Optima in Evolution

[colewd (Bill Cole)]

@Rumraket

The abzymes highlight an important point with respect to the claim that functional proteins must be rare in sequence space just because some particular fold is , in that they show that completely different folds can catalyze the same reactions, and can evolve towards recognizing identical substrates from very dissimilar structures.

This data does very little to support evolution by natural selection and neutral changes. You need to show all proteins can evolve not some small subset. As you need to show all proteins have local optimums and that local optimums exist such that functional space is almost equal to sequence space.