A little over a year ago, Ed Brayton attempted to refute the notion of front-loading in an essay entitled, Exaptation vs Front Loading: Why Evolution Wins. To be fair, I should note that Brayton was critiqung an extreme version of front-loading that assumes an “ancestral prokaryotic super-cell that contained the coding for every single later development, from the flagellum to the blood clotting cascade to wings and lungs and the human brain.” Yet as I have explained earlier, this is not the hypothesis of front-loading raised in The Design Matrix.

Nevertheless, the notion that exaptation is an explanation that stands in opposition to front-loading should be addressed.

Brayton sets up the problem as follows:

Equally as important, while front loading presumes that those genes serve no function before they are later expressed, exaptation predicts that they must have some function if they are highly preserved over a long period of time. They simply must be expressed in the phenotype for some function or they will mutate in to uselessness. And that is exactly the case here, as this study found that those genes, though virtually identical between sponges and humans, serve a different function in sponges than they do in humans (obviously so, since the sponges have no nervous system).
There are only two ways out of this for ID advocates: either they have to accept that those front-loaded genes had different functions in earlier species (which effectively makes front loading synonymous with exaptation, rendering the idea meaningless) or they have to posit that God not only loaded the genes for all those later developments in to earlier organisms that didn’t need them, but he also put some sort of mystical force field around them to prevent them from mutating over the last 4 billion years.

As I explain in my book, it is difficult to seriously envision the specifics of how God would design and it thus makes more sense to restrict our imagination to actions of a human-like intelligence, since we have vast experience and subjective knowledge of this form of design. When this is done, I think it prudent to give up any notion of a “mystical force field” (as I explain here and here).

That leaves us with the notion that “that those front-loaded genes had different functions in earlier species.” Indeed. But Brayton then errs in thinking that this somehow renders front-loading “meaningless.”

On the contrary, in my book, I begin with the origin of life and outline a step-by-step case over 70 pages that allows us to see that exaptation (more commonly known as cooption) is something we would expect from front-loading. Exaptation is a brilliant solution to the design problem of front-loading evolution.

Furthermore, we need to remember that exaptation is not something we expect to exist from the logic of non-teleological evolution. It was something that was noted to exist in evolution and is then fitted into a non-teleological perspective. There is a difference between expectation and accomodation.

Brayton has set up a false dilemma. According to him, “ID advocates” must either embrace continual supernatural intervenion (sustained miracles) or embrace a non-teleological perspective (smuggled in as evolution by exaptation). But this is a posture that stems from the Traditional Template, one that needs a “gap” in order to infer design.

In the next posting, let’s take a closer look at exaptation.