Randomness and Theology

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@BenKissling

It’s hardly necessary to demonstrate it when I can just round up to the next order of magnitude without it making any difference.

You “rounding up” to another number, equally empirically unsupported, is no more a demonstration of anything than Axe’s provenly false one.

@BenKissling

Axe started with a mutant that was at the edge of stability because that represents the base of the fitness peak

This is actually straightforwardly false. Stability is not the only factor affecting protein fitness, and using an artificially selected unstable protein enzyme synthetically inflates it’s sensitivity to mutation.

@BenKissling

He designed the screens to explore the base of the fitness peak, not the peak itself, because there should be far more weakly functional variants than highly functional ones. That’s both reasonable and generous.

Ahh see, there we have it, you’ve performed the switch Axe was hoping for. You’ve jumped from temperature sensitivity to “functionality”, but functionality is also contributed to by activity, and you can have highly stable yet weakly active enzymes, just like you can have unstable but highly active enzymes:

On the relationship between thermal stability and catalytic power of enzymes

Axe was NOT measuring what you think he was. And by the way, the base of the hill is fitness, not “functionality”. Thus Axe should have measured the fitness-effect of enzymes in organisms under conditions of competitive growth at the lowest antibiotic level that measurably affects fitness, not their ability to form visible colonies on plates containing the MIC.

Another thing, the things that matters is the function, not the particular fold that employs that function. There multiple different, completely unrelated enzymes known capable of catalyzing the hydrolysis of beta-lactam antibiotics, thus extrapolating how rare functional variants of a particular fold is, says nothing about how many other folds capable of performing the same function, exist in protein sequence space.

Why have creationists not realized this themselves? Why is it necessary to have someone like me explain this to them?

@BenKissling

Axe’s work has been generalized

No it has not, I have debunked that nonsense in this post here.

Miller: Axe Decisively Confirmed?

I’ll just copy-paste the relevant parts of my previous response to @bjmiller’s invoking the Tokuriki and Tawfik paper (Bershtein et al 2006) paper here: No, they don’t. One of them (Bershtein et al 2006) was deliberately set up to exclude several well-characterized mechanisms of evolutionary change in order to better understand, in isolation, the consequences of a single mechanism of change in the absense of the effects of the others. It only allowed the effects of mutations within the reading frame of the protein. Potentially compensatory chromosomal mutations were avoided by deliberately only mutating the plasmid genes with PCR, and then transforming competent cells to measure the fitness effects of those mutations. The TEM-1 gene was cloned into a plasmid (as it occurs in nature) under its endogenous promoter. Recloning after each round of mutagenesis confined the mutational drift to the open reading frame of TEM-1. Our in vitro random mutagenesis protocol was optimized for high…

Brian Miller is straightforwardly misrepresenting the articles he is citing by completely neglecting the effect of purifying selection when mutations accumulate in proteins over time.

But thanks for bringing that presentation to my attention. I see I wrote that rebuttal to Brian Miller in February of 2019, and he has done NOTHING to correct his misapprehensions - despite previously having directly received correction here on this forum - when he did that talk on 30 of May 2019. He since posted that video on October of 2019, still with zero indication of having received correction.

This is why I consider ID-creationist “scientists” dishonest charlatans and pseudo-scientists.
Oh by the way, that entire presentation by Brian Miller is bad. Holy hell Batman that presentation is bad. SUPER bad. One could spend a month unpacking every misleading statement made there.