In light of my third clarification about front-loading, I should probably address one aspect of Michael Sherman’s paper (Universal Genome in the Origin of Metazoa) that is being discussed on Telic Thoughts.

Sherman proposes his model and outlines its predictions:

According to this model, (a) the Universal Genome that encodes all major developmental programs essential for various phyla of Metazoa emerged in a unicellular or a primitive multicellular organism shortly before the Cambrian period; (b) The Metazoan phyla, all having similar genomes, are nonetheless so distinct because they utilize specific combinations of developmental programs. This model has two major predictions, first that a significant fraction of genetic information in lower taxons must be functionally useless but becomes useful in higher taxons, and second that one should be able to turn on in lower taxons some of the complex latent developmental programs, e.g., a program of eye development or antibody synthesis in sea urchin.

As I see it, chapter 6 from The Design Matrix once again becomes important if one desires to extrapolate Sherman’s model/predictions to a case for teleological evolution/design. With such an extrapolation, the predictions that Sherman makes are more relevant to the realm of epistemological evidence than ontological evidence. Put simply, these predictions, if verified, would be revolutionary and might indeed convince hardcore skeptics of teleological evolution, but I don’t think that we should expect such things from the hypothesis of design through front-loading itself.

As I just explained, genetic information in lower taxons that would be functionally useless but become useful in higher taxons would amount to a pool of pseudogenes in lower taxons that would quickly be erased by mutations. And since developmental programs amount to genes and their regulatory units, these too would decay if they are not useful.

Of course, a possible solution exists. Perhaps one could design a mechanism that would protect these useless genes from mutation until needed. Let us call this the Hibernation Mechanism. Yet there are serious problems with any genetic Hibernation Mechanism, designed to protect nucleotide sequences from changing over vast spans of deep time.

The first problem is simply that we do not know if a Hibernation Mechanism is possible in the real world of biology. For example, not only would you have to protect the useless genes and regulatory sequence from point mutations and single basepair additions/deletions across deep time, you’d also have to protect against deletions. Is such perfect replication truly possible? What’s more, the same hibernation mechanism would require the ability to monitor the state of evolution itself, as it must be able to deactivate itself at the right time to allow the useless genes to come on-line and begin functioning/adapting. Thus we need a mechanism that not only protects and/or restores, but it must also sense evolution and have the ability to turn itself off.

But for the sake of argument, let us grant to the possible existence of such a Hibernation Mechanism. This brings us to the second problem. The Hibernation Mechanism must itself be encoded and transmitted to progeny over deep time. Yet if the function of the Hibernation Mechanism is to protect useless-until-the-future genes, the Hibernation mechanism itself is useless-until-the-future. So what would protect the Hibernation mechanism? And if we invoke a mechanism to protect the Hibernation mechanism, what would protect that mechanism ad infinitum?

And this brings us to the third problem. Not only should we expect useless genes and/or the Hibernation Mechanism to decay, but we might also expect that the possession of this useless genetic information to be confer a selective disadvantage on the single-celled organisms that possessed this material. In other words, protozoa (or simple metazoan) that shed all these useless genes would not require the energy and materials used to protect the useless genes and maintain the Hibernation Mechanism.

All in all, while Sherman’s model of front-loading leads to crisp predictions with potentially powerful evidence, the question to ask is whether such a model would be expected from a rational designer trying to front-load evolution. As I explain in The Design Matrix, a better strategy than fighting against mutations and the blind watchmaker is to exploit these processes and guide them so they serve your own ends. Or to put it another way, instead of looking for something that fatally wounds the Duck, look for ways that help the Rabbit hop.

[I should mention that if Sherman’s predictions are ever validated, I will acknowledge I was wrong with much celebration.]