De novo evolution of Nylonase?

I also have tried a few times, and I hit the same morass. I agree that it’s probably not a frameshift, but it gets muddled pretty quickly. When I wrote Adam and the Genome I was relying on the usual interpretation, which is now shown to be probably wrong. It’s almost a guarantee that a book on science will have something in it that is later shown to have a better alternate explanation, and it looks like nylonase is my example. Look for a “VENEMA ADMITS HE IS WRONG” headline coming soon to your favourite source of ID news. Though the irony here is of course that it’s just the usual new functional information arising through duplication and mutation, nothing to see here, folks…

If Adam and the Genome ever goes to a second edition I will replace the now-dubious nylonase example with another example where we have better evidence. There are many to choose from, but I’d probably use the yeast BSC4 example at present. The evidence there is very good, and not easily dismissed. Any de novo protein is a problem for Axe and ID.

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