Intelligent design and "design detection"

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

Yes, I don’t see how that differs from what I wrote.

@Rumraket patiently explained the invalidity of that here:

Gil grabs some ammunition and shoots down Doug Axe's 2004 extrapolation by a factor of more than 10^44

That may be what Gpuccio intends(as in he aims at that in his head), but not how the method actually works. It’s based on trying to extrapolate functional variation from homologous sequences, hence it’s not based really on function but on sequence similarity. That’s why. So if there was a very dissimilar sequence that could perform the function, it would not be detected as homologous, Gpuccio would not be able to find it in some database when using a similarity based-search, it would not be classified as belonging to the clade of sequences with a similar name (ubiquitin, alpha actin, ATP synthase subunit beta, or w/e), and so Gpuccio would miss it in his calculation. Hence, his method is not based on functions, but on sequence similarity and annotation classifications. Which means he’s only ever going to be looking within particular sequence-based families judged to be homologous by annotators. You contest it because it doesn’t take into account the possibility that other dissimil…

None of that is in Szostak’s paper incorrectly cited by Gil.