Dembski and Marks on the Conservation of Information

A Flood of Evidence Pointing Straight to the Creator

As we stand in awe of the world around us, one truth echoes louder than ever: the more we examine the intricate details of life and the universe, the clearer it becomes that our Creator’s hand is at work. At A Flood of Hope, we’ve seen time and again how the rocks cry out, the fossils testify, and the very fabric of reality declares the glory of God (Psalm 19:1). Today, let’s turn our attention to a remarkable scientific insight that strengthens our faith even further: the work of William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II on what they call the Law of Conservation of Information.

The Core Principle: No Free Lunch in Information

Dr. Dembski and Dr. Marks, building on decades of research in information theory, probability, and computational search, have demonstrated something profound: information doesn’t just pop into existence from nowhere. In any search process, whether it’s an evolutionary algorithm trying to “find” a functional protein, or nature supposedly “searching” for new biological features, the successful outcome requires prior information to be injected from an intelligent source. Blind, undirected processes can only redistribute existing information; they cannot create the complex, specified information we see in living systems. This is not opinion or wishful thinking. It is a mathematically rigorous law, as solid as the conservation laws we see in physics.

Imagine you’re searching for a specific card in a shuffled deck of 52 cards. A completely random search has only a 1/52 chance of success on any given try. But if someone gives you a hint, “it’s one of the red cards,” that active information dramatically improves your odds. Where did that helpful information come from? It didn’t arise by chance; it was supplied by an intelligent agent. Dembski and Marks prove, through what they call the “search for a search” framework and their conservation-of-information theorems, that this is always the case. Any apparent “free lunch” in a search, any boost in probability beyond blind chance, must be paid for by pre-loaded information from somewhere else. Their work shows that evolutionary algorithms, natural selection, and any material process you can name cannot generate the novel, functional information required for life’s complexity. They only shuffle around what was already there.

The Inspiring History of Their Research

But how did this powerful insight emerge? The history of their research is itself a testament to perseverance and the pursuit of truth in the face of opposition. Dr. William A. Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher with doctorates from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, laid crucial foundations years before his collaboration with Marks. In his seminal 1998 book The Design Inference and especially his 2002 work No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence, Dembski introduced the concept of complex specified information (CSI). He showed that the intricate, functional patterns we see in biology, far beyond what blind chance could produce, require intelligent input. These ideas challenged the Darwinian narrative head-on, arguing that natural processes simply cannot generate the novel information needed for life’s diversity. But Dembski knew the math needed tightening, and that’s where a divine partnership in research began.

Enter Dr. Robert J. Marks II, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at Baylor University and a pioneer in computational intelligence, neural networks, and evolutionary computing. Around 2005-2006, Marks and Dembski began collaborating, recognizing that information theory could deliver a knockout blow to undirected evolution. Marks invited Dembski to join him as a postdoctoral researcher, and together they launched the Evolutionary Informatics Lab at Baylor. Their goal? To rigorously test whether Darwinian mechanisms could truly “search” for and produce new biological information, or whether such information must always come from an intelligent source.

The road wasn’t easy. In 2006-2007, the lab faced significant opposition at Baylor. Critics of intelligent design pressured the university, leading to the revocation of Dembski’s research fellowship and the forced removal of the lab’s website from Baylor’s servers. Marks even returned a grant and had to release research assistants amid the controversy. Yet, as we’ve seen time and again in the history of science (think Galileo or Newton), opposition often signals that a truth is too powerful to ignore. Undeterred, Dembski and Marks pressed forward, publishing their findings independently and on neutral platforms.

Key Breakthroughs and Lasting Impact

The breakthrough came in 2009 with their landmark peer-reviewed paper, “Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success,” published in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Building on earlier conference work and Dembski’s 2006 draft on the topic (which already credited Marks for the idea of “added” or “active” information), this paper demonstrated mathematically that no search algorithm, evolutionary or otherwise, can outperform blind chance on average without pre-loaded information from somewhere else. They introduced the concept of active information: any boost in search success must be “paid for” by prior information supplied by intelligence. Blind processes only redistribute existing information; they never create it from nothing.

