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Author
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Topic: Front Loading: A Research Program (based on the ideas of Christian Schwabe)
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Drosera
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Member # 139
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posted 05. May 2002 00:33
Mike Gene concludes with,
quote:
Let me merely say that we have just begun to understand evolution and I think we will one day find that the processes of evolution are far too sophisticated to fit comfortably in the Modern Synthesis. Darwin helped us to understand things like finch beaks and the spread of antibiotic resistance. His concept has been extrapolated to all other origin events merely because we don't understand evolution very well and have no better explanation. Those days are changing.
But on another recent thread, the Moderator scolded another poster while complimenting Mike Gene:
quote:
This is no longer Model A vs. Model B in a schoolyard fistfight. At Brainstorms, we ask, "how can Model A inform Models B and C" and vice versa. A great example of this are the recent comments by Mike Gene which consider the notions of design via evolution and evolution by design.
But what was Mike Gene doing, if not suggesting that Model A (Neodarwinian evolution) is possibly wrong for things like the origin of metazoans, and that a Model B (front-loading in a particularly elusive form apparently) may be correct?
I have no problem with Mike Gene posting this, but if another poster like Edmund comes along and suggests that Model B is possibly wrong, or even just superfluous, and that Model A might be the better model, it seems that the Moderator squelches this in short order.
I am not sure how I could critique the post of Mike Gene without violating the same rules that Edmund apparently violated. Some previous critiques have gotten through, I'm not sure how they were different from Edmund's, but why bother posting a critique of an ID post (or book, as Edmund was doing) if it is going to be stopped for in fact being a critique?
Another example occurs when the moderator writes,
quote:
Your inquiring "about the motivations and abilities of the designer" can surely be discussed on ISCID, but only in proper context. What is the proper context? When the natural world gives us clues that deserve explication. However, when the natural world is not so forthcoming, several participants on Brainstorms have given us examples of using design concepts, without needing to know the puposes and abilities of the designer.
...in other words, apparently the Moderator is ruling out discussion of the "motivations and abilities of the designer" whenever the natural world does not offer up clues about what they might be, which frankly in biology is basically all of the time (or at least is the exact point in question much of the time).
If only posts which accept some version of ID at least partially are going to be allowed, then the rules might as well say that explicitly and be done with it.
This is certainly what "'how can Model A inform Models B and C' and vice versa", where at least one of the models is something ID-ish or at least something outside mainstream biology, sounds like it is requiring.
Making the rule explicit would be completely within the rights of the ISCID board organizers, might even fit your goals better, and would solve the apparent problem of having skeptics expressing their skepticism.
Drosera
[ 05 May 2002, 00:35: Message edited by: Drosera ]
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Mike Gene
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posted 05. May 2002 00:58
Drosera: But what was Mike Gene doing, if not suggesting that Model A (Neodarwinian evolution) is possibly wrong for things like the origin of metazoans, and that a Model B (front-loading in a particularly elusive form apparently) may be correct?
All I am doing at this point is suggesting that the neo-Darwinian model may be incomplete and missing important ingredients. Others such as Shapiro and Morris seem to agree on this point. Whether or not the missing ingredients exist, and whether they fit into FLE, remains to be seen. But I am not attempting to argue Neo-darwinian evolution is "wrong" and FLE is "correct." I thought I had spelled this out clearly above:
quote:
Currently, I view FLE purely in terms of its heuristic value. The examples I cite above are not intended to support the validity of FLE, but to illustrate how we can rethink of the data from a different perspective. After one trains their mind in this new way of thinking, and after the data are explored from this new perspective, then one can come back and begin to make a case for validity. In the meantime, there is real heuristic potential in this approach (another way of showing the utility of ID).
As for being "elusive," I have also made it quite clear that I am in the beginning stages of thinking in terms of front-loading. Clearly, during the initial phase in any investigation, it is prudent to be adopt a tentative, "feeling things out" approach. If I had a desire to shoehorn all the data into a preconceived belief, I would have a less "elusive" hypothesis. Certainly you can appreciate the value of such an approach?
Drosera also adds: ...in other words, apparently the Moderator is ruling out discussion of the "motivations and abilities of the designer" whenever the natural world does not offer up clues about what they might be, which frankly in biology is basically all of the time (or at least is the exact point in question much of the time).
