Comments on Gpuccio: Functional Information Methodology

[T_aquaticus]

@gpuccio

This objection is very reasonable from the point of view of a fervent believer in the powers, of NS, but irrelevant if we consider what NS can really do according to facts. Optimizations are short and scarcely important. New fucntions are complex already in their starting form. Even if some optimization can cerianly occur, and does indeed occur, a complex function is complex, and cannot be decostructed into simpler stpes, each of them naturally selectable.

How would you measure the FI in a newly emerged protein that is found in a single species with no variation? It would be near zero, wouldn’t it? You only get increases in FI as the gene is passed down to subsequent populations and diverges in lineages that split from one another.

@gpuccio

No, the Texas sharpshooter has nothing to do with this. This objection is often referred by me as the “any possible function” objection. In brief, evolution is not searching for anything, so it can find any possible function. Therefore, it must be much more powerful than a search for a specific function.

Why isn’t evolution searching for any genetic change that increases fitness? You need to explain this.

@gpuccio

First of all, it is not “any possible function”: it is any change that gives some definite reproductive advantage, and can therefor be expanded and fixed, with reasonable probability, by positive NS. That is much more restricted than “any possible function”.

That’s what @glipsnort said:

The target space you’ve considered consists of a single function, the function of the gene you’re looking at. To the extent that evolution can be considered a search algorithm, though, it is not a search for “the function performed by gene X”. It is a search for any function that will increase fitness.
–@glipsnort

What does evolve is just one possible solution that increases fitness. You seem to think that what we see is the ONLY possible solution. That’s the problem.

@gpuccio

Behe’s book, and known facts, show clearly that in known cases of NS acting, the variation is very simple, and it is variation of some already existing complex structure, with some impairment of its original function, but at the same time some collateral advantage in a specific environment. Like in antibiotic resistance.

How many genes and species does Behe look at? I don’t see how looking at a handful of examples allows anyone to make general statements about all of biology.