Then why ask:
The problem is that you can’t articulate “the claim.” It changes constantly.
Really, Bill, how can you endorse a hypothesis/measurement/analysis that you are completely unable to apply for yourself? Doesn’t your inability indicate a major problem?
No further comment.
Huh? We know the sequence SPACE, Bill. What you and @gpuccio keep falsely claiming to know is the ratio of functional to total sequence space. You have no estimate of the former whatsoever.
Thanks for your thoughts. I went over the discussion with primarily you @swamidass and @Art. My personal opinion is that in the minimum the accuracy of his method needs refining.
I think the 500 Bit part of the argument is a distraction for now as it does not address the key issue: can we can generate a measurement of FI we have confidence in? Whether it was the result of evolutionary processes or design (mind) is secondary.
This would keep the discussion more focused and potentially bring Kirk’s work into play as he appears to be working on the accuracy of the measurement.
Since Kirk’s work and Gpuccio’s are different they can be used as a test against each other.
If a reasonable measurement is established we can then trace the functional information changes over the history of life and see what conclusions that brings forward.
Is someone doing this?
Not that I know of.
What does this mean? The protein “started” with >500 FI bits? I thought you said we can’t estimate FI bits until hundreds of millions of years has passed, so what does it actually mean for a particular protein (presumably in a single individual/population/species) to “start at >500 bits”?
This is where we see human conservation of 500 bits in slime mold or yeast with an evolutionary separation of 1 billion years.
How do you presume conservation without accepting that natural selection is involved?
What does this have to do with the protein “starting with” 500 bits?
They just can’t get their stories straight. Some times we can measure FI in nonfunctional sequences, some times we can’t. Some times we can measure FI the instant a new sequence is found, some times we need to wait 400 million years. And we still haven’t been told why 400 million is the magic number of years we have to wait. You’d think it would, at least in part, also depend on mutation rate, strength of purifying selection, population size, clade diversity, and so on. But no, it’s just “400 million years”.
Why are we still pretending there’s some discussion to be had around this? Bill, Gpuccio, and their resident cohorts here are full of ****.
Those “bits” are not the same as those defined in Hazen et al. Each and every time @gpuccio claims otherwise, he is betraying a fundamental ignorance of how BLAST works.
Has @gpuccio ever done anything to work out a formal mathematical relationship between the two?
This is a good question and is where I believe the discussion should go.
This is simply my conclusion based on the evidence of comparing sequences separated by long evolutionary time. If we observe 500 conserved bits of human functional information in slime mold how do we explain the origin of that functional information? Especially if slime mold would die if we removed that information.
Can you describe how you think it was involved?
Another non-answer from Bill.
You are the one using a model that relies on the presumption that conservation of proteins occurs over the history of a genetic lineage. Please demonstrate how this occurs without selection being involved.
So what is your answer to the question? If it is “No”, then the discussion is pretty much over, isn’t it? Your pal @gpuccio is all hat and no cattle. Which would explain why he high-tailed it out of this forum.
We are observing conservation by comparing sequences separated by a split a billion years ago. If you are proposing that natural selection was responsible for the origin of the FI its up to you to model how it was responsible.
We observe prokaryotic cells with very few introns and then eukaryotic cells with many introns that need to be spliced out inside a nucleus prior to translation. Where is the selection path here?
How do you think the initial evolution of the protein would have looked if you could have sequenced the LCA 400mya?
Very similar in my opinion as when we look at a long separation it is stuck in its position despite a lot of DNA mutations occurring during that time.