The abzyme work supports the hypothesis that totally different folds can catalyze beta-lactam hydrolysis. This calls into question one of the very foundations of ID thought (which is, I suspect, why @Agauger is so unwilling to admit even the simplest and most obvious of conclusions that the abzyme work leads to - grant even some of these points and ID thought is going to be in serious trouble).
One very significant problem for those who use Axe’s work as support for rarity of function is that, in order for such a conclusion to be valid, the numbers of totally different sequences and folds that can catalyze the same reaction must be very, very small. Not Axe, not @Agauger, not anyone at the DI knows what these numbers may be. Random combinatorial studies raise the very real possibility that this number is very, very large - large enough that simple random processes can in fact “find” new functions. In newly-arising open reading frames, by modest alteration of extant enzymes, by massive re-organization of genomes.
I am quite sure that Axe et al. would have predicted that all random combinatorial projects, such as the abzyme field, would be fruitless, pointless, and completely unable to “find” new catalysts. The whole point of our discussion here is to point out that this expectation, and in fact the broad, sweeping assertions that pervade the ID literature, are wrong. Plan and simply wrong.