Create a Protein with Your Mind

So Bill, can you please type out a functional protein sequence without knowing it beforehand? Just design it de novo with your mind? Can I tell you what I want it to do, and then you can just sort of think it up and it will work?

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I notice you completely ignored @Rumraket’s request that you create a functional protein right now with your mind. Why is that?

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I it not a serious request in my opinion.

It is. I seriously request it.

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Seems dead serious to me.

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Maybe he needs more time, and a PhD, and computational power, and the data gathered by hundreds of the scientists he scorns. Then he could. I know someone who did.

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Yes. Ironically, that process of learning takes huge amounts of trial and error. Even more ironically, proteins are designed by humans in part by evolving them under artificial selection. Go figure…

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Like the work that got Frances Arnold a Nobel Prize. Here’s her 2018 Nobel lecture:

Gee, imagine that.

Of course, the creationist invoke their 3rd Law in attempt to handwave that away.

Or we can design proteins from the ground up.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1432-8

And use them to design new signaling circuits.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1425-7

The biggest problem with Bill’s model is that the only example he can cite is “design” by humans. But humans are the very thing whose existence his model is trying to account for. So the model does not work. Design cannot explain the existence of DNA, since the only designers for whom we have evidence require the prior existence of DNA.

None of this is relevant to identifying mind as a viable mechanism as being discussed in an attempt to design a protein. The challenge is functional information and minds have been repeatably tested to be up to that challenge.

Let’s return to Dawkins attested solution in the blind watchmaker. Algorithm plus mind = sequence found. Human languages turn out to be a great test.

Have you read it? You are probably talking about the less-than-3-page illustration of the Weasel thing. That wasn’t about evolution. It was about cumulative selection. No scholar of any merit at all would cite it as a “solution” to anything.

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Yes I have read it and tested the algorithm.

“tested the algorithm”? :laughing: It’s a tiny illustration of cumulative selection. Again: no scholar of any repute at all thinks of it in any other way. It’s not about evolution.

If you are an evolution advocate I can see why this test is a problem in that it showed the large challenge of finding function inside a sequence as the solution required a target. Without realizing it Dawkins was making a case for ID.

This challenge contained somewhere around 100 bits of FI.

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It didn’t show anything of the sort. All it showed is that if you have a target you can select towards it. It doesn’t in any way show that to have cumulative selection you need a target.

Merely HAVING a target and cumulatively selecting towards it doesn’t show that you NEED a target to cumulatively select.

All you need for cumulative selection is a constant selective pressure. Unlikely genetic sequences then evolve incrementally, but they’re not targets.

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So far it is the only model that can generate 100 bits of the English language reliably that I have seen.

So what? Nobody is claiming Shakespeare, or any particular english text evolved. Sentences in english aren’t targets in biological evolution. Biological evolution doesn’t have targets, so whether populations fail to produce english sentences is utterly irrelevant.

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I would make this claim also if I was trying to defend evolutions feasibility.

Why can’t you run a simulation with the environment as a feedback mechanism and find function in a changing sequence? Start with an exceedingly strong feedback mechanism.