Talk:Evolutionary informatics

Source of the term "Evolutionary informatics"
I think it is likely that the Marks/Dembski "Evolutionary Informatics Lab" is likely to be challenged as an unreliable and unauthoritative source for the term. Can we find a less controversial and more prominant (within the mathematical community) source for it? HrafnTalkStalk 14:37, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I now know of two senses of "evolutionary informatics." The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center funded an Evolutionary Informatics working group and conference series in Fall 2006. The subject matter seems to be processing of information in the study of evolution. The sense presently in the article is study of information in evolutionary systems. Revisions are coming.ThomHImself (talk) 01:17, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Total rewrite
I think the legitimacy of the topic should be obvious now. I have invited a member of the NESCent EvoInfo Working Group to contribute to the article.ThomHImself (talk) 03:33, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Citation not required
When two plain-language statements are juxtaposed, the ordinary reader can gauge that one is a specialization of the other. In other words, all it takes to see that Marks' definition is a specialization of Edinburgh's definition is general reading ability, not technical acumen.ThomHImself (talk) 03:53, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I disagree with you, per WP:SYNTH & WP:PSTS. HrafnTalkStalk 04:10, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Justification of "Controversy" section
The mention of evolutionary informatics in the film "Expelled" is significant. There needs to be some acknowledgment of that here, along with Wiki links to the pertinent articles. ThomHImself (talk) 06:13, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge with articles on intelligent design, computational biology, and NESCent
1. I wrote this article in 2008, when it was not clear that the Evolutionary Informatics Lab (EIL) was part of the intelligent design (ID) sociopolitical movement. The principals of the EIL now indicate overtly that they are working in the field of ID. The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (the nexus of the ID movement) provides a link to the EIL website from the "Research" tab at its website.

2. I, publishing as Thomas English, was wrong to indicate that there is conservation of information in black-box optimization. I have added a preface to the online copy of my 1996 paper, linked to in one of the references, explaining my error. Black-box optimizers, including evolutionary optimizers, are absolutely uninformed, which is to say, there is no information to conserve. Thus there is no good reason to relate the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems to information and informatics. The NFL-related material in this article should be discarded.

3. To my knowledge, no one outside the ID movement uses the term evolutionary informatics as ID proponents do.

4. The Evolutionary Informatics (EvoInfo) Working Group of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center has a wiki of its own: https://evoinfo.nescent.org/Main_Page. There is a brief section on informatics in the Wikipedia article on NESCent.

5. The consensus of Wikipedians is that ID is pseudoscience. Juxtaposing what ID proponents mean by evolutionary informatics with what NESCent means by the term adds an air of legitimacy to pseudoscience.

'''Very little would be lost if this article were simply deleted. The very existence of the article is detrimental.''' If no one bothers with the merger, then the article should be deleted.

ThomHImself (talk) 22:35, 13 September 2016 (UTC)


 * If this article is retained, then it should be restricted to the NESCent meaning of evolutionary informatics. A brief explanation that the term is used differently in ID pseudoscience would suffice. ThomHImself (talk) 22:40, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Evolutionary Informatics in Intellignet Design
Informatics has different meanings depending on the interpretation of information processing. Evolutionary informatics is an interesting concept that deserves its site like other intelligent design concepts. Please do not merge this site with intelligent design because there is nothing about evolutionary informatics. Computational biology, on the other hand, is a slightly different concept. Informatics has a little presence in various fields of science, technology, philosophy and religion. I will insert the "intelligent design" frame so that no one accidentally thinks that it is a "serious scientific" discipline. 83.31.52.38 (talk) 16:33, 1 January 2021 (UTC)