Gauger and Mercer: Bifunctional Proteins and Protein Sequence Space

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I’ve been staying out of the way of this exchange, but I don’t want this to be missed.

Do you take a different position that Axe? That would be really interesting to unpack. Can you tell us more?

It seems that you are more in the “wait and see” position. I note also that your key claim is a conditional, not actually even asserting that you know what the actual case is. I think there are some problems with this argument, but it is still notable that you are taking a more measured position than Axe. It seems that (forgive imprecision):

  1. Axe argues that evolution by natural processes alone is improbable because we know that functional proteins are rare in sequence space, and different functions are isolated from one another.

  2. You seem to argue the far more restricted claim: IF proteins are rare and isolated, then evolution by natural processes alone is improbable. Are they rare and isolated? This is an open question.

Am I reading this distinction correctly? If so, you are making a far more restricted claim than Axe, that needs to be engaged in a far different way. In fact, perhaps much of this discussion is missing the point. You would not, then, even be making an ID argument per se, but merely saying the question is currently unresolved. This would put you in a middle ground position between @Mercer/@art and Axe.

Am I reading this correctly? If so, I think this discussion has really missed your point, and deserves a reset.

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