On Telic Thoughts, a critic with the screen-name Zachriel took issue with a small segment of my essay, The Rational Essence of Proteins and DNA

I wrote: “What of the blind watchmaker only had three amino acids to work with? … Could the blind watchmaker still produce a biosphere as diverse and resilient as that which exists with such scaled down palettes? I doubt this very much.”

Zachriel replied:

Mike Gene is a bit confused. That’s not what is proposed by the Theory of Evolution.

No, I am not confused, as I said nothing about the Theory of Evolution and what is does, and does not, propose. Here is what I said in context:

Now I have previously argued that the blind watchmaker, like all designers, is limited by the building material that is available. So we need only ask ourselves a simple question – what if we cut down on the diversity of this palette? What if the blind watchmaker only had one member from each color-coded group to work with? What if the blind watchmaker had only the amino acids found in any particular color-coding (only hydrophobics or uncharged hydrophilics, for example)? What of the blind watchmaker only had three amino acids to work with? Say arginine, valine, and glycine? Or leucine, proline, and aspartate? Etc.

Could the blind watchmaker still produce a biosphere as diverse and resilient as that which exists with such scaled down palettes? I doubt this very much.

Since we can think of natural selection and variability as a designer-mimic, and designers are limited by the material they design with and through, we can extend the analogy to ponder in what ways evolution is an expression of its design material, helping us to get closer to the intrinsic factors that drive evolution.

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Let me bring to your attention another blogger who is also progressively fleshing out a teleological perspective of evolution - Teleomechanist. In his introductory posting, he notes:

How deep does the rabbit hole go? Have fun, enjoy the ride!

And he sure seems to be having some fun. He’s been doing a wonderful job of patiently gathering clues from different areas, while exploring things in more depth than you will find on this blog. For example, sit back and enjoy his posting on front loaded evolution. Also, be sure to keep an eye on his other blogs Preadaptations and Biomolecular Machines . It will take time, but I’m fairly optimistic that the hypothesis of front-loading will gather increased traction because that is where the data are pointing. In the meantime, we explore, we probe, we speculate and hypothesize, and allow the avalanche of data from genomics and evo-devo to fall into place.

Over the last few months, we have seen evidence that renders the front-loading of epithelial tissue, synapses, and endocrine interactions all the more plausible. We shall continue to explore similar examples of front-loading, but it is also time to expand our focus beyond the Three Expectations. If we propose that the ancient Earth was seeded with a consortium of single-celled organisms designed in such a way that the evolution of metazoan complexity was rendered more likely, something else is implied.

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The hypothesis of front-loading evolution posits that life was designed with evolution in mind. As such, the design objectives would not only take evolution into account, but would use and exploit evolution as a partner in reaching those design objectives. This attempt to design the future through the present leads us to expect at least three things from evolution:

1. Evolution would demonstrate deep homology. This is because deep homology allows us to connect design in the past with the present. The ancient designs have long been present as evolution occurred around them.

2. Evolution would exhibit PREPA (the present explains the past). PREPA is a hint of foresight, where unusual or odd features about ancient ancestors make more sense when seen in the context of the present. A potentially fruitful concept for fleshing out PREPA may be Needless Complexity.

3. Evolution would be significantly driven by intrinsic, biotic features. Since the design itself would be biotic, then the more that evolution is likened to a biological process, the more that design can be connected to such evolution. In other words, if evolution was purely a function of random happenstance propagated only because such events happened to elicit greater fitness against the backdrop of haphazard environmental conditions, we would predict that the ability to design the future through the present would be quickly be swamped by noise. But if there is a strong, intrinsic component to evolution, the designs are buffered against such noise.

What continues to encourage me is that the recent findings of science allow us to see these expectations are beginning to bear out. We see this with deep homology (here and here), PREPA (here, here, and here), and now with an intrinsic dimension to evolution (here and here).

Evolution need not have demonstrated these patterns. That they exist adds great strength to the plausibility of front-loading. After all, if they did not exist, the case for front-loading would be very weak.

Yet there is a fourth expectation that comes from front-loading. Let’s explore this shortly.

