William Dembski and Winston Ewert developed a formulation of specified complexity grounded in the minimal description length of a pattern or outcome. Their approach can be framed within George Montañez’s framework of canonical specified complexity (CSC), which illuminates the underlying logic of their model and of design detection more broadly. This integration also highlights the general applicability of specified complexity as a tool for design detection. Dembski and Ewert’s methodology for hypothesis testing is applied to bacterial chemotaxis to illustrate its use in a biological context.