Marty's testable ID hypothesis

[Michael_Okoko]

@John_Harshman

@Michael_Okoko

In contrast, @John_Harshman’s comment implies there is no “right” (or designated) place to bind, only a wrong place (say, an active site).

Isn’t that what he claims to have meant?

Yes he claims so, but his new line of thought (thanks to you) doesn’t match that of his original claim. He was trying to contrast two things as shown in the excerpt below (bold mine):

@Marty

@T_aquaticus

B-cells run the math for us. Out of a few billion random sequences we get tons of protein-protein binding sites. This demonstrates that these binding sites can’t be nearly as rare as Behe claims.

This looks good until you realize antibodies can bind to any spot on an antigen that happens to have a sequence that can act as the complement. So the location is somewhat random and there are no further implications. For a protein complex, you need the complement at a “right” location so that the resulting quaternary structure has meaningful catalytic activity.

As you can see he was trying to contrast the location for binding between antibodies and antigens to binding between polypeptides in quaternary assemblies. He did not have the same thoughts as you.

@John_Harshman

Is he wrong about what he meant?

I don’t believe he meant the same thing as you. Regardless, that isn’t wrong AFAIK.