Is Helicase a House of Cards?

What, trying to find ways to weasel our of accepting facts he’s rather ignore by using pseudoscience? I’ll hold my applause.

Have you looked at his work?

No. I also have never read any of David Icke’s books outlining his theory that our society is run by a race of shape-shifting reptilian aliens. And feel no need to.

There are thousands of worthwhile papers published in legitimate journals by hardworking, competent scientists who are not desperately trying to prop up a superstitious ideology, and which I will never read. It would be a slap in the face of these scientists to instead waste my time reading some nonsense from a non-peer reviewed creationist blog.

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@stcordova Sal, this is not the Law of Large Numbers (hence LLN). You are saying this sequence is unlikely to assemble in a simple random manner (true, for what it’s worth). LLN is a statement about sums of numbers where each term in the sum has some finite random variation about a fixed value (call it mu). For sufficiently large N, and over repeated trials, the sum of N terms is more likely to be close to N times mu than to any other value.

See also: Law of Averages, Central Limit Theorem, Chebyshev’s Inequality.

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Of note, molecular and cellular systems are usually small, without large numbers, so the LLN does not apply. These are precisely the contexts we expect to see large violations in the LLN.

Presumably the price of a ticket would be 10-121 dollars US, or so. ;D

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I was specifically referring to the Urey-Miller soup of L and D amino acids. Not even alpha helix or beta sheet can form. It has to be all L or all D, much like all heads or all tails in the coin analogy. Homochiriality is unlikely to form, and even if formed, will deveolve to a racemic mixture due to quantum effects. This is like talking 100% fair coins and flipping them.

Each amino acid position is like an indpedendent Bernouli trial, or analogous to a single fair coin.

Next the problem of 6-polypeptides repeating the same pattern by randomness is a violation of the LLN, you’re just not looking at it correctly.

Say you have a sequence of randomly assubled amino acids.

The odds for another random sequence of the same length to have the same residue at the same position is something like 1 out of 20 but must be adjusted to the proportion of amino acids in the soup and any natural bonding preference, but let’s say its about 1/20.

If there is a match at one position, we can call it T (for true), and F (for false). So we can thus form a results string that is T or F in value. The probability that is T or F follows the binomial distribution of which all T’s would be a violation of LLN where the mean expectation mu is about 1/20 = 5 T's, not 100 T’s.

@stcordova, where is your evidence that steroselective catalysts absolutely, positively, beyond all doubt cannot have possibly played any roles in the origination of life. Please be specific, since your model here demands that this be the case.

Otherwise, you are railing against a strawman that is not relevant.

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Well, the general class of philosophical arguments that order in nature in general points to a God is perfectly viable, in my opinion, and different compared to typical ID arguments.

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I was thinking similarly.

In other words, just a little bit less than a Venezuelan Sovereign Bolivar just before redenomination.

Exactly. To argue against ID is not to argue against providence or “design” construed as God’s providential work in creation.

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Probably more, counting its continuous inflation.

Not really. It argues for an ad hoc grouping based on assigning a new node to every combination of presence and absence of genes. There is no attempt to find any sort of a priori or functionally explained combination.

In principle it can have played a role.

The best stereoselective catalyst however is a living cell. If we’re going to postulate plausible initial conditions, I suggest that one for many reasons because a living cell (except for rare exceptions like an erythrocyte) has a genome which enables a repeat of a necessary recipe.

Thanks for your essay on how helicase could evolve. I didn’t respond immediately because I thought it was worth pondering, and maybe even just simply commending. Excellent work. I have not problem passing your comment on in my class.

A quote from Ewert’s paper:

Ewert himself postulates that ID will produce violations of a nested hierarchy, at least from my understanding of the paper.

That quote says exactly what I said.

Yes, but how does he identify these violations? Just by assembling similar violations into a new node. There’s no other justification. Rather than functional units, these “modules” are just collections of genes that happen to share a similar distribution among taxa (based on the existing very small taxon sample, one might add). And contrary to his belief, we expect such violations at a certain frequency in ordinary evolution because of random patterns of gene loss.

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And we expect even more such violations in ordinary sequence data because of random and nonrandom patterns of incomplete data.

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Would we expect to find a gene in just a single species of bird and a single species of a ray finned fish and nowhere in between?

I would guess that to be rare enough never to happen. But of course nobody has any data to show that it did.

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Ewert seemed to suggest that he did have that data, and that ID expects this outcome.