Actually, edmund asserted that the ability to make testable hypotheses about the empirical world is dependent on first forming hypotheses about the motivations and abilities of the designers. Yet this is not true and would thus steer the discussion into old, nonproductive arguments. That is, while one way to form testable hypotheses would be to speculate about the designer, it is not the only way. I have already provided a walk-through on this forum, using the concept of IC to generate testable hypotheses. On the ARN forum, I provided a few examples using ID (which I will eventually transplant here). In fact, in the next week or two, I'll provide another example that speaks to FLE (I just need to write it up).
It may be true that non-teleologists need information about the designer to test concepts of design, but teleologists are exploring ways to think about design without this information. To declare such exploration a failure without trying it out doesn't make much sense to me.
[ 05 May 2002, 01:20: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
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Drosera
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posted 05. May 2002 02:07
Mike Gene writes,
quote:
Actually, edmund asserted that the ability to make testable hypotheses about the empirical world is dependent on first forming hypotheses about the motivations and abilities of the designers. Yet this is not true and would thus steer the discussion into old, nonproductive arguments.
So how does this work, a poster like Mike Gene gets to declare that someone's argument is untrue (which I very much doubt in this case, by the way, and I certainly don't recall it being demonstrated in the forum, rather I recall controversy about just these points), therefore "old" and "nonproductive" and therefore it gets ruled out of the discussion?
Drosera
PS: There's not much point on going back-and-forth with Mike Gene on this, my question is really for the Mod., who probably has better things to do on Saturday night, so I'll sign off & check back next week.
To restate: what, if any, critiques are permitted from what we might call "the perspective of currently mainstream science", or more specifically "mainstream evolutionary theory". If the answer is basically "none" then that's fine, just say it straight out and I will happily move to greener pastures.
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Mike Gene
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posted 05. May 2002 07:50
what, if any, critiques are permitted from what we might call "the perspective of currently mainstream science", or more specifically "mainstream evolutionary theory". If the answer is basically "none" then that's fine, just say it straight out and I will happily move to greener pastures.
There is no need for such hyperbole. Just check out the eleven critiques in this thread or the various critiques in another thread. And these are just the threads I have followed closely (being a participant in them). Clearly, the answer is not "basically none." Like I said, it may be true that non-teleologists need information about the designer to test concepts of design, but teleologists are exploring ways to think about design without this information. That would seem to be the whole point of Brainstorms. To declare such exploration a failure without trying it out doesn't make much sense to me. That would be like saying this forum needs to be shut down, as novel intuitions, speculations, hypotheses, conjectures, arguments, and data, are not possible without first discussing the designer.
So how does this work, a poster like Mike Gene gets to declare that someone's argument is untrue
Look at it this way - obviously, many teleologists here do not think it is true that we first need to pin down the motivations and abilities of the designer. We're not talking about a point of disagreement about the data. Edmund raises an argument that seeks to invalidate the whole enterprise, the whole purpose of Brainstorms. Imagine things from a different perspective. Imagine a forum devoted to putting novel intuitions, speculations, hypotheses, conjectures, arguments, and data about evolutionary transitions on the table. The moderator of that forum encourages creationists to criticize those speculations. But the same moderator also will not allow creationists to argue that things must be approached from one particular vantage point - showing the data cannot be explained by creationism and requiring observations of the transitions. The moderator might think that while those arguments can be answered, and are worthy of discussion, they would also clearly distract many from the intended purpose of the forum. In my opinion, that is all that is going on here.
[ 05 May 2002, 08:09: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
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Moderator
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posted 05. May 2002 10:01
First of all, let me say that I understand Drosera's concern and would like to properly address it. You can expect a write up in the near future that attempts to explain my polices in subjective form: I refuse to create rules for people to find loopholes in. However, I will try to explain the reasoning behind my policies.
Second, this bulletin board is not the appropriate place to discuss such issues. From now on, when posts are made with the single intention of receiving feedback from me, I will delete the posts. All policy discussion should be sent to moderator@iscid.org.
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charlie d.
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posted 05. May 2002 14:13
First, an aside: I understand (and partially share) Drosera's frustration. On the other hand, this is an ID-"inspired" board, and there is little point in arguing with the unfairness of the rules: it's somebody else's toy. As long as forced arguments and ex-cathedra interventions do not become a way to systematically skew the outcome of discussions (and this has happened only a couple of times, in my experience), that's fine with me. As a person who believes ID has so far revealed itself to be pretty much an empty box, my approach is to play by these rules, but just push things below the skin to show if there's any flesh and blood there.
As for the discussion at hand, when Mike Gene says:
quote:
All I am doing at this point is suggesting that the neo-Darwinian model may be incomplete and missing important ingredients.
