Here we see Darwin speculating on potential consequences of his new theory.
His speculations are somewhat interesting, but utterly irrelevant.
You disagree?
Historically, the argument for front-loading came from Laplacian determinism based on a Newtonian or mechanical universe — if one could control all the initial conditions, then the outcome was predetermined. First quantum mechanics, and then chaos-theory has basically destroyed it, since no amount of precision can control the outcome far in the future. (The exponential nature of the precision required to predetermine the outcome exceeds the information storage of the medium.)But “front-loading” permitted Deists to say that God designed the Universe, and then stepped back and let “natural” forces operate, thereby removing any “supernatural” interference of the sort that Lucretius fumed about in 50 BC. So if Newtonian determinism was now impossible, perhaps there could be some sort of algorithmic determinism (which I’ll call Turing determinism) which could step in and permit a Deist to avoid the supernatural. That is, God doesn’t have to create the oak from the acorn anymore, but the biological program He inserted in the acorn can handle all the intermediate steps. So perhaps, God didn’t have to create humans, but the biological program in the first living cell He created, started the ecosystem that eventually evolved humans…
Ian Turing himself addressed a number of algorithmic dilemmas with the thought experiment of the deterministic computer now called a Turing machine. He asked if the outcome of such a computer can always be predicted, and demonstrated several examples of completely unpredictable behavior. Applying this to our biological example, it says that some organisms may act/evolve unpredictably, though perhaps not the ones God programmed.
But Turing went beyond this existence proof, and demonstrated necessity — a computing machine with feedback, where the output tape went into the input, was always unpredictable. In our biological example, we have to define the input and the output. TE [theistic evolution] tells us that the input is an organism, and the output is more organisms, and the computer is the organism too. In other words, the type of algorithmic determinism required by TE is not weakly, but strongly recursive, and therefore doubly unpredictable.
Even should God have infinite knowledge of the outcome of such a biological algorithm, the information regarding its outcome cannot be contained within the system itself. Therefore if the system is determined, it must be determined externally, with constraints outside of biology, which is exactly the definition of the supernatural that the TE “front-loading” was intended to remove!