This wasn’t the end. Follow-up papers in 2009 and 2010 (including “The Search for a Search” and collaborative work with students like Winston Ewert and George Montañez) expanded the theorems, applying them to real-world evolutionary simulations. By 2017, they co-authored the book Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics with Ewert, making these ideas accessible while powerfully demonstrating how evolutionary algorithms secretly smuggle in design to “succeed.” In celebrated examples like Richard Dawkins’ WEASEL program, the algorithm only converges quickly on the target phrase “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” because the programmers built in a fitness function that rewards partial matches to the final sentence, giving the search explicit hints and foresight that undirected nature could never have. Similarly, in the Avida digital evolution platform, success depends on carefully engineered rewards that guide incremental increases in complexity, along with tuned parameters and representations chosen by the designers. Dembski, Marks, and Ewert quantify this injected “active information” in bits, showing that without this hidden intelligent input from the programmers, these algorithms perform no better than blind, random search. The apparent success is not due to any undirected Darwinian process, but to the domain expertise and design smuggled in by intelligent minds. And in 2025, Dembski published a definitive monograph in BIO-Complexity titled “The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.” This work unifies all their previous theorems into a clear, general law: information in searches cannot increase without an intelligent source. It’s as fundamental as the conservation of energy in physics: no free lunch in the information realm!

What This Means for Darwinian Evolution and the Origin of Life

Now, think about what this history reveals and what it means for the origin of life and the diversity we see in God’s creation. Darwinian theory has long claimed that random mutations plus natural selection can build eyes, wings, immune systems, and the staggering specified complexity of DNA, all without any guiding intelligence. But according to the Law of Conservation of Information, that claim collapses. The “search” for new functional proteins or body plans in evolutionary space is astronomically improbable without active information being supplied upfront. Where did that information come from? The Bible gives us the clear answer: “In the beginning, God created…” (Genesis 1:1). The same God who spoke the universe into existence programmed the information we observe into the genome from the very start. He is the ultimate Source, the Designer who loaded the deck, so to speak, with the precise information needed for life to flourish according to His good plan.

This insight is a powerful testament to the existence of God because it closes the door on any purely naturalistic explanation. Just as the laws of thermodynamics remind us there is no free lunch in energy, the Law of Conservation of Information reminds us there is no free lunch in meaningful, functional information. Every bit of CSI (complex specified information) we discover in biology, whether in the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum, the information-rich Cambrian explosion, or the finely tuned genetic code, bears the signature of intelligence. It didn’t self-assemble from primordial soup or blind trial-and-error. It was spoken into being by the Word who was with God and who was God (John 1:1-3). How fitting that the Apostle John would describe our Lord Jesus as the very embodiment of information and wisdom!

Fitting Perfectly with a Biblical Worldview

At The Flood Museum, we’ve walked the Grand Canyon, studied the Craton record, and examined volcanic evidence from a biblical perspective. Everywhere we look, the data fits the historical record of creation, the Fall, and Noah’s global Flood far better than the slow-and-gradual stories of naturalism. The conservation of information fits right into that same pattern. Even the mechanisms of adaptation and variation we observe today, marvelous as they are, operate within the information already provided by the Creator. They do not invent new information from scratch; they express and rearrange what God has already given. This is why we can rejoice in the resilience of life after the Flood while recognizing that all the glory belongs to Him.

A Flood of Hope for Believers Today

This is more than an academic debate. It is a flood of hope washing over us in a world that increasingly tries to explain away the Creator. When science itself declares that information requires intelligence, we are reminded once again that it is “OK to believe.” God keeps His promises. His Word stands firm. The evidence in the rocks, in the genes, and now in the mathematics of information theory all converge on one glorious truth: “For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… all things were created through Him and for Him” (Colossians 1:16).

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork.” (Psalm 19:1) May this truth fill you with hope today.