Is Helicase a House of Cards?

Yes, and yes this is an excellent point you made. I think we agree at this point.

Here is an example of Gpuccio’s “logic”

Leaving aside biological objects (for the moment), there is not one single example in the whole known universe where a flying machine arises without any intervention of design.

That is strong evidence birds, bats, insects, and pterosaurs must be intelligently designed.

Any ID-Creationist, is that argument valid?

Again, that’s opinion. We need some evidence.

We eliminate it through parsimony. Here is the Romanes quote I have used before:

That’s the whole trick, right? The Bill Cole Gallop. Just hop from one example to another, all the while ignoring the fact that the evidence has already been given to you.

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Study the cell cycle. There is plenty of evidence and this is something you should learn on your own. You can clam it may have been simpler in the past but you are speculating and that conclusion is very difficult to support.

How do you measure parsimony?

This is again demonstrating a plane can fly 100 ft when the requirement is to go to the moon. This has been the weakness in the theory all along as the grand claims have never been tested.

If you narrow your claim then the paper supports your conclusions.

What evidence?

Just stating a possiblity. If you can’t rule out that possibility then your argument falls apart.

We measure phylogenetic signal. When there is a highly significant statistical match between the data and the hypothesis of common ancestry then parsimony rules out a supernatural designer due to the very fact that a supernatural designer can explain anything.

You are saying that the Apollo missions could not get to the moon by travelling 100 ft at a time.

So its arbitrary.

We could also say it’s special creation… however no scientist is going to accept that.

No because it is designed to get to the moon. It also pasts the test of going there. A bicycle can go 100 ft and we can test that but a moon travel test it would fail.

Have you heard about the “Genome of Eden” problem? It’s in a paper written by Dr Doolittle.

All current evidence points to a LUCA (speaking loosely here about LUCA. It could also be a population of different organisms) that is as complex as current single celled organisms if not more complex.
So phylogenetic evidence actually supports @colewd when he says the cells are complex throughout.

They need to be simpler for evolution to work. However there is no empirical evidence that they actually were.

Evolutionary thinking relies on the simple to complex model yet there is no observable evidence to support this claim and lots of reasons to think it is false. Can a simple molecular structure reliably self replicate?

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Sorry but that is simply not true.

Integrative modeling of gene and genome evolution roots the archaeal tree of life
Williams et al
PNAS June 6, 2017 114 (23) E4602-E4611

Abstract: A root for the archaeal tree is essential for reconstructing the metabolism and ecology of early cells and for testing hypotheses that propose that the eukaryotic nuclear lineage originated from within the Archaea; however, published studies based on outgroup rooting disagree regarding the position of the archaeal root. Here we constructed a consensus unrooted archaeal topology using protein concatenation and a multigene supertree method based on 3,242 single gene trees, and then rooted this tree using a recently developed model of genome evolution. This model uses evidence from gene duplications, horizontal transfers, and gene losses contained in 31,236 archaeal gene families to identify the most likely root for the tree. Our analyses support the monophyly of DPANN (Diapherotrites, Parvarchaeota, Aenigmarchaeota, Nanoarchaeota, Nanohaloarchaea), a recently discovered cosmopolitan and genetically diverse lineage, and, in contrast to previous work, place the tree root between DPANN and all other Archaea. The sister group to DPANN comprises the Euryarchaeota and the TACK Archaea, including Lokiarchaeum , which our analyses suggest are monophyletic sister lineages. Metabolic reconstructions on the rooted tree suggest that early Archaea were anaerobes that may have had the ability to reduce CO2 to acetate via the Wood–Ljungdahl pathway. In contrast to proposals suggesting that genome reduction has been the predominant mode of archaeal evolution, our analyses infer a relatively small-genomed archaeal ancestor that subsequently increased in complexity via gene duplication and horizontal gene transfer

From the paper:

Inferring Ancestral Genome Sizes.

The DTL model provides inferences of ancestral genome size, and, because the reconciliation model explicitly allows for horizontal transfer as well as gene loss, there is no trend toward inferring increasing genome size for earlier nodes on the tree. Thus, the use of this model ameliorates the “genome of Eden” problem, a tendency toward inferring unrealistically large ancestral genomes in the absence of HGT that is so marked that it has been used to set a lower bound on rates of HGT through time. Previous simulation studies and analyses of empirical data have suggested that ancestral gene content inferences under this model are realistic and robust to gene tree uncertainty, and thus the ancestral sizes that we present here have been corrected to account for gene families that have been lost in all sampled species, as described above. Our analyses suggest that there has been an ongoing increase in gene content throughout archaeal history, from ∼1,090 genes in the common ancestor to 537–5,359 (mean, 1,686.4) genes among modern lineages. This trend is not dependent on the basal placement of the DPANN clade in the tree; in the analysis without DPANN, the common ancestor was predicted to encode 1,328 genes, increasing to 1,373–5,359 (mean, 2,081.1) genes among modern genomes. These reconstructions do not support the hypothesis, based on an analysis of phylogenetic presence-absence profiles that a large-genome archaeal common ancestor gave rise to modern lineages by genomic streamlining.

Note this paper was edited and approved by Dr. Ford Doolittle himself.

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Sorry that is simply not true either. Dozens of examples have been provided here but for some unknown reason you continue to ignore them.

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That would be the last universal common ancestor, not the first life. What you would need to show is that the life preceding LUCA was not simpler.

Also, there is doubt being cast on the transition between prokaryotes and eukaryotes which is well past LUCA. Prokaryotes don’t have intron splicing, while eukaryotes do, so we already know that prokaryotes were simpler in this respect than eukaryotes.

That’s your opinion. When you have this actual evidence, let us know.

You ignored the analogy. Did the Apollo missions get to the moon by travelling 100 feet at a time?

The simple to complex model is missing the evidence. Darwin was hoping it would surface but the observed complexity of the cell has been a problem.

Except for the dozens of examples you’ve been shown which you choose to ignore.

Not by those who produce the evidence you’re denying exists.

If you’re truly persuaded and not simply engaging in wishful thinking, why don’t you apply @gpuccio’s calculations to catalytic antibodies? He doesn’t appear to be willing to do so.

Don’t catalytic antibodies fall into that group?

Catalytic antibodies provide a real-time test. What are you waiting for?

You haven’t looked at catalytic antibodies.

Was talking about LUCA. Not LACA.

The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

Though you have a point that if scientists are willing to discount many Genes which are prevalent in all three domains of life as LGTs and not as homologues, they can reduce the complexity of LUCA.

This seems a lot like twisting data to fit a theory.