About seven years ago, I wrote, “The non-teleological view of evolution is that it is not really a biological process, but instead is the consequence of many smaller biological processes. Or look at it this way: the purpose of life is not to evolve; it just happens. But a teleological view of evolution likens it to a biotic process (roughly analogous to ontogeny). Evolution was intended/anticipated. I suspect much of the so-called junk DNA comes into play here. Is evolution really nothing more than a by-product of messy molecular interactions or is it far more sophisticated (itself being designed)? Concerning the cell and its contents, Bruce Alberts noted, ” But, as it turns out, we can walk and we can talk because the chemistry that makes life possible is much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered. ” More and more, I am coming to seriously think that in another few decades, another leading scientist will write, ” But, as it turns out, we exist because evolution has been much more elaborate and sophisticated than anything we students had ever considered. (here)”

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George Church is from the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He makes a couple of very interesting comments that show subtle, but very striking, parallels with The Design Matrix. Let me post a few examples :

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Here is a nice essay from Krauze posted on Telic Thoughts back in June 2006:

When surveying the battlefield, you can be forgiven for thinking that there are only two camps in the discussion over intelligent design: The creationists, who claim that the major types of life were separately created (birds, fishes, etc.), with evolution playing a minor role thereafter, and the ID critics, who claim that the first life was the product of geochemistry, with evolution proceeding from this sloppy beginning. Now that we’re disposing of misleading dichotomies, let me just point out that there is a third alternative: That life was designed to evolve, and that the first lifeforms, although simple in appearance, were made with the future in mind. This alternative is also known as front-loading.

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I’d like to go back to the discovery of a complex calcium signaling toolkit in the single-celled organism, Monosiga brevicollis. The researcher who discovered this toolkit in this protozoan, Xinjiang Ca, wisely raised the following question:

We conclude that an extensive Ca2+ signaling ‘toolkit’ exists in the unicellular choanoflagellates, preceding the origins of animals (Metazoa). The current hypothesis of Ca2+ signaling acquires new dimensions in light of this novel discovery. Why does such an apparently simple unicellular organism need a complex Ca2+ signaling machinery?

Yes, why does such an apparently simple unicellular organism need such complex Ca2+ signaling machinery? And it’s not just the calcium toolkit, as the same unicellular organism has a toolkit of tyrosine kinases that is “more elaborate and diverse than found in any multicellular organism.”

Because I think there may something very significant here, let me refer to this state as Needless Complexity (NC). This is not to say that this is functionless complexity, as I am willing to bet all this complexity plays a role in the lifecyle of Monosiga brevicollis. I suspect that out in the wild, these creatures live rather complex lives, and both the calcium and tyrosine kinase systems are involved in control and adaptation that are involved with the every day life of these creatures (for example, I would expect different systems may come into play in response to different environmental conditions and time of day).

This complexity is needless in the sense that it is not required for unicellular, eukaryotic life. That is, other species of protozoa are able to survive just fine without the elaborate calcium and kinase systems. Such complexity is therefore not needed for unicellular life, but will become needed for complex, metazoan life. NC is thus a feature that is recognized from a relativistic perspective.

I plan to expand in much more depth about Needless Complexity and its role as part of a mechanism for front-loading evolution.

Cooption, the process by which traits switch function, is something we predict to be important from the hypothesis of front-loading evolution. As I noted, cooption is tightly linked to preadaptation, a concept that is teleological. As I have also noted, my book, The Design Matrix, lays out a step-by-step case for the logic of front-loading that leads to the realization that cooption is entailed by front-loading. Functional shifts are the very strategy that would work in an attempt to design the future through the present. This is a subtle, but important, point to grasp. Cooption is not some add-on to the front-loading perspective. Cooption is a prediction given that front-loading would not work without it.

In contrast, cooption is not a process that is predicted by neo-Darwinian evolution nor entailed in this mechanism. To see this, let’s consider some more from Deborah McLennan’s paper, “The Concept of Co-option: Why Evolution Often Looks Miraculous.”

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In 2007, Michael Denton (and JB Edelmann) published a paper entitled “The uniqueness of biological self-organization: challenging the Darwinian paradigm (in Biology & Philosophy 22:579-601). I hope to review this paper in more detail in the future. But while I am not too keen on the “challenge the Darwinian paradigm” angle, it is definitely worthy considering how the phenomenon of self-organization might relate to front-loading evolution.

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