Can God be a useful "scientific" hypothesis? Yes

[Michael_Okoko]

@scd

@Michael_Okoko

So do you agree that a single mutation can suffice to bring about a novel function within a short time (it took about two weeks in that paper)?

if this is what we see in the lab sure (even though its just a promoter)

You are exasperating. There is no “if” here, we actually saw it happen and happen quite readily.

Yes its “just” promoters that evolved, but they evolved from nonfunctional, random DNA sequences in approximately two weeks. We got to see the creation of new promoters de novo and through rearrangement of preexisting promoters and that tells you its quite easy to evolve new functions or at least some types of new functions. This contrasts with the unrealistic high improbability arguments you keep throwing about here.

@scd

@Michael_Okoko

The ancestral and derived RHs (sequences EGKA and GSKV, respectively) are connected by a path of just 3 steps, whereas the most distant proteins in the functional network are 13 steps apart.

if this is true then many of the alternative pathways are inaccessible because they require more mutations. so this make that even harder to get a new function.

On the contrary to the the claim in your comment, this is what was observed in the study:

Next, we asked whether the evolution of SRE specificity depended on the starting point within the large network of mutually accessible ERE-specific genotypes. All but two ERE-specific variants can access SRE specificity without passing through non-functional intermediates Fig. 2a), and more than 90% can do so by paths no longer than the historical trajectory (Fig. 2b). Evolution of the derived specificity per se was therefore not strongly dependent on the starting point

In other words, a vast majority of the ERE-specific variants could achieve their evolution to SRE-specificity by taking the shortest paths possible, with some doing so in one step which is two counts shorter than the historical outcome (which happened in three steps). Thus, even if there were more inaccessible outcomes (there weren’t) due to the number of required steps, it would be irrelevant as the shortest steps possible would be picked more often relative to those longer steps as shown in the paper.