# Optima in Evolution

**URL:** <https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/optima-in-evolution/9323>\
**Category:** Side Conversation\
**Created:** [January 17, 2020, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/optima-in-evolution/9323 "2020-01-17T22:30:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 157

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**Author:** ![Rumraket](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/rumraket/32/9328_2.png) [@Rumraket](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Rumraket)\
**Post date:** [January 31, 2020, 11:43pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/optima-in-evolution/9323/157 "2020-01-31T23:43:45Z")

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> [@T\_aquaticus](#):
>
> Obviously, this is a dishonest request since they measure FI by using sequence conservation over hundreds of millions of years. In fact, if an ID supporter were there for the evolution of the ancestral sequence 100’s of millions of years ago for what is now a highly conserved protein they would claim that it had very low FI when it first evolved.

Well no, it’s worse than that. When the protein first evolved they would ignore it, wait 400 million years, and THEN claim it has high FI and that it couldn’t evolve.

But the amount of divergence the protein would have to undergo over those 400 million years, to have a large impact on the FI calculation, is effectively physically impossible. We would have to find more variants of the protein, having become fixed or at least detected in some lineage, than there are numbers of individual cells that have ever lived.

It is not physically possible for sequence divergence over 400 million years to even _result in_ so many protein variants as would be required to bring the FI down from some value like 700, or 1000, to below the arbitrarily set threshold of 500 bits FI. As I have argued at length. Even if we don’t require they become fixed. Just to have existed for some fleeting moment.

Suppose we have a 300 amino acid protein and we only know of one variant of it. That’s 1297 bits of FI for that one variant. We then discover that every single cell that has ever existed in the history of life made it’s very own mutant version of that protein, so we have _that much_ variation known. Let’s be extremely charitable and say as many as 10^50 cells have lived during the history of life(so one novel variant pr. cell, aka 10^50 different known variants of the protein). What does that bring the FI down to? 1130 bits.

With 10^50 different variants, we go from 1297 to 1130 bits. Let’s exaggerate to the extreme and propose that every single one of those 10^50 cells that ever lived, all produced _one thousand_ different versions of it each, all of them different. So each of those 10^50 cells produced one thousand variants of the protein. What does that do to those 1130 bits? They become -log2(10^53/20^300) = 1120 bits FI.

Even if every single cell that ever lived produced one thousand of their very own sequence variants(detectable as homologous based on similarity) of the protein in question, that would not result in enough variation to make much of a dent on the FI calculation at those scales.

The estimation of FI based on extrapolation from alignments of homologous sequences appears to have been carefully designed **to represent an impossible hurdle to overcome.** It is not physically possible for all of life to have generated the amount of variation IDcreationists are demanding to be shown. Which means the very method simply begs the question against evolution.

Even if there really _were_ so many different possible functional variants of the protein, there’s no physical way life could diverge and produce it during it’s entire history even under completely unrealistically generous assumptions. **The whole thing is fatuous in the extreme.**

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