Posted: Dec 20, 2014 3:07 pm
BooBoo wrote:Shrunk wrote:BooBoo wrote:Shrunk wrote:
And Summers' paper confirms that. So they were right.
No, the paper does not state that at all. It confirms that two mutations are necessary and, crucially, that "the mutations be added in a specific order to avoid decreases in chloroquine transport." The paper also admits that there would be "significant transient reductions in CQ transport activity before the full complement of Dd2 mutations is attained. The authors, however, speculate that a compensatory change could allow deleterious changes to be masked/buffered: "one or more compensatory changes (e.g., perhaps R371I and/or M74I) could arise at an early stage to maintain the normal physiological function of the protein while it develops the ability to transport CQ."
So...?
So we have confirmation that chloroquine resistance requires a lot of things to happen in the right way for it to happen at all. PZ Myers even admits this: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007 ... on-part-i/If you demand a very specific pair of amino acid changes in specific places in a specific protein, I agree, the odds are going to be very long on theoretical considerations alone, and the empirical evidence supports the claim of improbability for that specific combination.
You are not understanding the criticsm. Nobody is claiming that chloroquine resistance evolves easily. And nobody is claiming that there isn't an actual limitation to evolution, of course there is, evolution is not omnipotent and nobody claims it is.
Of course there are going to be cases where things that evolve require improbable events. So those events will as a matter of consequence only happen very rarely. That's why CCC evolves slowly, even in large populations of parasites.
The problem arises when Behe tries to extend this single case as applying to everything that happens in evolution, including the history of life. Nothing supports this extrapolation.
Also, Behe claimed the original mutations are required to be simultaneous, they are not, so his original claim was actually wrong. Regardles, several of the mutations are deleterious, and only balanced by other compensatory mutations, so that's why CC resistance evolves slowly.
Does that mean everything else also evolves slowly? No. So his case is useless, he cannot extend this single case to the entire diversity and history of life, nothing merits this. Case: dismissed.