But I addressed this, do please respond to what I said in reply, instead of repeating your objection.
Actually, in your posted excerpt, you argue that the wild-type would have been preferable, the number would have been higher than Axe’s result. Along the lines of what Axe said…
If function and fitness are correlated, would you expect data to demonstrate this?
Is there data to support this?
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Sorry if you find this very confused. Maybe the following will help:
No he said the diametrically opposite.
Axe writes:
Both Hunt and Venema seem to think the outcome would have been more favorable (i.e., functional sequences would have been more prevalent) had I used the highly proficient natural enzyme as a starting point rather than the handicapped version. Actually, as a demonstration will show, the opposite is true.”
So that was Axe saying that if the wild-type enzyme had been used instead of the unstable mutated one he deliberately created, we would have found FEWER functional sequences. That’s what those words mean.
And that is a lie and I explained why. Had the wild-type enzyme been used (the wild type is more stable and can therefore tolerate more mutations), his “pass rate” would have been higher than 0.38.
So it’s 0.38153 × 10-13 ≈ 10-77
Had it been, for the purpose of illustration, 0.60 instead (the enzyme could tolerate 60% of mutations at the typical position, rather than 38% of mutations at the typical position, 60% is more than 38%), then Axe’s calculation would get us:
0.60153 × 10-13 ≈ 10-47
10-47 is fantastically more probable than 10-77. It is in fact 1030 times more probable.
Can you actually read?
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The way you say they are related is that having one means having the other and lacking the other means lacking the one. Let’s set aside how the phrasing you chose would suggest both to be binary attributes, and how regarding function in particular you rather consistently treat it as something either present or absent with naught inbetween, going even so far as to suggest the need for a threshold to segregate the otherwise smooth gradient into two distinct sub-intervals to allow for the binary treatment you seek. Even granting you that you are acknowledging the complex and multi-dimensional character of both terms, there is no mention of anything that would indicate this relationship between fitness and function outside and beyond of your say-so. There is no explanation as to how you came to this conclusion, nor what experiment any of the rest of us could perform in order that we see it too. If anything, you insist that this cannot be assessed by measurement.
“Vibes” isn’t a mockery on my part. Rather it is the only chance for a semblance of coherence in your statement. If something cannot be assessed by either methodologically sound means or by subjective ones, then nonsense through and through is the only thing left for it to be. And you really should consider taking it. If “they are related by being the same thing; this is obvious because of come on you guys, we’re talking about meaning here; this cannot be verified by measurement” is not vibes, what on earth else could it possibly be?
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Oh dear. You really have no idea what we are talking about.
Here, I’ll try help you using a simple analogy.
Imagine Doug Axe is very upset about all the reports that 40% of Americans are obese. He thinks this is just some woke propaganda to make Americans feel bad about themselves. So he decides to do his own experiment.
Obesity is typically defined as a BMI of over 30. But, unfortunately for Axe, the Biologic Institute does not have the budget for fancy equipment like bathroom scales and tape measures. So he decides to use his own method to define obesity.
He invites 100 Americans to his lab and has each of them stand on a wooden crate. If the crate is crushed, then the person is defined as “obese.”
He runs the experiment and finds the crates collapses only 5 times. From this, he concludes that the obesity rate in America is only 5%.
Questions:
Did his method “lower the threshold” for the detection of obesity? i.e. Did he make it more likely that an obese person would be detected, compared to if he had measured their BMI?
Is his conclusion sound? Has he actually demonstrated that the obesity rate in America is only 5%, and not 40%?
Well, aside from the fact that, as we have seen, your “response” is based on your utter incomprehension of the subject at hand, we are also debating whether Axe himself has ever responded to Art’s objections raised in the 2018 post. It seems you have now finally accepted that he never has. Correct?
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To be fair Axe makes an argument. And it’s complete nonsense.
As is typical he tries to make an analogy with writing although it’s simply illustrative.
First he starts with showing that two typos in seven characters is acceptable.
Then he argues that scaling that up so that 2/7ths of the characters are mutated produces some unreadable strings, so using that figure would overestimate. It’s also not at all clear that the same applies to enzymes - or at least whether it applies to the same extent.
