils down to whether you prefer an infinite regression of increasingly complex designers, each one the progenitor of the last; or that, at some stage, significant complexity has originated from a form of ‘natural’ systems – contradicting a starting assumption of the EF.

And one more point- It is called a design INFERENCE for a reason- further research can either confirm or refute it.

But the main point is we know it matters to an investigation whether or not that which is being investigated arose via agency involvement or nature, operating freely.

And in the end nature operating freely cannot account for its own existence…

How much investigative field experience do you have?

And just because your article was peer-reviewed justmeans you found some people to agree with it.

The EF works. The only “flaws” are 1) the data input and 2) the people/ person using it.

And all anyone has to do to refute the design inference pertaining to biological organisms is to demonstrate that undirected processes can account for it.

Can you even muster a hypothesis for the premise of undirected processes?

Did you cover that in your paper?