More general question: Is Bill Cole really the only ID Creationist willing and able to defend this argument? I do give him credit for at least sticking it out, rather than just running away and telling tall tales to his friends.
I off for the night. The method does not use DNA as a measure of FI. Gpuccio does look at the change in DNA over time as a metric to see how much neutral mutation there is that does not change amino acid sequences. This measure it a part of the functional constraint observation. FI approximation is made by the constraint of the change to amino acids.
If that’s really the case, then his whole argument is even more irrelevant and ridiculous than I thought. How the actual frig can you discuss protein evolution and ignore DNA. Maybe ask him to clarify whether you are actually understanding that correctly.
Please read for comprehension. DNA is not being ignored it is just not what the metric is based on and there are good reasons for that. DNA is part of what is being measured.
I am off now. I am being very patient with you guys but you need to follow along. The discussion with T and Rum was peripheral to the method you are trying to learn.
Actually it’s everyone else who is being patient with you Bill. You need to start answering questions honestly instead of all the dodging and excuses. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer and is much better than empty hand waves.
If the single mutation created the codon for M such that transcription took place where it couldn’t happen before, that would turn useless junk that couldn’t be transcribed into a gene for a protein that may have some effect.
Thank you. Well so I think the context of why I bring that up should be clear from the preceding discussion. But to reiterate, @T_aquaticus asked a hypothetical question of Gpuccio when he was around, about how to calculate the change in FI when one protein (pre-ubiquitin) mutates into another protein (ubiquitin). Gpuccio says the change is 4.3 bits of FI. In other words, Gpuccio is calculating the FI of one amino acid, instead of the entire sequence in which it sits. Which makes no sense.
I point out that this answer of Gpuccio’s is inconsistent with Gpuccio’s insistence that we need to wait 400 million years before we can begin to estimate the FI of a newly evolved protein, as you yourself have insisted we need to do for the Bsc4 protein.
The new protein in @T_aquaticus hypothetical example is ubiquitin. It, in his hypothetical, can do a function pre-ubiquitin can not. So with respect to the new function, the ubiquitin function, the old protein has no FI. Zero. It is not in the “target set” of sequences with the ubiquitin function. I say we need to calculate the FI for the ubiquitin sequence as a whole, not just a single amino acid picked out of the ubiquitin sequence.
This is where Bill Cole comes along and protests, by insisting I don’t understand Gpuccio, is misrepresenting him and creating false narratives. Bill Cole also proceeds to declare that the FI in the ubiquitin sequence was almost all, already present in the pre-ubiquitin sequence before it became able to do ubiquitin’s job. I then proceed to try to explain to Bill Cole why this is not the case following Hazen&Szostak’s method.
So “FI” is just another meaningless ID Creationist buzzword that does nothing to establish the existence of “design”, just like “irreducible complexity” or “CSI.” That’s what.
To be fair it is Hazen and Szostak who came up with this particular way of calculating Functional Information. It’s just that Gpuccio is misapplying it(his method of estimating the number of sequences that meets the minimum threshold doesn’t work, and even then it doesn’t mean the sequence can’t evolve).
And then I really don’t see what practical benefit it has(this would be a criticism of Hazen and Szostak though). If one in (say) 10^12 sequences have the function of interest, or 1 in 10^30, why not just say that? Why bother with this FI stuff?