Hi Dennis
No one can say that a certain specific binding site cannot evolve over time especially if one is a few mutations away from another and you have the advantage of huge bacterial populations.
This does not model the search problems evolution is facing.
Your immune system idea is very interesting. Could the search algorithm Cornelius is referring to be a mechanism of evolution? I think the spliceosome and alternative splicing mechanisms that Joshua brought up are possible evolutionary mechanisms.
In the example I linked to, the new binding event is 4 mutations away from the starting point - far beyond Beheâs âedge of evolutionâ that the ID community likes to claim as a barrier for evolution.
Youâre moving the goalposts here - you started out by saying randomized processes cannot generate new binding sites. I show you an example, and you fall back on saying itâs not relevant to your claim.
If modifying a protein to form a new binding site isnât enough, we also have examples of enzymes being formed de novo, such as the nylonase example Iâve written up here. It arose from a frameshift mutation in a gene, giving a new open reading frame of 392 amino acids, that nonetheless was able to function as a weak nylonase. Subsequent duplication and mutation events to the duplicate produced a nylonase with much better functionality.
If sequence space is really too vast for evolution to work, why was this possible?
This doesnât work, and if it did, it wouldnât be evolution. The latter first: For AS, or GE, or ATI/ATT, or epigenetics, etc., to create a human from a primitive ape would mean evolution had to have created 25000 genes, and the molecular mechanisms to create that change. If a factory created a bunch of parts which just happened to fit together to make a car, would you say it evolved? Of course not, this is silly. The fact that you insist this is evolution suggests you want evolution to be true. Indeed, even you had to admit how remarkable this is:
Indeed, from an evolutionary perspective this is astonishing. What luck? The level of serendipity is astronomical. Can you imagine the chance evolution just happened to create all that stuff, which incredibly turned out to make humans? I guess you could appeal to the anthropic principle, multiverse, and so forth. Evolution just keeps on surprising us.
Now the other problem is that all of this is unlikely anyway. The vast majority of our genes are alternatively spliced, and science indicates that, surprise, this is not merely useless diversity or junk DNA doing its thing. As this paper explains:
The history of evolutionary thought is full of claims of uselessness, only later to proven wrong. Alternative splicing looks to be quite useful and important. We have to assume that most of the human alternative splicing is important. No, thatâs not to say you canât change the splicing anywhere. But you probably canât just have any old splicing patterns. The different alternative splicing of a gene can result in a very different gene product. So it is not good enough to just generate tons of AS, willy-nilly. It has to be the right AS, out of an enormous space of possibilities. Secondly, gene products typically work together. Sure there are singletons, but often proteins form quaternary structures, pathways etc. So most of these AS genes are going to function, at least part of the time, in a network, they need to come in groups. So a trillion mutations over 6 MY is not going to help. Drift over MYs is going to give some winners, but mostly a whole bunch of incoherent combinations. Selection isnât going to work because you canât get a group of newly created, coherent, ASs in one individual. Youâre going to need a whole bunch of multiverses for this.
It sounds so easy doesnât it? Evolution creates the genes, the introns / exons, the splicing mechanisms, the TFs, binding sites, and all the other regulatory machinery, and then it proceeds to experiment around, mutating these and building up a huge library of neutral functionality, and then at some later time, given a critical mass, or the right environmental shifts, that functionality now suddenly provides a coordinated orchestra of organization and emergent functionality. This is how evolutionists view the biological world, without concern for the serendipity.
Hi Dennis
If were going to stick with debate tactics I would claim you are creating a straw man argument because exceeding unlikely does not mean cannot. Winning the debate is only interesting if we are on the right side of scientific reality since we all share the same ideology.
When Meyer used Doug Axeâs work to claim all proteins cannot evolve due to his experiment showing the rareness of protein folds, he was missing the detailed analysis of Axeâs experiment.
The protein in the experiment had to able to perform two functions in order to break down penicillin.
-Bind with a partner protein in order to make the complete enzyme.
-Bind and break down penicillin.
