Dembski gets raked over the coals again

Cosma Shalizi has a sharp dissection of Dembski's peculiar abuses of information theory. Things don't look happy for poor Bill.

Dembski's paper seriously mis-represents the nature and use of information theory in a wide range of fields. What he puts forward as a new construction is in fact a particular case of a far more general idea, which was published in forty-four years ago. That construction is extremely well-known and widely used in a number of fields in which Dembski purports to be an expert, namely information theory, hypothesis testing and the measurement of complexity. The manuscript contains exactly no new mathematics. Such is the work of a man described on one of his book jackets as "the Isaac Newton of information theory". His home page says this is the first in a seven-part series on the "mathematical foundations of intelligent design"; I can't wait. Or rather, I can.