@lee_merrill , the first post you cite is an excerpt of the second one, almost word-for-word, and with the same figures. When it comes to descriptions of Axe’s work, there are no differences between the two.
First, I am glad that you can see the difference between the two hills. The reason a conversion factor is needed is as follows: The ultimate goal of the ID research program is to enumerate all possible functional sequences for any given activity. This is precisely the base of the hill shown in the first figure in these posts. However, as I explain in these two essays, Axe has tried to estimate the base of a much smaller hill, shown in Figure 3. Whatever value he gets from his experiments, it is not the same as the base of the hill shown in Fig. 1. In order to generalize his results to the larger matter of enumerating all functional sequences, he needs some way to relate the hill in Fig. 3 to that in Fig. 1. He has never done so, and indeed denies (when he complains about criticisms about his use of a temperature sensitive variant) that this is an issue. But it doesn’t take much to see that this is a huge issue, one that invalidates Axe’s conclusions.
My point about Axe’s assay has nothing to do with these considerations.
As I stated here: “In Tables 1 and 2 of this report, they state that the lowest concentrations of ampicillin that completely inhibited growth of cells expressing the respective constructs had overlapping ranges (5-10 µg/mL and 10-45 µg/ml for the inactive and low-activity variants, respectively). Moreover, the ranges of highest concentrations of ampicillin that permitted appropriately-transfected E. coli to grow (5-7 and 5-40 µg/mL, respectively) also overlapped. These concentration ranges include the concentration (10 µg/mL) Axe used in his 2004 paper.”
It’s all there, in black-and-white. Not stated as explicitly as you may like, @lee_merrill , but plain-as-day it is.