Did Douglas Axe Disprove Evolution? Spoiler: No

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@lee_merrill

@Rumraket

Okay, so let’s see if we can agree on the following.

In Axe’s analogy, he takes four fragments of his sentence, then mutates each individually and puts it back into the full sentence context, and sees that the sentence remains somewhat readable as long as he does it one at a time. But when he puts all four mutated fragments together, it’s gibberish.

So Axe says because the result is gibberish, it shows we can’t extrapolate the per-fragment pass rate to the entire sentence. The result is invalid.

Do you agree with this characterization?

With one quibble, it seems Axe is allowing a proportion of mutations throughout the sentence, not putting together all four mutated fragments: “However, when we try this by generating full-length strings with twelve typos (maintaining the 2-in-7 ratio)…”

It would be six pieces (6×7=42) not four (it’s four fragments in the actual experiment with the protein enzyme).

Regardless, his point is: If we allow the full sequence to have the same 2 mutations in every 7 characters, we get 12 mutations total, and since the sentence has now become unreadable, Axe argues, the result we obtained by mutating only a single 7 character fragment 2 times, in the context of the remaining sentence being intact, means we have obtained an invalid result.

Axe: Evidently we have made a mistake, because mutants that ought to be readable according to our calculation clearly aren’t readable. As you may have guessed, the mistake is that the 2-in-7 typo rate was tolerable only because it was restricted to a narrow section of seven positions. The fact that the remaining 35 positions were without error compensated in large measure for the errors in the mutated section.

His point is, since we can no longer read the sentence when every 7-character fragment is mutated 2 times simultaneously, the result is invalid. Right?