I think what he is instead clearly doing, as edmund already remarked, is to try to make FLE look just like DE. Where DE says any imperfect replicator will necessarily evolve, Mike says the ability to evolve could have been "designed in". Where DE says that all genes must have ancestors, Mike says that ancestral genes could be proof of "function-in-waiting"; if DE states that even "pre-adaptations" must always have some original raison-d’etre (as unrelated adaptations themselves, or, in rare cases, as “spandrels”), Mike's FLE rebuts that of course a good designer would give a pre-adaptation some function to start with. If DE says co-option must be a common way to originate new structures and functions, Mike says sophisticated design could use co-option as a front-loaded strategy.
Add to that Mike's (sincere, I think) belief in a significant role for RM and NS, as well as his recognition that chance plays some unavoidable role in evolution, and quite the opposite of what he was saying, it is not DE that is "missing important ingredients", it's FLE (at least in his own - provisional and exploratory - version) that seems condemned to borrow heavily from Darwin's recipe books and kitchen cabinets.
So, to now turn things to a constructive outlook, how would FLE actually show itself unequivocally, if it were true? I can think pretty much of only 2 ways, one inductive and one deductive.
First, if front-loading, as Mike says, significantly "channels possibilities" by pre-encoding a number of potentially useful adaptive outcomes in the genome, then one would expect that in most cases 2 unrelated organisms faced with the same adaptation problem would reach the same non-obvious de novo (i.e. not exaptive) solution in terms of genetic pathways involved.
To rephrase this as a question, the hypothesis would imply asking: are cases of bona fide convergent evolution more often the result of recruitment of different genetic paths to the same phenotypic result (as predicted by DE), or of recurrent recruitment of the same functionally unrelated genetic network (which would be expected in the case of front-loading)? Note that there may not be many clearcut “clean” examples in which homology can be excluded a priori (in which case of course the underlying paths would necessarily be the same), but nevertheless there are some, and I think it would be interesting to try to collect as many as possible. [In addition, there are dozens of “dirty” examples, all obvious cases of analogy, which support DE by definition; although I think it would be just fair to set the bar higher for FLE as the challenging, and by far less parsimonious, theory, we can ignore this entire set of evidence for the time being.]
I have mentioned a relevant “clean” example a few times already on this board: arctic fish species have independently evolved similar anti-freeze glycoproteins by duplication/divergence of very different initial genes. This suggests to me that the generation of molecular antifreezes (and hence, the adaptation to arctic water environments) is more likely the result of evolutionary happenstance than of front-loading of the anti-freeze potential within a specific gene. I can think of a few more examples, but I’d be interested to hear about other people’s, if anybody has any.
The second way for FLE to “stand out” would be for its supporters to openly state that some goal was inherent to evolution, and show that the historical record of evolution shows clear signs of organisms pursuing this goal. This, of course, implies ascribing an “intention” to the Designer. Unfortunately, the only “intention” Mike seems to allow for at this point is the intention to have organisms evolve as if by DE (albeit “channeled”), and that just doesn’t cut it for me. I understand the reluctance to take this step: it may indeed be premature, and it would be easy to be proven wrong. However, ultimately it is a step to be taken for the entire theory to make any sense: you don’t front-load for nothing.
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Mike Gene
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posted 06. May 2002 01:05
Charlie: quote:
I think what he is instead clearly doing, as edmund already remarked, is to try to make FLE look just like DE.
While you may perceive me as trying to make FLE look just like DE, I can assure you that I am in a better position to understand what I am trying to do than you. Just as the concept of FLE was not designed to do away with the uncomfortable concept of human life as a random event, neither is it about trying to look just like DE.
Let's take the weakest position I can be in (without being shown wrong, that is) - my concept of FLE becomes indistinguishable from DE. If FLE looks just like DE from one perspective, then it follows that DE looks just like FLE from another perspective. That is, what we end up with is a teleological and non-teleological interpretation of the same data. In other words, there is no reason that compels us all to credit coincidence for every single evolutionary change that has ever occurred. However, since a systematic attempt to flesh out FLE has never been done, we really can't yet say that my views will end up being no different from DE.
