RumRaket: He wasn’t actually doing that either. He certainly makes claims to that effect, but his methods do no such thing.
It’s odd then, that a respected journal published his paper, and hasn’t published a rebuttal in 21 years. And mere assertions are not convincing.
Rumraket: At best what Axe does in that respect is try, with a very flawed experimental setup, to estimate the probability of finding a particular structure-function relationship if you imagine proteins first arose by completely blindly and randomly polymerizing amino acids.
Again, how was the setup flawed, and how did the reviewers not see this? And this applies to evolution, as well as to a protein arising at first, the search is essentially random, until you get a significant difference in fitness, either improving or degrading it.
And Joshua Swamidass is on record as stating in an interview that he has seen problems with Axe’s paper, I would love if he would chime in here and state the problems he was referring to.
I was considering returning here to discuss Axe’s paper and James Tour’s challenges to OOL researchers, and lo! Here it is.