Front end loading (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, November 11, 2008, 18:22 (5854 days ago) @ David Turell

One of the key issues I addressed in my book was the theory that organisms could control their own evolution, known initially as "The Baldwin Effect" but also proposed earlier by Alfred Wallace at a time when Darwin was making his theory known. Reznick's guppies in south american rivers were the first clear proof that something of this sort existed, published about 1998. Here is another new example. The actual article is not on line as yet so that I can not study it directly, but this is the Princeton PR blurb: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S22/60/95O56/index.xml?section=topstories All of biology has feedback loops that act as thermostats act for furnace heat. This is another of many loops that have been discovered. A loop of this sort implies that a great deal of information had to be developed to allow this to go on beneath the level of normal mutation. Obviously, an organism that can direct its own evolution to fight a rapidly changing hostile environment is at a great advantage. But if one believes in Darwinian step-by-step development, and feedback loops have several steps, the issue has to be raised, what caused each intermediate step to be conserved through many generations if each step, of its own, has no immediate value?