Optimal designs, rugged fitness landscapes and the Texas sharpshooter fallacy

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Giltil

@Mercer

One example of this is evolution itself in antibody production, which happens in only 2 weeks. There’s no mind doing any choosing AFAIK.

The process of somatic mutations involved in finding optimal solutions for antibodies is most likely associated with fitness landscapes that have properties of smooth landscapes.

I think you just made that up without doing any math. Far more likely is that the ruggedness of fitness landscapes differ by orders of magnitude for different antigens. Yet mutation+selection finds a way.

So on a similar subject, why did you write,

@Giltil

Keefe and Szostak did just that. They created a library of 6 x 1012 proteins each containing 80 contiguous random amino acids and then estimated that approximately 1 in 10^11 random proteins bound to ATP.

Why did you omit their very explicit, quantitative qualification of that, Gil?