Day after day after day, I have been able to update this blog with recent research findings that continue to demonstrate the plausibility of front-loading evolution. And there is much more to come. So let me pause and reflect, because, in some sense, I am beginning to feel vindicated.

For many years, I have been giving this hypothesis some public thought. For example, if you Google the terms ‘front-loading evolution’, you will get a result like this:

The lead entries all stem from yours truly and most entries trace back this way. This is because I have been the primary voice advocating this particular position for a long time simply because it is a hypothesis I came up with many years ago. In fact, as one critic of ID noted:

Now this front-loading thing is nothing new; it must be at least 10 years now since I first read the pseudonym Mike Gene writing about front-loading on the ARN ID-forum.

Around the year 2000, I began to seriously entertain the notion that evolution could be designed in the form of front-loading. The idea was that the future could be designed through the present and that evolution could be channeled. I was not thinking in terms of determinism and the preprogramming of evolution. I was not thinking in anti-Darwinian terms. I was thinking about the ways design could bias evolution and exploit the Darwinian mechanism.

At first, most people scoffed at the idea. And for good reason. Conventional views have us believing that evolution is saturated with myopia and contingency. The notion that evolution could be guided toward some specified end was considered ridiculous.

Yet I kept with the hypothesis, using whatever spare time I had to research the literature and test out various ideas and speculations in arenas of highly educated and extremely hostile skeptics.

The result of this effort is laid out in The Design Matrix. In chapter 7 (the longest of the book), I lay out an extensive, systematic, and logical case for using random mutations and natural selections as vehicles to carry out a teleological process. Chapters 9 and 10 then tap into this logic to provide a methodology for cautiously approaching (detecting?) front-loading.

Since the writing of The Design Matrix, the sequenced genomes of sponges and protozoans are working to create a sense of vindication for me. What began as a pure speculation about possibilities is becoming a powerful, plausible scenario. More and more papers are appearing that contain data that is expected to exist from the front-loading perspective. And I finding more and more papers that fit seamlessly with the arguments I lay out in The Design Matrix.

Unfortunately, limited time remains my adversary, but I will continue to inform you of the stream of research results that fit so comfortably in the front-loading perspective. What’s more, I want to step back and also begin a “big picture” analysis that complements the details being laid out on this blog. And I plan to begin organizing all the details.

So check your seat belts, Dorothy. The ride has only just begun.