Bill Dembski often uses the term “specified complexity” to denote a characteristic of patterns that are best explained by the act of an intelligent designer. He defines the term as follows:
What is specified complexity? An object, event, or structure exhibits specified complexity if it is both complex (i.e., one of many live possibilities) and specified (i.e., displays an independently given pattern). A long sequence of randomly strewn Scrabble pieces is complex without being specified. A short sequence spelling the word “the” is specified without being complex. A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.
William A. Dembski, No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), xiii.
Dembski does not claim to have originated the concept of specified complexity:
The term specified complexity is about thirty years old. To my knowledge origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel was the first to use it. In his 1973 book The Origins of Life he wrote: “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity” (189). More recently, Paul Davies (1999, 112) identified specified complexity as the key to resolving the problem of life’s origin: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”
The Logical Underpinnings of Intelligent Design
Is there a relationship between Leslie Orgel’s use of the term and Dembski’s. Yes, Dembski explains the relationship as follows:
Neither Orgel nor Davies, however, provided a precise analytic account of specified complexity. I provide such an account in The Design Inference (1998b) and its sequel No Free Lunch (2002). In this section I want briefly to outline my work on specified complexity. Orgel and Davies used specified complexity loosely. I’ve formalized it as a statistical criterion for identifying the effects of intelligence.
Id.
In summary, Orgel and Davies used the concept of specified complexity loosely. Dembski takes the concept they used loosely and formalizes it. One must be willfully obtuse, however, to fail to see the connection between the way Dembski uses the term and the way Orgel uses the term.
Dembski:
A long sequence of randomly strewn Scrabble pieces is complex without being specified.
A short sequence spelling the word “the” is specified without being complex.
A sequence corresponding to a Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified.
Orgel:
Mixtures of random polymers are complex without being specified.
Crystals such as granite are specified without being complex.
Living organisms are both complex and specified.
Yes, Orgel used the term more loosely than Dembski, but they are talking about the same concept. That is why Dembski repeatedly connects the term with Orgel and Davies in No Free Lunch.
When intelligent agents act, they leave behind a characteristic trademark or signature-what I define as specified complexity. [FN13] The complexity-specification criterion detects design by identifying this trademark of designed objects.
No Free Lunch, 6
[FN13]: The term “specified complexity” goes back at least to 1973, when Leslie Orgel used it in connection with origins-of-life research: “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.” See Orgel, The Origins of Life (New York: Wiley, 1973 ), 189. The challenge of specified complexity to nonteleological accounts of life’s origin continues to loom large. Thus according to Paul Davies, “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.” See Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 112.
And
The central problem of biology is therefore not simply the origin of information but the origin of complex specified information. Paul Davies emphasized this point in his recent book The Fifth Miracle where he summarizes the current state of origin-of-life research: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.” The problem of specified complexity has dogged origin-of-life research now for decades. Leslie Orgel recognized the problem in the early 1970s: “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.” [FN33]
No Free Lunch, 149
[FN33]: Leslie Orgel, The Origins of Life (New York: Wiley, 1973), 189.
And
In The Fifth Miracle Davies goes so far as to suggest that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from any scientific laws known to date.3 The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they cannot explain the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. As Davies puts it: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.” [FN 5]
No Free Lunch, 180
[FN5] Davies, Fifth Miracle, 112. Consider also the following claim by Leslie Orgel: “Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity.” In Leslie Orgel, The Origins of Life (New York: John Wiley, 1973), 189.
And
The term “specified complexity” has been in use for about thirty years. The first reference to it with which I am familiar is from Leslie Orgel’s 1973 book The Origins of Life, where specified complexity is treated as a feature of biological systems distinct from inorganic systems. [FN35]
No Free Lunch, 328-29.
[FN 35] Leslie Orgel, The Origins of Life (New York: Wiley, 1973 ), 189.
UPDATE (HT to Mung):
Orgel on Specified Complexity
Crystals are usually taken as the prototypes of simple well specified structures…Lumps of granite or random mixtures of polymers are examples of structures which are complex but not specified.
p. 189
Wait for it …
These vague idea can be made more precise by introducing the idea of information. Roughly speaking, the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure. One can see intuitively that many instructions are needed to specify a complex structure. On the other hand a simple repeating structure can be specified in rather few instructions. Complex but random structures, by definition, need hardly be specified at all.
– p. 190
A final nail:
Paley was right to emphasize the need for special explanations of the existence of objects with high information content, for they cannot be formed in nonevolutionary, inorganic processes.
– p. 196