Front-loading would also help explain the Pax-6 similarities in the seperate phyla.

These recent findings lend support to the hypothesis of front-loaded evolution (FLE). As Krauze notes, we front-loaders expect this "genetic toolkit" to trace back to unicellular organisms because this is what FLE predicts. Multi-cellular life is not something that just happened, where what we see are simply the lottery winners frozen, tweaked, and perpetuated by selection. On the contrary, according to FLE, such evolution was rigged to occur.

When I have argued for front-loading, one of the most common complaints was that FLE and Darwinian evolution (DE) were indistinguishable. I've dealt with this (and more) here, but I think we might be able to see one way in which a distinction is gradually emerging. As the excerpts provided by Krauze demonstrate, scientists, working from within the paradigm of DE have again been surprised by a new finding. And anyone who has ever taken a basic biology course understands the surprise, as jellyfish have always been described as primitive creatures and descendents of an evolutionary branch that reflected such a primordial state. It fit well within the paradigm of DE. But if we understand the process of evolution so well, why are scientists continually being surprised by findings that deal with very fundamental issues in evolution? Clearly, we are still in the very early stages of understanding evolution.

Y'see, there is nothing surprising about these findings from the perspective of FLE. FLE does not provide intellectual inertia for the idea of "simple beginnings, thus simple = primitive." FLE expects "The urmetazoan was probably quite sophisticated in a developmental and genomic sense." More importantly, it predicts the toolkit should be housed among the unicellular life forms. If it is not, the front-loading of multicelluarity is fatally wounded. But not so with DE, as it has existed for over a century alongside the belief that unicellular life would not possess multicellular machinery.

Another relevant point concerns something I wrote years ago:

Secondly, our perception of evolution has been skewed over the last century. This is not surprising, as science is limited by the perceptions its tools can deliver. Yet how has the perception been skewed? From a morphological and behavioral perspective, life is immensely diverse. But the molecular perspective shows such diversity to be "skin-deep." Thus evolution, as evidence by the fossil record, has not been about developing novel software to solve adaptive problems. It has been more about reshuffling, testing, and deploying the molecular endowments it has been given. Put bluntly, all the evolution contained in the entire fossil record and inferred by our phylogenetic trees has been largely a footnote in the development of life. The really interesting and important questions concern the origin of this "animal in waiting" software that was infused into protozoan life forms.