His solution, however does not make any sense. He says that to avoid the problem all the mutated strings must be rejected unless they are as good as the start string. How this addresses the issue he does not say - and he really needs to since it isn’t at all obvious. Surely we’d expect a large proportion of the mutants to be worse than the start string unless it were very heavily mutated - and choosing a variant sensitive to mutation - Art Hunt’s actual point - will still make things worse.
But that’s not all. The more recent criticisms show that he didn’t apply any such test. If it was actually important he would have. So the whole answer is just worthless obfuscation.
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Good question. Based on the responses I quoted in my last post, it is debatable.
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The thing with using the temperature sensitive enzyme isn’t even the worst problem with his method at all (it’s not clear how much it would really affect the calculation).
It is entirely plausible that the TEM1-betalactamase enzyme is a very rare construct in protein sequence space that would, a priori, be very unlikely to be discovered by a blind random guess. Even if it isn’t 10-77. Suppose it’s really 10-50, that would still be incredibly unlikely, and likely outside the plausibility of being discovered de novo by evolution.
But there’s just so many other ways enzymes can evolve, so the probability of de novo discovery number just isn’t and can never be a successful argument against evolution.
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Indeed. The distribution of functional proteins in sequence space is the more important issue. But Axe fails to answer that, too. All he has is a supposed analogy but no reason at all to think that it is a valid analogy. You’d think that addressing that issue with real biooogical evidence would be a priority for Axe. How, for instance, does he square his ideas with the existence of protein families ?
But if Axe has come up with anything of significance in that area,I haven’t heard of it.
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It didn’t. That just takes you back to the beginning: Bechly’s challenge. But not every feature is advantageous in every environment. We have no reason to expect that major changes happen all the time. And this is especially true when nobody has been able to say just what constitutes a major change or a “new complex biological feature”, or whatever you imagine Bechly was talking about. This was answered extensively at the time.
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Exactly. Axe’s whole argument assumes that every evolutionary path to the modern betalactamase much pass thru a stage where it takes the form of the variant he used in his study, or one with a similar sensitivity to mutation. There is no reason to believe this to be the case.
The number of ways in which this study fails seems inexhaustible. And this really is the best the ID’ers have to offer.
Well, he has been living high of the hog by grifting religious zealots into thinking he is some scientific genius. Even got himself an endowed chair, albeit at a fundamentalist clown college. Why should he waste his time doing any actual research?
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SOLD!
Make him president of the US next.
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It’s helpful to remind yourself that Axe is not trying to convince you or anyone else with a properly working cognitive system. He only needs to convince people like @lee_merrill. And, as we have seen, Axe has been very successful with that. Grifers gotta grift.
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Of course, but this is not the point. The point is rather that at least some innovations should be advantageous in at least some environments. And given that you seem to believe that the RV + NS mechanism has the power to bring about many organic innovations rapidly, including a number of imaginary innovations that never actualized, it is quite surprising that no such innovation was produced in the last 10 millions years.
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How can you say that? What counts as an innovation and what doesn’t? Have you rejected the Hawaiian honeycreepers, incidentally?
And if opportunities for innovation are not evenly spaced in time, how do you know that one should have happened recently? Are there other similar periods in the past in which there is a comparable lack of innovations, however you define them?
Further, what model do you propose to replace the evolutionary model? Is it that we’re living in the end times, and all of earth history has been working toward the present biota? If not, what?
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Just to be clear, what ever the serious and fundamental biological distinction creationists insist there is between man and other apes, none of that counts among one of the “such” innovations, right? Nothing so severe happend in the last ten million years as to consider man a different kind than chimps and gorillas, correct?
Not that I disagree[1], mind you, I’m just making a note here for future reference.
Without some non-vibes-based criterion to identify an innovation as “such”, I literally cannot take a stance on this one way or the other. ↩︎
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It has already been noted that Bechly, himself, acknowledged this example. He simply dismissed it, because reasons.
Given we still have no agreed upon definition of what counts as an innovation, it is premature to make this conclusion.
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