When it comes to DE, I think there are important points to remember. DE does not entail that cooption will take place. Neither does it entail that pre-adaptation take place. This is because we can have Darwinian evolution without cooption or preadaptation. Consider a mutation in a ribosomal gene that confers antibiotic resistance that is selected for. This is a classic example of Darwinian evolution. But it does not involve cooption. And if we explain this as pre-adaptation, then we'd essentially drain that concept of all its meaning. In other words, cooption and pre-adaptation don't really follow from Darwinian evolution (random variability culled by maximizing fitness). Cooption and preadaptation are phenomena that follow from the workings of life itself. Life provides these are DE simply exploits them as one way to maximize fitness. But DE would still exist without them. In contrast, it is very difficult for me to imagine FLE without cooption and preadaptation, as these are just the type of mechanisms one could use to unmask secondary designs buried in primary designs. Thus, you can design life itself, and its stem parts, such that cooption and preadaptation will be made available to DE.
And this brings me to the second point about DE. Charlie and others seem to be under the impression that FLE is supposed to entail mechanisms other than DE. But FLE is about how a designer might employ and exploit DE to carry out a design objective. That is, I think we can all agree on three basic points: random mutations occur and generate variability; natural selection culls this variability in terms of fitness; RM&NS are myopic (so myopic that Dawkins labels this watchmaker "blind"). From here, the teleologist asks a question - how can one use such facts to carry out a design objective? How does one design X such that DE will eventually extract Y as a function of X? When you begin to ask such questions, you are not simply "trying to look like DE."
I'm too tired right now to continue, but I plan on reply to the rest of the major points in the next day or two.
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James A. Barham
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posted 06. May 2002 08:59
Mike G. provided a very lucid exposition of the relationship between Darwinian thinking and the ID front-loading perspective, culminating in this statement:
"I think we can all agree on three basic points: random mutations occur and generate variability; natural selection culls this variability in terms of fitness; RM&NS are myopic (so myopic that Dawkins labels this watchmaker "blind"). From here, the teleologist asks a question - how can one use such facts to carry out a design objective? How does one design X such that DE will eventually extract Y as a function of X?"
I just wanted to add my two cents' worth from the self-organization perspective. I would leave everything exactly the same, and reword the last two sentences to read:
From here, the self-organization teleologist (i.e., someone who views biological intelligence as the result of a sui generis physics of the living state of matter) asks a question---How can one explain such facts from a physical perspective? How does one account for the fact that the living state of matter can have the property of striving to maintain itself in existence by interacting intelligently with its environment, as well as the property of finding new and more sophisticated types of intelligent actions over time, either in order to adapt to changes in its environment, or just for the hell of it?
In short, how is it possible for mere matter (1) to acquire the tendency to actively "strive" to preserve itself in existence, (2) to "know" what needs to be done to accomplish this goal successfully, and (3) to "learn" new ways of doing it over the course of evolution? I submit that Darwinism has no explanation at all for the striving and the knowing (the intelligent agency), and has only a superficial explanation of the learning that surreptitiously assumes the striving and the knowing at every step of the way.
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Drosera
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posted 07. May 2002 00:08
Hello,
I thank the moderator for his consideration, if anything further comes up I will restrict myself to email. My dander was a bit up as it appeared that a perfectly good topic was getting stopped -- notably John Bracht appears to have revived pretty much the same topic in reply to Edmund, so I guess it's "in play" anyhow. I suppose the thing to do is simply post what seem like relevant points & then let the moderator decide.
Returning to the topic of "front-loading":
I think perhaps one of the bigger concerns that we should have surrounding the proposal of front-loading in Mike Gene's sense is just the sheer inefficiency of it. Could any (presumably human-like in some sense, see Bracht's post over here) intelligent designer seriously be expected to journey light-years just to tweak some proteins, so that possibly evolution might, billions of years later, produce something that could be somewhat more complex than would have happened otherwise, at least if there weren't too many meteor strikes?
If you've got the knowhow to do the necessary interstellar travel and biochemistry, why not hang around for a few thousand years and directly engineer the complex biosphere, or do whatever it is you're trying to do (Mike still hasn't explained what the point of all this is). To take John Bracht's Mount Rushmore analogy a step further, you don't design Mount Rushmore by making minute interventions over millions of years to guide natural processes such that, eventually, the current carved faces are produced (or "something like them would be more likely to be produced", which appears to be how Mike Gene puts things in biology). You just go and do it.
Posters at ISCID often discuss "design principles" and such, but it seems to me that design principle numero uno would be that designing things directly works a whole heck of a lot better than front-loading. It's more dependable, it's millions/billions of times faster, the odds of getting whatever it is you want are much much better, and in general it lets you get a whole lot more designing done in the lifespan of the universe. In fact, if someone used the "front-loading" method to design Mount Rushmore, we'd probably all think that they were nuts.
My thoughts for the day, hopefully provocative rather than distracting...
