Posted: Sep 18, 2017 1:00 pm
Greyman wrote:To the contrary, prominent IDcreation proponentists have espoused that the one true sequence of amino acids needed to produce a specific new function could not have arisen through pure chance.Wortfish wrote:Rumraket wrote:Ancestral sequence reconstruction really does utterly refute ID-creationism.
No. ID proponents and creationists both accept that microevolution occurs, especially at the molecular level. The paper doesn't address the origin of the protein, a transcription factor, but rather small changes in its specificity over time.
Yes. Specifically, this was claimed by Douglas Axe here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15321723
Those claims were pretty solidly refuted by Arthur Hunt in an article at Panda's Thumb. But this current article goes a step further and actually correctly calculates the number of functional proteins (of a specific function) that exist in sequence space, the very thing Axe tried (and failed) to determine.
This is in addition to number of empirical studies that have been reviewed by Rumraket which already showed Axe's figures were too low, by as many a 60 orders of magnitude.
The magnitude of the defeat this presents for ID cannot be overstated. Axe's figures on "protein folds" is one of the chief premises of Stephen Meyer's entire argument in "Darwin's Doubt", so on this one issue alone that entire book's argument collapses (although it fails in many, many other ways besides.) And Axe's study is repeatedly trotted out as a rare instance of peer reviewed studies which supposedly support ID (which would not be true even if Axe had got his numbers right.)
So they have to respond to this paper. But they can't without lying. Which is OK, because that's what they're good at.