theyeti

Okay, as promised, my problems with “front-loading”. This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. These are just the things that immediately occur to me when I hear someone advocate front-loading as a “theory” of intelligent design. I would appreciate feedback from DNAunion (not that front-loading is necessarily his position) or anyone else who wishes to play devil’s advocate.

<ol type="1">[*]Information Encoding.

If life were front-loaded to evolve its present complexity, a simple bacterium that typifies early life would have to carry with it all of that information. This would include, at the very least, every “irreducibly complex” structure that is found among the three domains of life. In other words, a whole lot of stuff. This would be too much to fit into a bacterial chromosome, especially since genome size is at a premium in those guys. So the only way that this would work is to have the information encoded in some way as to vastly increase the storage capacity. Furthermore, that mechanism would have to be lost in time, since we presumably don’t see it today.
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*[*]Informational Entropy

What we know of molecular evolution is that DNA sequences, unless they’re under selective pressure, tend to accumulate mutations until they become random “noise”. This is manifest in introns, for example, that DavidH seems so interested in. Introns from distantly related species have become so “noisy” that the phylogenetic signal has been lost. Only in relatively closely related organisms are sequence similarities apparent in introns. This also applies to other “junk” DNA. So the problem with front-loading is that these genes for making stuff like blood clotting would have to sit around for billions of years before being subjected to selective pressure. Unless there was something really special going on, they would have degenerated into useless “noise” within a period of mere millions of years. This problem becomes especially acute when one considers that at least one billion years of prokaryotic evolution precedes that of the eukaryotes, and another billion or more precedes complex multicellular life. The problem is further compounded by the fact that prokaryotes are under strong selective pressure to get rid of any superfluous DNA.
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*[*]The Time Factor

This isn’t so much a problem as it is an unexplained phenomenon from the front-loading perspective. As above, the first life appears on Earth something like 3.5 billion years ago. And yet complex multicellular life, which is the supposed goal of front-loading, does not appear until about 600 million years ago +/-. Why the time discrepancy? I interpret this as the result of the creakingly slow process of evolution. Things like the evolution of eukaryotic cells and complex multicellular life took a lot of time, and probably involved no small number of fortuitous coincidences. If we were to replay the tape over again, these things might evolve faster, or they might evolve slower, or they might not evolve at all. But under a front-loading scenario, I would expect them to evolve quickly under all circumstances. After all, there was no waiting required for IC structures, for example, to come about,. Any explanation for the huge delay that I can think of is necessarily ad hoc . It would also make more sense if the “goal” of front-loading didn’t tend to go extinct every so often.
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*[*]Design / Counter-design.

Again, this isn’t so much a problem as simply something that front-loading can’t really explain without some weird assumptions. Why are there all these “designs” whose purpose is to thwart other “designs”? Why is the IC immune system designed to defeat an IC laden bacteria or protozoan? Why would the features of parasites be front-loaded? In a front-loading scenario, we have to assume that the space bacteria was loaded with information for both the immune system and the pathogens that it has to defeat. What sense does that make? I interpret these facts to be the result of “evolutionary arms races” where the only goal is for each participant to maximize its inclusive fitness. How would front-loading, or any theory of ID, interpret them?[/list=a]

So anyway, those are some of the bigger problems that occur to me. Much of the problem as I see it is that anytime ID actually does come up with a theory, it usually suffers from some flaws that put it well below natural evolution, IMO, on the evidentiary scale. Of course, most IDers are very circumspect about what their theory is (or if they have one). This makes for a good debating tactic, but it's poor scientific discourse. Until the ID movement can come up with a viable theory about “what happened”, it should not enjoy the status of anything other than a pseudoscience.

theyeti

[ February 03, 2002: Message edited by: theyeti ]</p>

Automaton

I believe such errors in the theory are immediately obvious to anyone not blinded by their own ignorant religious ideologies. The first one is the most important. For example, along a similar tangent, many creationists like to explain away observed instances of evolution such as insects becoming resistant to pesticides as mere population mechanics, with no net gain in genetic information. Of course, this is ridiculous. It would mean, within any population of insects, there will be all the alleles already present for resistance to every single possible toxin! The amount of net information needed for this would be so large, that we would see massive amounts of such genetic redundancy in each individual insect.

Peez

Here is a concrete example that might give an ID'er problems. It is a simple point mutation, in which the incorrect nucleic acid base is incorporated into a copy of DNA. This part of the DNA double-strand starts with the following bases:

(12 bases)...CCTGTGGAGAAG...(414 bases)
(12 bases)...GGACACCTCTTC...(414 bases)

During DNA replication, one of the base pairs is changed, resulting in

(12 bases)...CCTGAGGAGAAG...(414 bases)
(12 bases)...GGACTCCTCTTC...(414 bases)

Why is it impossible for this mutation to take place? Point mutations like this are relatively common, why should it be impossible for the base pair T-A to be changed to A-T? I certainly can find no reason, nor can I see how such a mutation has resulted in an increase in "information." Whether or not this mutation is beneficial to the organism depends on the rest of the organism (in some organisms the first sequence might be better, while in others the second sequence might be better). In fact, the first sequence is for "sickle-cell" hemoglobin, while the second is for "normal" hemoglobin.

Peez
[edited for math]

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: Peez ]

[ February 05, 2002: Message edited by: Peez ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> Wow Peez! I thought that was just a nice hypothetical example, till you revealed it's a real one! Ain't science brilliant!

Cheers, Oolon