Drosera
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Mike Gene
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posted 07. May 2002 09:25
Let me look more closely at Charlie's analysis, as there are subtle points worth adding:
Where DE says any imperfect replicator will necessarily evolve, Mike says the ability to evolve could have been "designed in".
This doesn't really capture what I am saying. Yes, an imperfect replicator will necessarily evolve. But this does not mean unicellular organisms will necessarily evolve into a multicellular organism. In fact, a planet-full of unicellular organisms could very well undergo billions and billions of years of darwinian evolution without ever evolving a multicellular organism. My perspective explores the possibility that unicellular organisms were designed in such a way that the evolution of multicellular organisms was made more likely.
Where DE says that all genes must have ancestors, Mike says that ancestral genes could be proof of "function-in-waiting";
It's the "E" part of DE that states all genes must have ancestors. The difference between DE and FLE is that the latter depends on genes having functional ancestors. A gene that has no function will quickly have its sequence erased through mutation, meaning any front-loaded information will be lost. From the perspective of DE, a pseudogene could be reactivated by happenstance and just happen to encode for "something" that "somehow" increases fitness. Therefore, DE does not state all genes must have functional ancestors.
if DE states that even "pre-adaptations" must always have some original raison-d’etre (as unrelated adaptations themselves, or, in rare cases, as “spandrels”), Mike's FLE rebuts that of course a good designer would give a pre-adaptation some function to start with.
I'm not rebutting anything. I'm merely showing there is more than one way to think about such things. At this point, we either attribute a pre-adaptation to raw coincidence or look for something deeper behind the coincidence. The problem here is that things get really squishy. There may be many examples of preadaptations that are due to raw coincidence, but since we really have no test to score something as coincidence (this is the working assumption fueled by the non-teleological approach), it's difficult to make a judgment on a case by case basis. The whole concept of preadaptation has the fishy smell of telic phenomena being interpreted through a non-teleological filter.
If DE says co-option must be a common way to originate new structures and functions, Mike says sophisticated design could use co-option as a front-loaded strategy.
It seems to me that an effective front-loading strategy would have to employ things like preadaptation, cooption, and buried design. The alternative is to directly design all the genes needed far in the future and deposit them in the present. The two main design problems come with storing all this information and maintaining it until it is used. Preadaptation, cooption, and buried design are solutions to these design problems. Of course, every design solution brings about a new design problem. In this case, the solution takes control out of the hands of the designer. The question I am thus exploring is just how much control has been lost. It would seem pretty clear to me that this teleological approach has the potential to generate all kinds of experimental research (thus, once again, and from a different angle, taking the sledgehammer to the discredited notion that ID cannot generate testable hypotheses about the empirical world).
As for cooption, remember that DE does not entail this should exist. Neither is this specific to DE. After all, old-fashioned Lamarkianism could also employ cooption.
As for borrowing from Darwin's recipe book, it is really a recipe notepad with two bullet points - any way to generate variability and any way to increase fitness. All the particular ingredients DE uses stem from the way life works, which takes us back to the OOL, which....
Most people take the various ingredients at face value. Cooption happens. Preadaptation happens. Gene duplication happens. Evolution depends heavily on borrowing functional precursors. Etc. There is no need to probe any deeper than accepting these as ways to fuel DE. But the FLE approach doesn't merely treat these as brute givens, but instead seeks to ask why evolution works this way and what this might mean from a teleological perspective.
Charlie also suggests two ways to unequivocally tease apart FLE from DE. It is admirable to reach for such an objective, but I don't think it is good idea to demand that one's approach revolve around some "silver bullet" test to reach an unequivocal result. That approach may force us to miss important, subtle clues.
The "inductive" test Charlie offers is interesting:
quote:
First, if front-loading, as Mike says, significantly "channels possibilities" by pre-encoding a number of potentially useful adaptive outcomes in the genome, then one would expect that in most cases 2 unrelated organisms faced with the same adaptation problem would reach the same non-obvious de novo (i.e. not exaptive) solution in terms of genetic pathways involved.
The problem here is that there are no unrelated organisms from an evolutionary viewpoint.
Thus, finding examples of the same genetic pathway in different organisms can be used as evidence of descent that calls convergence into question. This is a most serious problem from my perspective. If I am to investigate for front-loading, the most logical place to begin is near the OOL. That is, since time has the ability to degrade the message, one might want to look for an event near-by. So many factors are leading me towards converging on the origin of multicellularity. But here, we can't pin down the "adaptation problem" and the same pathways would be viewed as evidence of a shared ancestor. So why not look at two different species of fruit flies? Well, here we have no reason to think FLE extends out to such recent times and even it it does, no reason to think the echoes of front-loading are smeared across biotic lines in a homogenous way. In other words, as evolution progresses, some lineages, more so than others, may have more successfully accumulated/preserved FLE information.
