And that statement is false. Flat. Out. False. He is stating a falsehood. He’s not reporting what anyone have said. He’s giving a demonstrably false straw-man version of the responses he’s received.
He is not quoting anyone saying those words because no one have said those words. And no one have said anything that indicates that conclusion, or is intended to leave that impression. It’s false when he says that.
It is simply false when Axe says that critics claim these enzymes (much less the “creatures” that carry them) have been so effective at tailoring them to their environments that they have reached “endpoints”, and that they “can no longer undergo evolutionary change”. That is flat out false. Nobody has claimed that, and there’s no evidence the statement is true, and it’s not indicated by the experimental failure of Axe and Gauger to convert A into B, that they have reached any sort of evolutionary endpoint and can no longer undergo evolutionary change. It simply doesn’t follow, it is not even vaguely implied by their results.
Yes. The answer he has received is that he should have done ancestral sequence reconstruction, as that would constitute an actual test of the evolutionary postulate: That the two enzymes A and B evolved from a common ancestral protein C that once existed in the ancient past. That is what evolution says happened. It is meaningless to “test” a transition that isn’t claimed to have occurred and then take the tests failure to mean evolutionary transformations of “gargantuan ones”(what the fork does that even mean?) cannot occur.
If Axe said that then he was lying again. When his and Gauger’s enzyme experiment came out numerous scientists pointed out they were testing a scenario no one says or thinks happens. Science doesn’t posit A evolved from B (or vice versa). Rather it’s that A and B shared a common ancestral enzyme C. Axe’s “experiment” was just a ridiculous propaganda stunt aimed at the lay public. It’s a stupid as trying to get a cat to evolve into a dog, failing, then claiming neither could evolve instead of testing the actual scientific claim cats and dogs shared a common mammalian ancestor.
Your ID heroes continually get caught in such blatant dishonesty. Why do you still listen to them?
See Rumraket’s excellent response, to which I can add little.
But the point here is not that Axe’s challenge is wrong. The point is that Axe is dishonest. You tried to defend his honesty and fell comically far short of the mark: instead of showing that, as Axe claims, biologists now believe evolution has stopped, you showed that one rather strange man who died thirty-five years ago thought it had slowed somewhat.
So let’s begin there. Axe is dishonest. What is left to be done with his “work” with that in hand? His work, such as it is, has had no impact upon science and never will. His premise, as Timothy Horton has explained to you, is akin to alleging that if evolution is true, we should be able to evolve cats into dogs.
Now, if Axe were honest, one might think that this was merely an unfortunate reversal. But he is not, and it is not. He is a mountebank, seeking victims who will believe him.
Axe has tested whether enzyme A can evolve to work like enzyme B and he found the answer to be negative. He then asks why is it the case that enzyme A cannot evolve to work like enzyme B. You say that no one says or thinks that such scenario happens. Okay. But what reason do evolutionists like you give for the fact that this type of scenario cannot happen?
I already explained to you. To get A into B you’d have to have A reverse evolve into the common ancestor C, then re-evolve from C to B. That is theoretically possible but practically impossible.
Why can’t you easily evolve a cat into a dog?
Why do you fall for such cheap propaganda stunts like the dishonest IDC pushers like Axe put out?
A better question to ask is why Axe failed to evolve enzyme A into enzyme B, which share a common ancestor something like two billion years ago. They now differ by 225 out of a total of about 380 amino acids. Among which are multiple insertions and deletions.
Axe and Gauger only screened double and triple mutants, but these enzymes have diverged through an epistatic ratchet through hundreds of mutations since their common ancestor.
That doesn’t, of course, at all imply either enzyme can no longer be “plied” by natural selection, nor that their evolution has stopped. They’re just not evolving into each other’s functions, but why would they? That doesn’t mean they can’t be evolved in some other way, or have stopped doing so.
Axe and Gauger also tried converting enzyme A direcly into enzyme B using rational design, by picking residues found in A and replacing those in B in similar positions. This also failed. So they failed to evolve enzyme A, which is different from B by over 220 amino acids, by a mutational trajectory there’s no reason to think evolution ever took, by screening a few dusin million double and triple mutants.
They then go on to attempt designing A’s function into B by picking somewhere in the range of 10 to 15 (IIRC) residues from A, and inserting them in B in positions they reason might recapitulate A’s function. This also fails.
Axe now proceeds to flail around about how Gargantuan Transformations™ can’t evolve, because his “small” 225 amino-acid different, two-billion-year-diverged enzymes don’t interconvert with a double or triple mutation, and his one single attempt at picking residues from A to insert into B didn’t do the trick either.
So their straw man of evolution fails, and their rational design fails. And then they conclude evolution is next to impossible(so design, which failed, mustadunit anyway).
And we are to pretend this is a good argument against evolution. Please.
Edit: spelling&grammar.
The phenomenon you are describing here, ie., epistatic ratchet, is precisely the phenomenon that, according to Axe s ´critics, has tailored enzyme A and B to their environment in such a way that they have reached end points. I conclude that Axe was right when he said that the current stance is that natural selection is now thought to have been so effective at tailoring organisms to their environment that it did reach end points - creatures so good at being what they are that they can no longer undergo evolutionary change » Bottom line: Axe is neither dishonest nor incompetent.
Which is misleading by Axe to say, because there’s no “end-points” involved and no evidence for them, and none of Axe’s critics have said or implied such a thing. He’s assigning positions to them they don’t hold.
Using double or triple-mutants, Axe & Gauger failed at converting the function of enzyme A, into another enzyme B, which is different by over 220 mutations, and you conclude from this that
"natural selection is now thought to have been so effective at tailoring organisms to their environment that it did reach end points - creatures so good at being what they are that they can no longer undergo evolutionary change"
From Axe’s failure at interconversion of an enzyme → Conclude: life has reached an endpoint.
That’s fantastic!
I believe you have revealed an incredibly desperate desire to reach a particular conclusion.
Except NO ONE said the enzymes (or any biological features) have reached end points and can no longer undergo evolutionary change. That is Axe’s bogus claim you’re trying to defend and which has already been shown 100% wrong.
Real bottom line: Axe is either willfully dishonest, incompetent, or both.
And heck, even if completely hypothetically those two enzymes really could not change any further, you can’t generalize that to life in general. Much less that it is the current stance in evolutionary biology.
The whole thing is false, and by insisting on it Axe reveals that he is a dishonest and/or incompetent man.
Because no evidence has been presented of it. I’m sure Axe would have been more than happy to quote them if they’d said that. And you’d be happy to bring those quotes here.