I concede that if the requirement was any single one of these functions then the chance of success may be higher the 1/10^77
It is true by consensus supported by common sense.
If we didnât use this interpretation, there would be any number of cases where a change would not be called evolution until thousands of years or millions of years allowed an old feature to become suddenly useful due to some new feature in the environment or some other change in the gene pool.
For you to fixate on some of the most technical aspects of cell structure or function, and not know that any genetic change is Evolution, suggests a rather slim foundation in these matters.
Hi Ben
Any thoughts you have here would be appreciated.
I have discussed this experiment with Art Hunt(wrote the counter argument in pandaâs thumb) and he was concerned how Doug measured the binding strength of the enzyme. Doug used a different technique. He measured the bacteriaâs ability to grow in the presents of penicillin.
Until we look at the number of fixed mutations, splicing changes , and gene expression changes that are required to make the change. I think special creation is a valid competing hypothesis.
BTW thanks for citing the alternative splicing paper
I would like to see any model of CD that is falsifiable in the scientific sense - you constantly conflate attempts at finding patters and data fitting with genuine scientific models. My impression is you have no expertise in this area, despite you many comments on the subject.
@Billcole⌠I would accept your Special Creation if you accept a 5 billion year old Earth. If you donât accept a very old Earth, your special creation really just amounts to an attempt to distract readers from the findings of geologists and physicists.
So, @gbrooks9, @billcole is actually a theistic evolutionist in that he largely accepts common descent, and certainly accepts an old earth. He is also convinced by many ID arguments, and because of this argues there is strong evidence that natural processes alone were not enough.
Moreover, he has been very open to the possibility he is wrong. He has been a kind and respectful interlocutor. We need to treat him better than this. Just assuming that he is YEC and making ad hominems is not really the best way to engage.
@Billcole, by the way, thanks for joining us here. I do really appreciate your comments. Iâve been a bit caught up with Hunter, but have always appreciated your open-mindedness and kind dialogue here. I hope that more people meet you on that level. Thanks for braving the forums here. I really appreciate it.
We have looked at this. And it makes a ton of sense in light of neutral theory and common descent. This is exactly the data that convinced me of the scientific strength of evolutionary theory. In the details, in the math, evolution makes rigorous sense of this.
Of course Special Creation is always a valid hypothesis, but we need a clear model of it to test against the data. Currently we have no model for special creation that makes sense of the data.
That is easy @GJDS, we falsify models of common descent all the time. For example the strict âTree of Lifeâ CD model was falsified by strong evidence of ad-mixing at the population level and also horizontal gene transfer. Also the neo-Darwinian positive selection dominate change model of CD was falsified in the 60âs by Haldane and Kimura. Also, there was several competing models of human CD; did we diverge first from our CA with orangutans or chimps? Turns out the answer is chimps, and orangutan CD model was not correct.
So I have now presented three CD models that have been falsified by the data. So yes, CD models are falsifiable. And in the genomic age, several trees built on much less reliable phenotyping data have been revised because of genetic data. This is exactly what we expect, because genetic data is much more powerful at adjudicating different models. There is so much information in DNA that it has allowed to see much more clearly the vague patterns we had only seen by phenotyping before.
I think youâre avoiding massive amounts of evidence.
[quote]I have discussed this experiment with Art Hunt(wrote the counter argument in pandaâs thumb) and he was concerned how Doug measured the binding strength of the enzyme. Doug used a different technique. He measured the bacteriaâs ability to grow in the presents of penicillin.
[/quote]
Thereâs that, which isnât measuring the enzyme at all.
The bigger hole is the fact that Axe started with a temperature-sensitive mutant, not the normal protein. The mutant was pre-selected to be at the very edge of stability, so of course subsequent changes are likely to destabilize it even more.
It doesnât say anything about the evolution of that normal, wild-type protein, much less all proteins.
Hi George
As Joshua said, in his post above, I accept an old earth. In fact until 2 years ago I accepted universal common descent. I believe that basic structure of matter is enough evidence for Gods existence so the âhowâ of lifeâs diversity I am open to.
