Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the sixth post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
The focus on patterns in understanding randomness put my work in the same ballpark as information, information at some level being a study of patterns. But there was still a lot to be done before the connections between my work and information theory would become explicit. Given that we use patterns to defeat randomness, the next question for me became what sorts of patterns we use in practice to defeat randomness or chance. I wrote up my thoughts in response to this question in the spring term of my first year as a grad student in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago (first half of 1990). This was in a paper I titled “When Chance Precludes Chance,” and I submitted it to Synthese. As I recall, it was Jaakko Hintikka who got back with me. He rejected the paper but indicated there was a good paper embedded in what I had sent them, which I needed to try to bring to light.
An Ironclad Definition of Specification
In retrospect, the problem was that the patterns that defeat randomness and chance are specifications, and it would not be until I published The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities with Cambridge University Press in 1998 that I would have an ironclad definition of specification and thus of specified complexity. Interestingly, the academic editor for Cambridge who shepherded the review process of this book was Brian Skyrms, a philosopher who spoke at the 1988 randomness conference at Ohio State University. It was at that conference that I met him, and on account of that meeting that I approached him to try to get The Design Inference published with Cambridge as opposed to elsewhere.
I should mention that in my seeing the importance of specification to design inferences, Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker played a crucial role. I read that book in the late 1980s. There Dawkins wrote, “Complicated things have some quality, specifiable in advance, that is highly unlikely to have been acquired by random chance alone. In the case of living things, the quality that is specified in advance is … the ability to propagate genes in reproduction.” Obviously, we have here specified complexity, though the actual terms used are cognates — specifiable for specified, complicated for complex.
A Special Effort of Explanation
For Dawkins, specified complexity required some special effort of explanation, but that effort could be performed by Darwinian natural selection. For me, on the other hand, natural selection, by acting as a probability amplifier over random chance, could not purchase actual specified complexity (actual complexity qua improbability would then be removed precisely because, acting as a probability amplifier, natural selection made the probabilities to be no longer small).
Yet specified complexity, in the absence of removable improbability, was invariably associated with intelligence. So the very thing that for Dawkins confirmed natural selection, for me confirmed a designing intelligence (my view of natural selection being nowhere as high as his). I’m condensing here a more extensive argument that I’ve developed at length elsewhere (such as in the second edition of The Design Inference, co-authored with Winston Ewert). But the point I want to make is that in my process of discovery, Dawkins played a crucial role even though I regard his ideas and arguments as deeply flawed. Yet they helped me to formulate my own arguments by putting them in stark relief with his.
Next, “Flying Solo Before Joining Steve Meyer and Paul Nelson.”