Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a new series by William Dembski, adapted from his Substack. This is the 17th post. Find the full series so far here, “My Personal History with Information.”
After Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics and Being as Communion, I took a few years off from intelligent design to pursue business and other writing ventures. I felt I had become stale in my work on intelligent design and needed a break. Around 2020, I felt my enthusiasm for intelligent design return and was ready to get back in the saddle. One thing that spurred me on was the need finally to do a second edition of The Design Inference, published originally in 1998.
The big obstacle for me in that regard came from feeling at odds with my publisher, Cambridge University Press. My editor at Cambridge was Terence Moore. He was the business editor in New York, not the academic editor, Brian Skyrms, mentioned earlier, who had overseen the book’s peer review. Moore had been quite happy with the first edition of The Design Inference, which performed remarkably well. It had been the bestselling Cambridge philosophical monograph over the previous five years. I therefore approached him about whether Cambridge would be open to publishing a sequel that made explicit the connection between design inferences and biological evolution.
Pulling Back the Curtain
By that point, my own views in favor of intelligent design and critical of Darwinism were public knowledge. Pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of the press, Moore told me that members of the Cambridge Syndicate (especially one or two biologists) opposed my work on intelligent design, and that even if such a sequel were approved on this side of the Atlantic, the Syndicate would likely kill it once it went for approval on the other side. Normally, the Syndicate rubber stamps books recommended on this side of the Atlantic. In my case, the Syndicate was going to make an exception.
Terence Moore was a stand-up guy, and I’m grateful for his plain speaking. Sadly, he died of cancer shortly after this exchange. As it is, I ended up publishing The Design Inference’s sequel, No Free Lunch, in 2002 with another press, Rowman and Littlefield. For many years, I didn’t look back. Instead, I simply kept extending the ideas and technical machinery inspired by the first edition of The Design Inference, without any thought of revising and upgrading it in a second edition.
A Path Is Cleared
But the thought that my publisher, Cambridge University Press, was not in my corner kept nagging me. Finally, in 2020, on impulse, I contacted Cambridge University Press and asked for the rights to the book back. Within a week, I had the rights back and now could do with the book whatever I wished. The sense of inertia I had felt about doing a second edition now vanished. To pursue the work in earnest, I therefore solicited a grant from Discovery Institute. They had supported the work on the first edition, and now generously provided a grant for the second. And so, the path was cleared for this second edition of The Design Inference.
The last four paragraphs above are virtually verbatim from the introduction to the second edition of The Design Inference, which was published in 2023, with Winston Ewert as co-author. In this second edition, all of the technical machinery from the first edition was cleaned up. Besides the design-inferential method described in detail in this new edition, we had hoped also to present our work on conservation of information. But the book had doubled in size from the first edition, and it seemed that a second book on conservation of information would better serve readers.
Next, “The Law of Conservation of Information.”