Take your example of the antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGP). FLE does not entail that every single adaptation we see was programmed into evolution. AFGP probably did indeed arise through non-teleological means, rendering it "noise" from the perspective of FLE. In fact, in some ways, one could argue that AFGPs were necessarily front-loaded into evolution. Why? Because it doesn't take much to make an AFGP. You simply trim away most of the protease sequence and expand a three-amino-acid repeat to carry out the very non-specific function of binding ice crystals. Thus, in a paradoxical way, you don't need to actively front-load AFGP's because essentially every protein has this function embedded in it. The same story holds for crystallins. And this explains why it is that in both cases, we see the same functions arising multiple times from different starting points.
As for the second test, I already explained that the outcome of FLE is the thing in question. But logically, the best place to start, after positing that the original life forms were unicellular organisms seeded on this planet, would be to investigate whether such cells were front-loaded to evolve into multicellular organisms. So I'll put that hypothesis on the table.
[ 07 May 2002, 09:26: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
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Mike Gene
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posted 12. May 2002 00:04
Reading through the PNAS paper from Morris (supplied by Drosera above), I came across a caveat regarding FLE:
"Most surprising, perhaps, is a changed status for the platyhelminthes (free-living flatworms and various parasitic groups). Classically regarded as primitive triploblasts, the flatworms appear now to be anatomically degenerate, dispensing with such features as an anus."
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Mike Gene
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posted 13. May 2002 16:22
Drosera claims "one of the bigger concerns" regarding FLE is its sheer inefficiency. Yet Drosera never really makes the case that FLE is inefficient. He writes:
quote:
Could any intelligent designer seriously be expected to journey light-years just to tweak some proteins, so that possibly evolution might, billions of years later, produce something that could be somewhat more complex than would have happened otherwise, at least if there weren't too many meteor strikes?
My FLE hypothesis is rooted in the notion that the first cells were bioengineered and used to seed this planet. It does not entail that the designers themselves made any interstellar travel. And its not about tweaking a protein so that something might happen billions of years later that would have happened anyway. It's about designing proteins with the inherent potential of stepping into foreseen generic roles, such that evolution entailing these roles or built around these roles or exploitive of these roles is made more likely. It's about designing something that will do your designing for you.
Understood in this way, the "why not hang around?" argument falls apart. Drosera adds:
quote:
it seems to me that design principle numero uno would be that designing things directly works a whole heck of a lot better than front-loading. It's more dependable, it's millions/billions of times faster, the odds of getting whatever it is you want are much much better, and in general it lets you get a whole lot more designing done in the lifespan of the universe.
Not necessarily. If I were to design evolution, I would not narrowly focus on any particular organism. One has to take into account the noise that is going to be generated by things like mutation and selection and how it serves as an obstacle to such directed attempts. Thus, it might be easier to design your life to front-load ecological states.
In the PNAS article Drosera brought to the table, Morris notes that the "The motor of the Cambrian explosion was largely ecological." He also alludes to "genomic change" "extensive co-option and redeployment of genes," and "a substantial proportion of the metazoan genome was probably available well before the Cambrian explosion."
In my opinion, the plausibility that something like this explosion was front-loaded has increased significantly. If the motor was ecology, ecology is something that can be front-loaded simply by ensuring that all of your designed cells are not completely self-sufficient and autonomous. That is, you can design them to be successful only if certain forms of cooperation emerge. The role of co-option and redeployment suggests that such an event could have been effectively encoded in the genomes of the original cells, making it only a matter of time until a certain threshold of co-option and redeployment was reached to trigger the explosion. And the fact that a substantial proportion of the metazoan genome was probably available well before the Cambrian explosion speaks directly to front-loading.
Drosera, apparently, would rather have the designer micromanage everything and design the Cambrian explosion directly. Yet one does not design multicellular organisms divorced from the ecological surroundings. Drop a cow on the primitive earth and what would happen? I am reminded of that glorious biological experiment from the 90s known as "Biosphere." Here, the attempt was made to design a self-sustained biosphere using the method Drosera advocates. It was a complete failure .
[ 13 May 2002, 16:25: Message edited by: Mike Gene ]
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